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cultural narrative. The science referred to is called “Western science,” which was developed originally by Europeans utilizing mathematical insights from India (the concept of “zero”), the Arab world (numerals, algebra), and other cultures.
    Peoples in all but the most primitive societies now utilize science.
    While we might consider science another “cultural narrative,” it differs from other cultural narratives because of its superior power, utility, and universality.
    Modeling God
    Everyone involved in discourses on the existence of gods may be well advised to consider the approach outlined above. Like quarks, the gods are human inventions based on human concepts. Whether or not we can say if the gods people talk about have anything to do with whatever objective reality is out there depends on the empirical success of the models that are built around these hypothetical entities. Whatever a god’s true nature, if one exists, a god model remains the best we can do in talking about that god.
    If we accept this procedure, then we can eliminate a whole class of objections that are made to types of logical and scientific arguments formulated in this book. In these arguments, God is assumed to have certain attributes. The theologian may ask: how can we mere mortals know about the true nature of a god who lies beyond our sensibilities? The answer is that we do not need to know—just as physicists do not need to know the ultimate reality behind quarks. Physicists are satisfied that they have a model, which currently includes quarks, that agrees beautifully with the data. The quark model is empirically grounded. It represents the best we humans have been able to do thus far in describing whatever objective reality underlies nuclear and subnuclear observations. Whether quarks are real or not does not change this. Whether any of the objects of scientific models are real or not does not change the fact that those models have immense utility. This includes Newtonian physics, despite the further developments of twentieth-century relativity and quantum mechanics.
    Analogously, if a particular god model successfully predicts empirical results that cannot be accounted for by any other known means, then we would be rational in tentatively concluding that the model describes some aspect of an objective reality without being forced to prove that god really is as described in the details of the model.
    Still, any god model remains a human invention, formulated in terms of human qualities that we can comprehend, such as love and goodness. Indeed, the gods of ancient mythology—
    including the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God—are clearly models contrived by humans in terms people could understand. What is amazing is that in this sophisticated modern age so many still cling to primitive, archaic images from the childhood of humanity.
    On the flip side, when a model is strongly falsified by the data, then those elements of the model that have been severely tested by observations should be rejected as not very likely to be representative of an objective reality.
    The following example should illustrate this rather subtle concept. Observations of electromagnetic phenomena support a model of electromagnetism containing pointlike electric charges we can call
electric monopoles.
Examples include ions, atomic nuclei, electrons, and quarks. Symmetry arguments would lead you to include in the model point magnetic charges—
magnetic monopoles.
    Yet the simplest observed magnetic sources are described as
magnetic dipoles
—bar magnets that have north and south poles.
    Electric dipoles such as hydrogen atoms, with a positive and a negative point charge separated in space, exist as well. But you can tear them apart into separate electric monopoles, such as an electron and a proton. On the other hand, if you cut away a piece of the north pole of a bar magnet, instead of getting a separate north and south monopole you get two dipoles—two bar