How can we talk about the existence of God, what is means to be an atheist, an agnostic or a believer, or who does or doesn't fall into one of these categories, without first defining what we mean by God?
According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power.
I have no idea what this means. What is a higher power? What is a universal spirit? Is it an entity? Does it exercise its power in some way? Did it create the universe out of nothing? When a person says he believes in it, what is he actually saying?
Wikipedia
Conceptions of God:
Conceptions of God in monotheist, pantheist, and panentheist religions – or of the supreme deity in henotheistic religions – can extend to various levels of abstraction:
as a powerful, human-like, supernatural being, or as the deification of an esoteric, mystical or philosophical entity or category;
as the "Ultimate", the summum bonum, the "Absolute Infinite", the "Transcendent", or Existence or Being itself;
as the ground of being, the monistic substrate, that which we cannot understand; and so on.
I think I'm as atheistic as it gets, but my atheism concerns certain fairly concrete conceptions of God. When it gets as nebulous as Ultimate or the Absolute Infinite, then I'm not an atheist, an agnostic or a believer, because I have no idea how these terms would even apply to such an abstract concept. If what we mean by God is Existence or Being Itself or That Which We Cannot Understand, then of course I'm not an atheist; who would be? who doesn't believe in the existence of Existence? Who doesn't believe that there are Things Which We Cannot Understand?
Is it meaningful to lump together all these quite different conceptions of God? Does a poll that lumps them all together actually tell us something?
What do you mean by "God"?