Not only was Yahwism (now upgraded to Godism) a latecomer in the history of religions, it was also a very local affair. Yahweh and his worshippers were limited to a sacred space east of the Mediterranean. Ancient peoples from across the globe never knew this deity, and neither, according to the Old Testament, did Yahweh know of them (e.g., Native Americans, the Khoi-San people of South Africa, or the Aborigines of Australia; just compare to the list of nations in Gen. 10). The scandal of peculiarity is increased when one realizes that all Yahweh's supposedly superhuman concerns and attributes of manifestation appear totally dependent on the region in which he was worshipped. According to the Old Testament, he comes from the desert steppe in the south (the Arabian Peninsula, see Judg. 5; Hab. 3; Ps. 68) as a storm-god, a tribal fetish of a once nomadic horde (according to hints in the Old Testament, perhaps possibly having first been worshipped by the Midianites or Kenites). The tropical parts of the earth know nothing of his cursing the creation with barren infertility, while regions like the Alps mock his idea that the Promised Land is all that beautiful. The fact is that the environmental psychology and ecological anthropology of ancient Israelites so accounts for the nature and concerns of this particular god that it is impossible to even imagine Yahweh being worshipped by, say, the Eskimos.
Interestingly the concept of divine eternity in the Hebrew Bible is not always the same as the philosophical sense thereof. In one text, Isaiah 43:10, we even find presupposed that Yahweh has a limited lifespan:
“You are my witnesses,” says the Lord, “and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am He. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.”
Look again closely and try to take the text seriously. It does not just say that there are no other gods. It introduces a temporal sequence that, if all the texts wanted to stress were monotheistic claims, seems quite unnecessary. Yet most people can read this passage and never bother to ask how it is possible for Yahweh to refer to a time “before” and “after” him during which there are no other gods. This text clearly implies that (a) there is a temporal period before Yahweh existed when no other god existed either, and (b) there will come a time after Yahweh during which no other god will exist either. Of course, this outrageous idea makes no sense in the context of philosophical monotheism, but there it is and against the backdrop of ancient Near Eastern theogony it is perfectly understandable. Gods, too, are born from and return to chaos, and not even Genesis 1 says God created the darkness/waters. To be sure, this allusion is basically the only of its kind in the Bible (although the notion of the divine life, or “nephesh,” as diminished in texts such as Exod. 31:18, implies the possibility of degeneration), but because scholars have wanted to see “second” Isaiah as theologically advanced, they have ignored the more primitive elements in his theology.
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
AS “NONSENSE ON STILTS”
Just as you cannot argue Zeus into existence via philosophical speculation and sophistication, so you cannot do it with God, aka Yahweh. Yet Christian philosophers of religion who no longer believe in Yahweh as depicted in the Old Testament can still bring themselves to believe in “God,” an updated version of the older tribal deity of manifold depictions. They use the latest technomorphic metaphors, which they project onto reality and by way of sophisticated jargon and a generic approach make their ideas seem intimidating and almost respectable. But the fact is that all Christian philosophy of religion, be it fundamentalist analytic philosophy or the most postmodern version of continental a/theology, is just reconstructive mythology. It only seems to work because people forget that God used to be Yahweh. They might as well try to rehabilitate any old tribal god under the universal umbrella nowadays covered by the concept of divinity. Thus any philosophy of religion that assumes the god it talks about is in any way basically the same divine reality as that talked about in the Old Testament is in serious trouble.
First of all, conceptions of Yahweh by most Christian philosophers of religion tend to be radically anachronistic and conform more to the proverbial “God of the Philosophers” (Thomas Aquinas in particular) than to any version of Yahweh as depicted in ancient Israelite religion. This means that the prephilosophical “biblical” conceptions of Yahweh, the belief in whom is supposed to be properly basic, are not even believed by Christian philosophers themselves. Their lofty notions of God in terms of “Divine Simplicity,” “Maximal Greatness,” and “Perfect-Being Theology” are utterly alien with reference to many of the characterizations of Yahweh in biblical narrative (e.g., Gen. 18). This means that debates about God's power and knowledge and his relation to evil (etc.), whatever its logical merits, conveniently ignore the fact that there are many biblical texts that contradict it (and that offer representations of divinity that Christian philosophers do not believe in).
The problem of evil is a pseudo-worry in many Old Testament texts, where Yahweh was neither omnipotent nor all-good. In addition, the ability to do evil in the sense of being destructive was in fact a great-making property in ancient theism. Yahweh is powerful precisely because he can do evil when he wants, whether natural, moral, or metaphysical (see Exod. 4:11; Lam. 3:38; Isa. 45:7; Amos 3:6; Eccles. 7:13–14; etc.). Ancient believers were not as spoiled as those today who believe a god has to be perfectly good (read: “user-friendly”) before he deserves to be worshipped. What made a god divine was great power (which is not the same as omnipotence), not client-centered service, family values, or human rights.
The second problem follows from the first: What kind of God is it that is warranted according to the Christian philosophy of religion? It is useless to say belief in God is justified unless one can specify what the contents of the beliefs about God are supposed to be (and who this god is in whom one basically believes). But this Christian philosophy of religion is radically undermined by its failure to take cognizance of the fact that it is committing the fallacy of essentialism. It brackets the philosophical problems posed by theological pluralism in the Old Testament and the diachronic changes (read: “revision”) in the beliefs about Yahweh in the history of Israelite religion. At many junctions in its arguments it seems blissfully unaware that there is no such thing as the “biblical” perspective on God. So if it is the “biblical” God that is supposed to be believed in, most Old Testament theologians would like to know “which version?” (or, “whose interpretation?”)
A third problem concerns another way in which Christian philosophy of religion fails to apply the Old Testament's own forms of verification. Now aside from the possibility of pluralism that may once again rear its ugly head (e.g., in the incommensurable religious epistemologies of Daniel and Ecclesiastes), the fact is that it is wrong to assume the Old Testament is not evidentialist. On the contrary, there is ample reason to believe that a primitive type of evidentialism is in fact the default epistemology taken for granted in ancient Israelite religion given the nature of the many prephilosophical assumptions in the biblical narratives. Thus the whole point of “miracles” (signs) and revelation via theophany, audition, dreams, divination, and history can be said to presuppose an evidentialism (see the oft-repeated formula “so that they may know…”). Philosophers of religion will deny that one can verify the existence of God in this empirical sense, and yet according to the Old Testament, Yahweh himself assumed this to be possible.
After all, of all the religious epistemologies that come to mind, it is difficult to imagine that the prophet Elijah in the narrative where he takes on the Baal Prophets on Carmel was endorsing anything remotely similar to the Christian philosophy of religion's claims that one need not prove anything empirically (see 1 Kings 18). If that is not an instance of evidentialism in the Old Testament, what is? Christians may have their own reasons why these things no longer happen and why no philosopher of religion will agree to a contest on Mount Carmel. But the fact is that Christian philosophers of religion, be they fundamentalist and analytic or postmodern and continental, all love dogmatic rationalization more than biblical epistemology. Again this shows that not even Christian philosophers of religion actually believe in Yahweh. They, too, are atheists in relation to the biblical divinity.
From this we see why belief in Yahweh is for both atheists and Christians as impossible as belief in Zeus. One might as well be asked to “just believe the Bible!” or any other ancient god. But few Christian philosophers ever ask why it is that a god's main desire is that his creations agree that he exists. Of all the things one could, in theory, worry about—and then do so little to make possible. That a god needs to be hidden and that there needs to be faith to make a relationship possible is simply a ridiculous and unbiblical notion. Moses allegedly both saw and believed in Yahweh, and they had a great relationship. So what is the problem with one-on-one intimacy on a daily basis with every human being, in a time when atheism is more popular than ever? Like Voltaire said before Nietzsche, God's only excuse is that he doesn't exist.
In other words, it is historical consciousness that led believers to reinterpret the biblical beliefs to make them seem credible and that leads atheists today to see why nobody can believe in Yahweh any more than they can believe in Zeus. We simply cannot imagine that reality is a planned setup where one all-too-human, yet superior, entity has all the power, where “might makes right”—God can do what he wants because he is God, exactly the same immorality believers accuse atheists of—where the meaning of its existence is to create weak, frail, and mortal beings to serve it and tell it how wonderful it is for all eternity. Religious devotion is simply the kissing up to power. However, it is not that we are rebellious and a priori do not want to believe in a god, it's just that the whole concept of divine reality as humans have constructed it in the biblical sense is so absurd and so obviously a projection of sincerely deluded humans who thought the cosmos worked the way an ancient human society does, that we couldn't really believe it even if we tried!
That is why theology and philosophy of religion and arguments for God have become necessary—to hide the absurdity and make it all seem convincing. But since when did reality need to convince anybody? If the world was really like that, it would be just as unnecessary to argue for it being the case as needing to argue for the existence of the biological world. The appeal to epistemological malfunctioning in unbelievers is as unconvincing as saying that the reason why we find it difficult to believe in Zeus is because we lack spiritual insight.
After two thousand years the Christian system has almost everything covered, and apologetics might seem to some believers to have an answer to every-thing. To realize how the trick was done—to see the tain in the mirror and the strings of the puppets—just allow Christian philosophy of religion to be judged by the history of Israelite religion. The best argument against any modern Christian dogma is its own history back to and from within the Bible itself. Christians’ own reinterpretations show us that even the most fundamentalist “believer” is really an atheist when it comes to Yahweh, and the most “biblical” of believers are not as biblical as they think. In the end Christian theology was brought down by Christian ethics; belief was destroyed by its own morality, which demanded we follow the truth.
Woe is the believer when in the end (s)he will come to realize that one has to choose between God and truth. It's the kind of experience of “reality shock” one associates with movies like
The Matrix
or
The Truman Show.
But you have to see it for yourself to realize it was the perfect catch-22, the ultimate double-bind for any person growing up in a religious culture today. Unfortunately, like the famous biblical characters themselves, believers today do not spend their time in serious Bible study. Most popular books on the Old Testament are spiritual junk food, brain candy, if you will. And when confronted with the question of why atheists bother with the Bible if they do not believe it, well, maybe it is for the same reason Christians worry about pagans: because one cares about what one believes to be the truth and about the fact that there are so many well-meaning people unwittingly bent on deluding both themselves and the rest of humanity.
CONCLUSION
In a sense, the entity called “God” is like an Internet troll created in a public forum—once you become aware of the agent behind the character, such knowledge changes everything about whether or not we can bring ourselves to believe “he” exists. There is nothing really to disprove, and we need not show that some god, of whatever description possible, does not exist. All we need do is to show that descriptions of Yahweh do not have any counterpart outside the biblical stories. For if Yahweh as depicted is not real, how can “Yahweh” as such still exist? If the god of the Old Testament—who is the God of Jesus—does not exist, how can the God of the New Testament still exist? And if the God of the New Testament is not real, is this not the end of Christianity as a claimant about reality?
So we need not be intimidated by Christian philosophers of religion who need to repress the fact that their sophisticated arguments about a supposedly respectable God ignore the history of Israelite religion. Their god's own biography is an embarrassment to them. They themselves no longer believe in Yahweh, and today “God” is nothing more than an ideal idol, created in the image of the latest technological metaphors projected onto the cosmos. Since Yahweh was never the living god, “God” is dead indeed.
In the end, then, it seems that the history of Israelite religion has a sense of irony. The same ancient and modern people who so mercilessly ridiculed pagans for their myths and superstitions failed to recognize the same superstitious tendencies in themselves. The same believers who deplore products of the human imagination cannot see that a god created as a character in a story on paper is no less of an idol than silent gods of wood or stone.