"God is the light of the heavens and the earth." (Islam, Quran 24:35)
True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.
My thoughts:
The thing about God (or gods) is that we can only hypothesize as to their existence and nature. Not theorize -- a theory has to be testable and falsifiable -- just hypothesize.
Or, rather I can only hypothesize. Perhaps there really are prophets and so forth who have firsthand interactions rising to the level of justified certainty ... but I'm not in a position to truly test their claims, either.
Do I have ideas on the matter? Sure. But those ideas are more about saying "if such entities exist, then here's what I think I can plausibly infer from the characteristics of the reality they've created."
And such inferences necessarily suffer from assumptions such as, say, the assumption that an all-powerful being would not be so perverse as to demand that its creations rebel against the rules implied by the created reality on pain of e.g. eternal punishment in an afterlife.
Based on the history of religious claims, I don't think the above assumption is necessarily a safe one. Consider, for example, the arbitrary and capricious members of the ancient Greek pantheon.
I have no interest in attempting to dissuade believers on any particular claim on the existence or nature of deity, and find many such claims interesting for various reasons, and I don't begrudge a Muslim's acceptance of this week's aphorism. But when it comes to actionable material, the claims don't really mean much to me.
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