The existence - or lack of - a God is one of humanity's fundamental questions. Since the first birth, the first sunrise, the first death, humans have sought to explain the world around them. The whole of human existence, in the end, comes down to this: Is there a God?
Most religious adults, particularly those in developed nations, reject the simple storybook god, just as atheists do, or preserve only parts of it in their personal theologies. But just because they can no longer believe in the god of childhood doesn’t mean they want to give up on the god idea altogether. So they add sophistication to the concept, reinterpreting the anthropomorphic scriptural stories in a wide variety of non-literal ways that allow believers to preserve belief.
This doesn’t keep people from often thinking and speaking of God in the old ways, however. Belief in answered prayer is one such anthropomorphic slip: since an all-wise and all-knowing god wouldn’t change his mind just because unwise and ignorant people begged him to. (Moreover, the common use of he and his in reference to God is another such slip.)
But since it is the storybook god that provides the motivational engine behind the abstract god of theology (believers don’t start out as theologians), such slips are to be expected. Indeed, they are defended with complex rationalizations designed to make sense of them despite their incompatibility with the basic set of abstractions.
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