It seems like this is a problem with semantics. [...] you are applying the word "God" onto what a non-theist would call "Nature" or "The Universe". In reality, it is not a belief in God at all, but simply a label you have applied (or perhaps misapplied) to something else entirely.
What I've been asserting when I say that God exists is that the universe is ordered. Thus saying that God=the universe is more than semantics because believing that the universe is ordered does require faith. Typical theists believe that the universe is ordered by a personal God, and theists like me believe that the universe is self-ordered.
What you are calling "God" is in no way related to the Christian or Muslim concept of God.
I'm sure most organized religions would object to my description of God. Yet I am not dissuaded that at their deepest theological roots, the Christian and Muslim descriptions of God are vague enough (and complex enough) to accomodate this kind of description.
So far however, I have read very little that leads me to assume you are holding a theistic belief in "God".
I agree, and I just wanted to do some research before I formally conceded. The problem, as has been pointed out in several places, is that it doesn't matter if a small handful of theologians see the equivalence of many descriptions of God or if I think what I believe in is "God". If what is meant by "theism" is what most theists believe (and this is reasonable) then arguing for "theism" would require arguing for what they actually believe in.
I began three months ago asking myself what was most fundamental about belief in God, and I decided it was the belief in meaning, which I decided is the belief in things being ordered and patterned rather than arbitrary and random. However, I failed to check this with real people...
Over the past two weeks, I've asked as many theists as I could get ahold of if they would consider my views as a belief in God.
The results:
3 thought my beliefs overlapped with theirs sufficiently well to conclude we believed in the same God (my closest friends are scientists, so I suspect this view was over-represented in my survey)
2 could relate to my belief as a belief in God but said they believed in a personal God, and considered this an important difference
approximately 6 asserted that I am an atheist (they didn't think my belief was sufficient and, to my surprise, they didn't necessarily believe that the universe was organized)
In conclusion, the majority of theists I questioned didn't accept my beliefs as theistic, and so I pretty much give up on arguing for theism. (Words mean what people say they mean.)
I asked some of the questions in writing, and this was the best response (from an atheist obviously):
I can't say it any better than Carl Sagan:
"The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."
(Later edit.) Recently, I found this comment here:
The reason you guys can't conceive of religion contributing to science is that religion, a.k.a Christianity, has already contributed her major part to science, namely, holding firmly to the position that the universe is intelligible and operates by consistent natural laws that are discoverable by a reason that is somehow able to understand the true nature of that universe.
Apparently someone thinks along the same lines that I do.
One occasionally sees such remarks as, "What good does it do to go around being angry about the nonexistence of God?" (on the one hand) or "Babies are natural atheists" (on the other). It seems to me that such remarks, and the rather silly discussions that get started around them, show that the concept "Atheism" is really made up of two distinct components, which one might call "untheism" and "antitheism".
A pure "untheist" would be someone who grew up in a society where the concept of God had simply never been invented - where writing was invented before agriculture, say, and the first plants and animals were domesticated by early scientists. In this world, superstition never got past the hunter-gatherer stage - a world seemingly haunted by mostly amoral spirits - before coming into conflict with Science and getting slapped down.
Hunter-gatherer superstition isn't much like what we think of as "religion". Early Westerners often derided it as not really being religion at all, and they were right, in my opinion. In the hunter-gatherer stage the supernatural agents aren't particularly moral, or charged with enforcing any rules; they may be placated with ceremonies, but not worshipped. But above all - they haven't yet split their epistemology. Hunter-gatherer cultures don't have special rules for reasoning about "supernatural" entities, or indeed an explicit distinction between supernatural entities and natural ones; the thunder spirits are just out there in the world, as evidenced by lightning, and the rain dance is supposed to manipulate them - it may not be perfect but it's the best rain dance developed so far, there was that famous time when it worked...
If you could show hunter-gatherers a raindance that called on a different spirit and worked with perfect reliability, or, equivalently, a desalination plant, they'd probably chuck the old spirit right out the window. Because there are no special rules for reasoning about it - nothing that denies the validity of the Elijah Test that the previous rain-dance just failed. Faith is a post-agricultural concept. Before you have chiefdoms where the priests are a branch of government, the gods aren't good, they don't enforce the chiefdom's rules, and there's no penalty for questioning them.
And so the Untheist culture, when it invents science, simply concludes in a very ordinary way that rain turns out to be caused by condensation in clouds rather than rain spirits; and at once they say "Oops" and chuck the old superstitions out the window; because they only got as far as superstitions, and not as far as anti-epistemology.
The Untheists don't know they're "atheists" because no one has ever told them what they're supposed to not believe in - nobody has invented a "high god" to be chief of the pantheon, let alone monolatry or monotheism.
However, the Untheists do know that they don't believe in tree spirits. And we shall even suppose that the Untheists don't believe in tree spirits, because they have a sophisticated and good epistemology - they understand why it is in general a bad idea to postulate ontologically basic mental entities.
So if you come up to the Untheists and say:
"The universe was created by God -"
"By what?"
"By a, ah, um, God is the Creator - the Mind that chose to make the universe -"
"So the universe was created by an intelligent agent. Well, that's the standard Simulation Hypothesis, but do you have actual evidence confirming this? You sounded very certain -"
"No, not like the Matrix! God isn't in another universe simulating this one, God just... is. He's indescribable. He's the First Cause, the Creator of everything -"
"Okay, that sounds like you just postulated an ontologically basic mental entity. And you offered a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. Besides, where are you getting all this stuff? Could you maybe start by telling us about your evidence - the new observation you're trying to interpret?"
"I don't need any evidence! I have faith!"
"You have what?"
And at this very moment the Untheists have become, for the first time, Atheists. And what they just acquired, between the two points, was Antitheism - explicit arguments against explicit theism. You can be an Untheist without ever having heard of God, but you can't be an Antitheist.
Of course the Untheists are not inventing new rules to refute God, just applying their standard epistemological guidelines that their civilization developed in the course of rejecting, say, vitalism. But then that's just what we rationalist folk claim antitheism is supposed to be, in our own world: a strictly standard analysis of religion which turns out to issue a strong rejection - both epistemically and morally, and not after too much time. Every antitheist argument is supposed to be a special case of general rules of epistemology and morality which ought to have applications beyond religion - visible in the encounters of science with vitalism, say.
With this distinction in hand, you can make a bit more sense of some modern debates - for example, "Why care so much about God not existing?" could become "What is the public benefit from publicizing antitheism?" Or "What good is it to just be against something? Where is the positive agenda?" becomes "Less antitheism and more untheism in our atheism, please!" And "Babies are born atheists", which sounds a bit odd, is now understood to sound odd because babies have no grasp of antitheism.
And as for the claim that religion is compatible with Reason - well, is there a single religious claim that a well-developed, sophisticated Untheist culture would not reject? When they have no reason to suspend judgment, and no anti-epistemology of separate magisteria, and no established religions in their society to avoid upsetting?
There's nothing inherently fulfilling about arguing against Goddism - in a society of Untheists, no one would ever give the issue a second thought. But in this world, at least, insanity is not a good thing, and sanity is worth defending, and explicit antitheism by the likes of Richard Dawkins would surely be a public service conditioning on the proposition of it actually working. (Which it may in fact be doing; the next generation is growing up increasingly atheist.) Yet in the long run, the goal is an Untheistic society, not an Atheistic one - one in which the question "What's left, when God is gone?" is greeted by a puzzled look and "What exactly is missing?"