Someone once called me ‘pragmatic.’ And I responded, “HEY! I don’t know what that means.” He said it meant that I was practical. I thanked him and went on my way. This man was the town drunk. A few days after our conversation, he ‘cleaned up’ his front yard by lighting it on fire.

Which brings me to my point: I was recently revisiting what pragmatic meant and what was pragmatism (don’t ask why, I’m just like that). Trusty Wikipedia told me that, actually, pragmatism is, among other ambiguous meanings (that need disambiguating) pragmatism is a philosophical movement. This movement is based on the work of (among a few others) Charlse Peirce who wrote the Pragmatic Maxim, which stages in part: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

In other words, we don’t really see things, we just see the effects of things.

This creates an interesting argument for the existence of God: though we may not see God with our own eyes, we can see practical effects which he has on the world. Once we’ve seen these effects, we then have a conception of God. We don’t need to see him in order for him to exist.