Ganesh

A quick question to an old friend, a professing Hindu, a Professor, a man of science and the Enlightenment. “Do you believe in Ganesh?”
“Yes.”
“Right. Me (that’s me, writing this), if I was living in a farming village, for a year or so, the life of a villager, working, dawn to dusk, poor, after a bit I’d go along to the temple with everyone else, if it was a Ganesh temple the god and I would begin to share a history, transactions and undertakings, promises fulfilled or not, on either side, good things and bad things, to me he’d begin to have a personality, a history, a strong psychological presence. In that sense, and it’s as good a sense as any, Ganesh, to me, would exist.
“But, do you believe in Ganesh as a discrete being, entirely independent of human consciousness, and a being who is aware of his own existence?”
This test can be applied to other deities