Do Buddhists Believe in God?

An interesting question, certainly.

Buddhism is the only major world religion that does not posit a god at the center of things. Doesn’t deny it, either. But famously Buddhism ignores the question as generally irrelevant to the questions it does address regarding human suffering, its cause and its cure.

Now the American Buddhist Tricycle blog cites science writer and blogger Razib Khan, who last year wrote about the famous Pew Religious Landscape Survey. At that time he noted the majority of Western Buddhists seem to believe in God. I generally didn’t credit this as much as I might otherwise have, as the survey suggested only seventy-three percent of self-described atheists didn’t believe in God. So, I suspected there’s a methodological problem here, perhaps in how the question was phrased. However, now Khan’s latest reflection, based on a World Values Survey, suggests that the majority of world Buddhists may believe in God.

Again, I wonder about methodology. But, I am beginning to suspect that perhaps some signficant number, perhaps the majority of self-described Buddhists do indeed have some sense of a deity.

What this means, and how it plays out, is an open question.

And with those open questions, as someone who is both a Buddhist and a Unitarian Universalist, another religious movement with a problematic relationship with divinity, I wonder if similar currents or issues are at play with adherents of our small liberal religious tradition.

Sorry, no actual answers here, only a rather interesting and from my perspective a bit on the bizarre side, question hanging out there.