God is a CONCEPT

    It is impossible to prove or disprove god because god neither exists nor fails to exist.  It's like trying to prove the number e exists: chances are that you've never actually seen e in real life, you've only read about it in books.  Of course, it would be silly to say that the existence of e is therefore infinitely improbable, since  e doesn't go about existing or not existing anyway.
    This is where /sci/ seems to be stuck, trying to prove/disprove the general concept of god.  For the arguments to progress, you need to understand the relationship between god and religion.  Religion tends to consist of three components: God(s), miracles, and practices.  Miracles are what the religion claims to be god's manifestation on Earth: these range between things that happened naturally(ie the existence of the universe, people recovering from illness on their own) and magical stories of things that never really happened(ie Moses parting the Red Sea, God creating the world in a week.)  Practices are the component of religion that says things like: love thy neighbor, thou shalt not murder, slay the infidels (often openly conflicting with itself.)  Religion ties the three together using miracles to "prove" that their god "exists" and wants them to follow their religion's practices.  The miracle->god->practice chain is normally non sequitur and is facilitated by a magic book (ie bible, qur'an) and/or a class of priests/prophets who are free to (mis)interpret the religion for the common people.
    Religion is afraid of science because science can disprove the "miracles" with which religion "proves" its god is correct.  However, neither science nor religion can prove/disprove a concept.

Damn it all, we keep arguing about something whose definition we can't even agree upon.  What is God?  We all have some vague notion of what we mean when we refer to the term, but these notions are not necessarily the same, and they do not necessarily have to come together.

OP: concept, like e
>>2: sentient entity that actually exists and can manifest itself in the physical world
>>9: higher conciousness
>>15: creator of the universe
among other things...

I'll buy the concept argument, but only because concepts are manufactured by the human mind (and assumed to be true/consistent like math), rather than based on some physical reality.  With such a definition of God, we know nothing except philosophical wankery.  2 is a concept, but 2 apples does not define the concept of 2.

I vaguely believe in a divine entity, but this is the definition that cannot ever be proven either way.  Even if God appears before us, how do we know it's not a hallucination, or some glitch in the matrix?

Higher consciousness?  Just like the 1st one: philosophical wankery.

Assuming the universe has a beginning, something has to have created this world.  If we're going to arbitrarily define this thing as God, there's not much I can do about it.  By this definition, God might just be a big bang.  This definition does not require any sort of sentience.  If a fire extinguisher created the universe, then it would be God by this definition.  The original poster, however, added qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence.  Such qualities goes to the sentient entity category above.

>>21
Your statements would be ideal for Average Joe, but I'm not very happy with Osama Bin Laden telling Average Mohammed to commit suicide bombings though.