“Do you believe God exists?”

 “Do you believe God exists?”
Answering this question “Yes” or “No” is an example of attribution substitution.

 But before we understand the problem with this question, we have to ask, what is "attribution substitution"?

According to David Cycleback, in his piece "Brain Function and Religion," attribution substitution is an automatic unconscious process the brain uses to make speedy decisions needed to function. It contributes to many cognitive biases, misperceptions and visual illusions. It is a heuristic used when someone has to make a judgment about a complex, ambiguous situation and substitutes a different but more easily solved situation. (Poulter 2018), (Brockman 2007)

The substitution is done at the automatic subconscious level and the person does not realize she is answering a related but different question. This explains why many visual illusions still trick the eyes after the person has learned they are visual illusions. This also helps explain why many individuals can be unaware of their own biases, and even persist in the biases when they are made aware of them.

An example is when you judge the intelligence or beliefs of a stranger by his or her looks, fashion, age, race, sex, accent or nationality. Determining a person’s intelligence and beliefs is a complex problem that must be done at the closely examined person-by-person level. However, everyone makes automatic judgments from their stereotypes before they’ve talked to the person or even when just shown a picture.

Understanding this idea of attribution substitution is necessary for considering the problems inherent to the question of "do you believe God exists?" 

Whether or not God exists, Cycleback goes on to explain, "God is impossible to define. “God” itself is just a human-made word, religious symbols of God are just symbols, and God is beyond human definition, language and imagination. Asking “Do you believe God exists?” is, as my late science professor father would phrase it, “a non-question.” One hundred different people have one hundred different incomplete and subjective definitions and conceptions of “God."

The person’s response of “Yes” is stating that he believes in the existence of his definition of God that isn’t and cannot be the true or accurate depiction of God (for every other person on the planet). You cannot believe in what you don’t or can’t possibly know or even imagine. Two people may say “Yes” to the question, but, as their definitions and conceptions differ, they do not believe in or are referring to the same thing. 

An anti-theist, or someone who answers “No, God does not exist,” is using the same attribution substitution process. She is making up a personal definition of God, or using someone else’s definition, then saying that that does not exist.

“Do you believe God exists?” is impossible to answer. The question itself is nonsensical, or a
“non-question.” It is asking for an answer as to the existence of something that the question itself does not and cannot define.

Similar to the word "God," is problems with the word, time.  In all its measures, as Steve McQuinn explained, time "defies layperson simplification. Of course, relativity and geologic time can be explained away without any deep understanding gained. The simplifications only add confusion when people try to reason further using the inadequate tools they are given. We resort to math, which furnishes utility, yet we understand nothing but the algorithms while taking the results on faith.

Second only to the word "God," so "truth" also suffers from being concretely definable, because there are so many  different ways of defining what kinds of truth we are referring to.  Scientific "truth" is more objective, but is always changing as our tools of investigation improve. Religious truth is more subjective, since it deals more with meaning, and is also always changing, even in a person who adhere's to one brand of religion their whole life. 

Others words that suffer from similar problems of definition might be art, aesthetics, and beauty, all for the same reason. The difference is that God is an idea that is said to exist wholly outside of everything we are limited to relying on to define such a word, while the material reality we are woefully confined and limited by is considered by some, like Einstein and Spinoza, to be a reflection of God, for others, like St. Augustine, material reality is necessarily fallen and flawed. The religious view offered by Augustine makes even Einstein's perception of "God" only as flawed as Augustine claims material reality to be.  

As a result, whenever someone asks "do you believe God exists?," the only intellectually honest answer one can give, if they are honest and humble enough to admit an awareness of their own limitations, is “I cannot answer that."

"However, if you give me your definition of God I’ll tell you if I believe in that.”