I believe in God, but I do not believe His existence can be effectively proven. We can ask interesting questions, we can try to answer them, we can try to explain why we believe one way or another, but none of these things are "proof". Some people construe miracles as proof, but even when the occurrence of a "miraculous event" is pretty much beyond dispute, there are always different plausible interpretations. Maybe there is only a one in ten billion chance of life developing on a planet. But there are probably tens of billions of planets in the universe, and in this particular cycle of the eternal Big Bang / Big Crunch crap game, Earth just happened to be the Big Winner. So here we are.
It's all a question of Pick your Favorite Mystery. How did the physical universe get here? How could it have been in existence "forever"? How could it be possible for Time to have no beginning? Asking similar questions about God is NOT the same as asking them about the physical universe, because "time" (defined by some great humorist as "that which keeps everything from happening all at once") is essentially physical -- an expression, perhaps, of the "pace" with which all particles, waves, fields, quirks, quarks, wiggles, excitations, interactions and frissons relate to all other such things in the universe. In fact, this is a reason why I cannot regard the creation story in Genesis as "literally true." If God created the world in "seven days", what was He using for a clock?? The wise writers of the Bronze Age can help us see beyond the limits of our own Age (one of those limits, not at all incidently, is an obsession with "literal truth"), but, of course, they had their own limitations. Their knowledge of physics was crude, their grasp of mathematics was primitive and they had some really quirky ideas about genetics. They were in posession of some great wisdom, but that wisdom could not have been passed on from one generation to the next had it been expressed in in the language of 20th century science. So pick your favorite mystery.
It is not correct, in my opinion, to regard God as an "abstraction." True abstractions -- those elements of what I call Abstract Mathematical Reality -- do exist outside of time, but they are devoid of consciousness and will. 2 + 2 = 4, but 4 would never wish to make things otherwise, and is not even aware of itself as a number. If God created us "in his own image," the word "image" HAS to be taken figuratively. Otherwise, we would be invisible. (See the architectural plans for the first Temple in the book of 1 Kings.) I believe "in His image" is a mythical (I use the word "mythical" very respectfully!) explanation of why humans posess consciousness and will.
As to the Fall, it was evil for Adam and Eve to violate the instructions given to them by God. But they didn't know the difference between good and evil, so how were they supposed to know that disobedience was evil?
Addendum, January 14, 2006:
Journalist Fred Reed wrote an excellent essay, Intelligent Design, which covers topics like consciousness and will, along with "intelligent design."
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