I have been reading through this site and found it really interesting. but i have been wondering what do you mean by "God" i myself dont have a religion, but I find it hard to deny some sort of entity to start this entire process. for instance we are made of matter, matter is the reaction of energy waves with one another, there mere fact that matter exists is astounding. if you look at something like the charge on a neutron also its perfect its not too positive and not too negitive its perfect and perfection is a powerful message. also the fact that salt can dissolve in water it would take a high amount of energy to break apart the ionic lattice of salt but water can do this at relatively low temperatures and if this didnt happen we wouldnt exist. so i was wondering, do you believe in the existance of an entity maybe not the "God" that christians speak of but some sort of idea like that?

Excellent questions!

What is meant by "God" is actually one of the most difficult subjects in religious philosophy. I have found that more often that not, when you get right down to it, most religious people I speak to really don't have a viable definition of "God." When asked what God is, they will generally say something like:

* "God is the creator of the universe," which really doesn’t tell you much about God other than he performed a certain task in some unspecified way at some time in the past,
* "God is love," whatever that means, or
* "God is the omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, all-loving father of us all," which is a collection of terms that generally don’t do well under analysis (particularly "all-loving.")

For this reason, when I say "God," I generally mean, "whatever it is you mean when you say God." This covers a lot of territory and, though it's still painfully vague, is useful in discussions where I don't think getting into defining this term would be useful.

The physics issues you mention are, indeed, amazing. Then again, we expect to find a universe with qualities like this because if it were otherwise then we wouldn’t be here to talk about the universe. I don’t find it necessary to assume a creator for any of these things. In fact, because "God" is such a fuzzy concept (in a metaphysical sense), I feel like saying, "I don’t understand the universe, so the explanation must be God," is akin to saying, "I don’t understand the universe, and the explanation must be something I understand even less and can’t even investigate." To me, that isn’t helpful.

I should point out here that different people have different levels of proof necessary for proving the existence of a deity, so for some "frozen water floats" is sufficient evidence of divine creation. To me, that’s a heck of a leap, but I can’t condemn someone for disagreeing with me on this, although I admit that I fear people who are easily convince of religious matters may, in some cases, be more easily convinced of untruths in non-religious matters.