The Inadequacy of Words

"Do you believe in God?" the interviewer asked.

"What do you mean when you use the word 'god'?" Carl Sagan replied. "The word 'god' covers an enormous range of different ideas, running from an outsized light-skinned male with a long white beard sitting on a throne in the sky, for which there is no evidence, to the kind of god that Einstein or Spinoza talked about, which is very close to the sum total of the laws of the universe. It would be crazy to deny that there are laws in the universe. If that's what you want to call god, then, of course, god exists… So when you say, 'Do you believe in god?' if I say yes or if I say no, you have learned absolutely nothing."

Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer best known for his "Pale Blue Dot" meditation on Earth's place in the cosmos, had exposed the trap hiding in plain sight. The word "God" itself creates confusion.