(Some) theists find it anomalous to ask about the existence of individual events or things or whole classes of things and yet refuse to ask that question about the universe as a whole. The belief that such a question is unaskable is based, firstly, on the fact that even theists have no answer to it, and secondly, on the fact that the language in which it is asked is exploratory -- it uses words in ways that are stretched beyond their familiar use (as in science). To assert the existence of God is not to state a fact within an established intellectual system but to claim the need for exploration; it is to claim that there is an unanswered question about the universe: viz., "Why is there anything instead of nothing?"
Theists in the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) take a further step. Each of the traditions asserts that that unknown God has spoken. (They differ, though not completely, on how.) Christians only know of God speaking because the church -- the Christian movement -- hears and responds. They admit that it's not a matter of deduction but of faith -- rather like trusting someone (since we can rarely prove deductively that someone is trustworthy). If you think that you do not hear, you will evidently have no good reason for talking of God's word, although of course you may or may not be a theist in the first sense.
--CGE (in part quoting H. McCabe)
PS--Regarding Hook's invocation of Feuerbach, there's an interesting discussion (unfortunately apparently not on the web) by philosopher (and Christian) Alasdair MacIntyre. "MacIntyre is interested in how Marx theorises the need to 'transcend the standpoint of civil society' and [argues that] Marx himself failed to carry through his own project. In MacIntyre's view the Theses on Feuerbach mark the point where Marx turned from philosophy to politics, having stated a set of crucial problems in social philosophy better than anyone before him, but failing to find adequate philosophical solutions" (C. Brooke). MacIntyre, Alasdair, "The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken," in Knight, Kelvin (ed.), The MacIntyre Reader (Polity, 1998).
On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
> Sidney Hook attempted to address what he saw asthe problems with
> religious language, including the analogy theory, outlined above, his
> essay, "Modern Knowledge and the Concept of God" in his book *Quest
> for Being*? There in discussing this issue he wrote: ...