Did I give my beautiful, sweet, angelic daughter my last bite of toast?

I've always thought that it doesn't matter very much if God is real, but that it matters a whole lot if God is not real.

If God is real, he will understand that I'm just a dumb human male. After all he made me this way. How could he hold me responsible for the shameful mess that I have become? I mean, for instance, the other morning as I was finishing my breakfast (toast with almond butter), my one year old daughter said "Da da!" with an urgency that was meant to communicate that she wanted that last bite.

She was practically telepathically shouting to me, "Whoa! Dad! Be careful, buddy! I noticed the toast is runnin' pretty low over there, dude. How about you swing a lil bite over here to daddy's lil girl, huh pal?"

Did I give my beautiful, sweet, angelic daughter my last bite of toast?

Nope. I ate it. I even kind of relished the moment, savoring my fatherly power to be the decider of toast.

Surely any God of infinite power and wisdom would be able to rationalize, to understand, to forgive me and to figure out how I've become the kind of jerk who literally deprives his only daughter of tasty, toasty breakfast morsels, in order to assert his will in a universe which seems to deny him of all authority and respect?

Because the alternative is unthinkable. Not that God wouldn't be able to understand that, but that there is no God at all.

Because the scene changes quite a bit if you take this nice God fellow out of the equation.

If there's no God, then I'm just a hungry beast, taking what's mine. A fat, greedy winner, taking bread from the mouths of babes. Not for my survival, but for my pleasure.

That's a dark universe. And that's not even the half of it.

If there is a God, he's going to have a lot of explaining to do when it comes to all the totally crazy unfair crap that goes on in the world. I mean, forget about cell phones (made by miserably unhappy, poor migrant laborers in China with rare earth minerals that are destroying villages, lives and the earth, as well as zapping my attention away from my beautiful toast-deprived baby daughter), and let's just take a moment to talk about chocolate.

Actually, I don't want to spoil it for you. The world is cruel enough.

But if you want to learn something, Google this: chocolate Ivory Coast (but don't say I didn't warn you).

Let's just say that any God who could make something as delicious as chocolate and put it somewhere where people are so desperate to earn a living that they kill each other for it so that I can appease my sweet tooth while literally laughing with joy as I watch brain withering videos of jumping cats on my iPhone as my hungry daughter cries, neglected, at the other end of the couch... Well, that's a God that's going to have some explaining to do.

If there's no God, well, then I guess the above makes a little bit more sense. The hotter parts of the planet gave us life. As life progressed it moved away from the hot parts and eventually we lucky ones in the mostly moderately climatized areas wound up with fun stuff like video games and fast casual dining experiences and trick or treating.

In this Godless scenario, life isn't exactly random, it's just distributed in a way that is oriented more toward creating species-wide feelings of security that will enable us to procreate freely (until we use all of our resources, anyway).

But the truth is that neither of these opposite viewpoints has ever had any real sway over me. And it's these kind of thoughts that have always steered me toward the third way, a way which Richard Dawkins calls 'intellectual cowardice.'

I think that's a ridiculous way of putting it. I think of us agnostics as being the custodians of wonder, amazement and awe.

I agree with my atheist pals that you can't really commit to something you can't prove is there. Just like I also agree with my God loving brethren that the universe seems so meticulously orchestrated that it could only have been authored by an almighty, all knowing universal father.

As a Californian, I am spoiled for beautiful weather and easy access to beautiful nature. One day I saw the sun rise while sitting on a sand dune in the desert. I had lunch in a mountain in the snow. I even had a snowball fight with some friends. Then we ate dinner on the beach as the sunset. On that day, I felt truly surrounded by a heavenly presence. I felt, in fact, as if I'd experienced heaven on earth.

By contrast, when my father died, I felt deserted by any Godly feelings at all.

My dad was an atheist and a Buddhist, but that wasn't it. His pure and utter absence just felt so ultimate and final.

But then, as the dust of my grief began to settle, I found myself sitting in my mother's back yard. She lives at the bottom of a beautiful, looming, crimson red bluff in Southern Utah, where the arid red rock seems to breathe beneath the silvery blue expanse of sky. On that particular morning, I was staring up at the top of the bluff.

And before you ask, no, I hadn't eaten anything funny.

But that morning, staring up at the top of the cliff, I saw my dad. He was doing cartwheels and dancing.

I can't really explain it. I also don't really believe it. I mean, I definitely saw it, but I also know that I definitely did not see it. It's the kind of thing you might have to be agnostic to understand.

And that's just it. I was so happy to have confirmed my agnosticism in that moment.

The truth is, like most people, I'm a flip flopper. If you catch me on the right day, I will tell you that I believe in God. If you catch me on another day, I will tell you that God is an extremely illogical concept. But most days, I'm settled into my agnosticism, and I feel just fine about it.

The fact is, I'm able to keep myself and my family happy (believe it or not, most of the time, I do share the toast) without caring all that much whether there is or isn't a God. In the endless debate over religion in America and the rest of the world, it seems to be that this third way is too often ignored. I'm not saying it's rational (it's pointedly irrational, as a matter of fact, and I'm just fine with that).

There are things that matter in the world, like conflict minerals and conflict chocolate. Those things are not really all that funny when you actually look into them. Those two things are on a long list of things that are really messed up about this world.

Religious zealotry has been the scourge of civilization since about the time that people started to organize themselves into distinctive groups. But zeroing in on this fact dismisses a beautiful history of charity and moral education without which it is difficult to say whether we'd still be standing around debating the issue in the first place.

As we enjoy Easter eggs, and weird bunnies amidst all the talk of Jesus and his supposed resurrection, I think that it should be worth pondering the fact that the essential human qualities, our inherent obligation to be kind, good, helpful, loving, understanding, nurturing, receptive, learning, strong creatures is the result of an inner nature that arrived there one way or another. Just the same as the pain and loneliness and iniquity that exists in the world is the result of impossibly complex systems that very few of us individuals have any meaningful power to influence on our own.

You don't have to believe in Jesus, and you don't have to believe in the great nothingness that Richard Dawkins salivates over, but this weekend, please remember to share your toast.