The trouble is, the soda can people are clearly physical. God is somehow simultaneously spiritual and capable of bending the physical to his will. The Soda can people seems like a more philosophically sound (and less trollish) version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. No theologian with any credentials is going to argue that we could find God with a telescope, other than a few who are only taken seriously when they show a church mailing list a pretty picture of the Hubble Deep Field and write some religious poetry on it.
Theism nowadays is mostly like the philosophical zombies concept, except the claim is that God actually does things and hides them to test everyone's faith. (Based on my extremely loose reading of the obscure elements of theology, this implies that there was a backstory where God went through a lot of suffering to become wise, which probably drove him insane. So basically, God is MoR Dumbledore, but also nonphysical somehow.)
"Spiritual" in this case is, of course, a semantic stopsign. I suppose if one wrote a very contrived map of the universe, it could include God without contradicting reality, but I'd only be impressed if it offered more predictive power than Traditional Chinese Medicine. (I think of TCM as where spiritualism and science meet without one annihilating the other; the qi concept has gone through variations that are sorta-kinda loose approximations of some concepts like thermodynamics and conservation of energy, vaguely like alchemy, which makes it subject to refinement through experimentation, until we get to today and the people who use the concept predictively admit that there's no magic and it's a way of modeling reality that just uses pretty semantic shortcuts. God appears to be a purely psychosocial concept; maybe a scientific study of tulpas can dissolve it?)
ETA: This does not go against the core of your argument, though--the God concept proposes something complex that hasn't been observed ever, and treats it as not only as valid as things that have been observed, but many times more so.
Consider whether your belief is making things clearer for you, or if you're stuck on point Z in an "A->B" discussion. Start by asking yourself, since God in your proposed philosophy is nonphysical, comprised of no readable patterns or energies and exerts no predictable, tangible effect on reality; What is the ontological difference between a universe WITH this strictly conceptual god and a universe with no god at all. Think about it for at least a minute... Okay, you're back? Now, if your answer is anything like "Well, there wouldn't be a...
Reading an earnest and thought provoking editorial1 from one James Wood, reviewing 'Letter To a Christian Nation' by Sam Harris. Though atheist himself, he admits a flagging patience with certain attitudes of atheists. I can concede that an atheist's superior and glib demeanor may be due to frustration and no small amount of pessimistic inference about the human condition, though I had to comment about a rebuttal he gives regarding Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot2.
He claims that God, so much grander and more complex than a teapot, cannot be banished with such a simplistic comparison, when I would insist that God is actually much less believable than the teapot for that exact reason. I think Russell's teapot is due for an update which is more approachable and grounded. Here goes:
I claim that there is a discarded Coke can somewhere in the vastness of the Sahara, but I will brook absolutely no discussion about doubting my claim or investigating it for veracity. "Okay," you think, "I suppose I can assume that much to be true. Whatever this man's sources, the odds of a Coke can being somewhere in the desert must be considerable." But I then elaborate with claims that it's actually many, many cans, folded into glorious and artistically pleasing forms, and my obdurate refusal to discuss how it can be proved continues. At this point even the most generous theists would likely start getting annoyed with my odd behavior, yet at the very least what I'm asking you to believe isn't outside the realm of possibility. For all you know (though I refuse to allow you to check) there could be a folk art bazaar currently set up in the Sahara, so really it costs you very little to entertain my view.
And then I say that the cans have taken on beautiful, shimmering consciousness and are forming a society which hides from humanity, burying their chrome castles beneath the sand and moving their aluminum cities whenever we get too close to discovering them. "But..." you try to cut in. Before you can even begin to tell me what you find odd about my fantasy, I'm on the next detail. I claim that all of our major technological achievements of the last several hundred years are all thanks to the secret influence of the Shiny Can People.
Now you have countless legitimate doubts, but every time you try to tell me that, for starters, soda didn't even come in aluminum cans several hundred years ago, I insist that you weren't there so you can't be sure, and how could a mere burden of proof destroy the mighty empire of the Shiny Cans?
I like the utility of the can people because it doesn't start with an outlandish proposition, but if you stick around it gets absolutely ridiculous. Not only does that remind me more of how religion is actually sold, but it also serves to strengthen the original analogy of the teapot by reminding the curious mind that Russell's teapot is infinitely smaller and less complex than God, making it much less embarrassing to genuinely believe in since it would have so much more room to hide.
Odinn Celusta
1) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/the-celestial-teapot
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot