Gotama [The Buddha] is concerned with how a person can flourish within the totality of his or her sensorium*, which he calls "the all." As a pragmatist, he has no interest in claiming that "nothing exists outside of experience" or insisting that "God does not exist." These are metaphysical claims, just as indefensible as the metaphysical claims of his opponents. To adopt an atheist position would lay him open to exactly the same charges he makes against those he criticizes. Instead of making a statement about the existence or otherwise of a transcendent consciousness or Divinity, Gotama says that claims to know what is unknowable and see what is unseeable are nonsensical and entirely irrelevant to the task at hand of practicing the dharma.
---Stephen Batchelor, in after buddhism---
*The organs of perception, that which is perceived, and the response to what is perceived.
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