God is not a Billiard Ball

Many of my conversations with atheists feel like this to me:

Anelectronist: I don't believe in electrons, you know, little billiard balls of negative charge that whizz around circuits and make them work.
Electronist: But something must carry negative charge.
Anelectronist: From what I read, a single electron can pass through two slits at the same time and make an interference pattern on the other side, like ripples on water. Billiard balls can't do that, even really small ones.
Electronist: Well, physicists don't think of electrons as billiard balls anymore. They talk about wave-particle duality or "wavicles", which exhibit properties of both waves and particles, to describe really small entities like electrons.
Anelectronist: I don't know about that. I define electrons as billiard balls and many other people think of them that way. So, I have to say, in light of these paradoxes, electrons don't exist.
Electronist: So, what do you think carries negative charge? Something must carry negative charge.
Anelectronist: Well, maybe there's something to these wavicles, although it sounds kind of incoherent to me - I don't see how something can be a wave and a particle at the same time. In any case, you'll have to come up with a better word for them. I can't talk about electrons without imagining little billiard balls.

Of course, I have loaded this rhetorically. Nearly anyone who thinks about it would realize that not believing in electrons is absurd, and that scientists are at liberty to update their models of reality as the data come in. I don't know of any "electronist" fundamentalists, for example, who continue to maintain billiard ball electrons in the face of the evidence! Nor of "anelectronists" who refuse to talk about electrons.

I suspect this has more to do with the human psychology of identity formation than with the facts on the ground. No one I know regards the existence of electrons as important in their view of themselves, but religious (as well as those who identify themselves as not religious) people often respond to criticism of their beliefs as if they were attacks on themselves. From a rational perspective, electrons exist in some form whatever an electron fundamentalist or anelectronist tells me! But when our deeply-held beliefs, theist or atheist, are under attack, a rational perspective is difficult to bring to the fore.

From the religious side, when I'm not annoyed, I can identify with Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb:

And [the angels] said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." (John 20:13)

Whether the perceived attack comes from a fundamentalist or an atheist, it can feel as though something very close to me is being taken away to who knows where? Scripture reminds me that Christ cannot be taken from me anymore than he could be taken from Mary. The resurrected Christ may also appear quite differently from the Christ I had remembered, yet still feel deeply the same.
A wider theological objection than atheism or fundamentalism is a traditionalism that would proscribe new ways of thinking. In the "existence-of-electrons debate" the traditional electronists would argue that billiard balls have been and continue to be quite adequate for everyday purposes, so why confuse people with complicated and unconventional electronology, when it gets in the way of useful stuff like building circuits, or whatever.

Whether traditional electronism is viable I don't know, but we do, for example, teach Newtonian mechanics in school, which is adequate to navigate the solar system, in spite of Einstein's relativity. We even start by simplifying it to ignore air resistance in calculating the path of a tennis ball from a moving train. We certainly allow paradoxes to remain in science, as of the incommensurability of relativity and quantum mechanics, even as we attempt theories of everything. So there may be pedagogical as well as pragmatic reasons to use simplified models in theology, just as in science.

In fact, theological models beyond stale tradition exist quite widely. What we learned about God in childhood may well be outgrown as we experience life. Thus, if life is good for us, then it's rather easy to imagine that God works things for the good. As we see and experience pain and injustice we may come to question what we were told about God. Traditionally, for example, classical theism claims that God is omnibenevolent (possibly meaning: infinitely good) and omnipotent (possibly meaning: all-powerful). The existence of evil and suffering suggests that the God of classical theism is either unwilling or unable to prevent them. The inability of people to grow in their thinking within their church of origin leads many to leave the church, often at the high emotional cost of disrupted relationships.

While there are biblical passages that support an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God, there are others that place limitations on God. Thus, the Bible itself encourages healthy debate. In the field of theology, Open Theism and Process Theology are just two ways of rethinking the God of Christianity to help us make religious sense of the data of human experience. I will go into no detail here - another post for sure - because my only point in mentioning them for now is this: God is not a billiard ball.