God or gods?

If you are an unbeliever and even passingly familiar with the likes of Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennett, known in the right circles as the Four Horsemen, you will be familiar with the idea that we are all atheists about 999 gods and that some of us just take it one god further.

At first glance this appears to be little more than a clever, somewhat witty remark. But it hides a deeper truth.

The current estimation is that there have been around a thousand religions throughout what we know of man’s history. The vast majority of these religions have faded into oblivion, known only as history and no longer having adherents. We cannot count a handful of people in the modern world who may have adopted an otherwise defunct religion for their own reasons, which usually have little to do with genuine belief in the gods as real beings active in the universe.

As example, neither the Norse panoply of gods, nor the Greek and Roman pantheons are seen as contenders for the celestial throne, in opposition to the Judaeo-Christian God or the Islamic Allah. Nor do they compete with Prajapati or the various aspects of Brahma in the Hindu faith or indeed the veneration of the Buddha. But they were once worshipped with all the certainty that believers of these more modern faiths display.

With an arrogance typical of monotheists, the followers of God and Allah claim that belief in these older gods faded in the face of their ‘true’ faith and that the dominance of their god proves that he exists whilst all the others were merely inventions. This is an overly simplistic account and has been discredited in many ways but the purpose of this blog is not to delve into that particular controversy. Rather, it is a brief synopsis of how belief in these gods may have evolved and how it then changed into a conviction that, in the words of Connor MacLeod, “there can be only one”.

There is a bewildering variety of myths regarding the creation of the world and of man and they cannot all be correct. Unfortunately, despite much sincere belief in Adam & Eve and all things biblical, there is no evidence to demonstrate that any one of them is more likely than any other. So, we may leave myth aside for the moment and focus on what we may reliably imagine was in the minds of our earliest human ancestors.

Surrounded by so much they could not understand and yet possessed of that insatiable curiosity which so distinguishes us from the rest of animal kingdom, it is highly probable that they attributed spirits to everything around them in order to explain the mysterious. Indeed, even today there are animist religions which do just that. Did the mountain explode into fire? Then the fiery mountain god must be angry. Did the river flood and wash away the wild rice? Then the river was displeased.

The next obvious step, in a hostile and unforgiving world, is to seek to establish some measure of control. The river is clearly angry with us and that’s why it washed away our food source. We must give a gift to the river to placate it and that gift should logically be something valuable, such as some of our precious food. But that didn’t work, so we have not done enough. Perhaps a human sacrifice? The terrible thing about such thinking is that a failure need not be attributed to the spirit of the river but to insufficient propitiation. In that way, what began as a simple offering eventually becomes the sacrifice of children and cutting the hearts from living enemies.

Once such a belief structure is in place, it is easy to see how the various animistic spirits might be resolved into something more distant from the world itself. Perhaps the spirit of our river and the river spirit of the tribe in the next valley are not separate. Perhaps there is an overall spirit/god of all rivers. And so, as mankind became more numerous and more settled into societies with a shared culture, the gods evolve into things at once more sophisticated and more familiar. Clearly the gods are not all good, nor all bad. Sometimes they help, sometimes they hinder. Sometimes they can be placated, other times they bring destruction or disease. So how to understand the nature of the gods? Well what examples do we have? We can see that men are also sometimes bad and sometimes good. It seems clear then that the gods must be like us. Men writ large.

It is easy to see how the idea of multiple deities would arise and how belief in them would not falter, despite the fact that they are often malicious, or at the very least, capricious. But it is still worthwhile worshipping and making offerings to them, because if things aren’t always great now, how much worse could the gods make it?

From that point, the further evolution, from a pantheon to a single God, was probably inevitable. Why must there be lots of gods? Gods are very obviously far above men and not governed by the rules and customs of our societies. The world must have had a cause and that cause is unlikely to have been the over complicated explanation of our ancestors, replete with the actions of primeval animals or one god cutting bits off another or giving birth. More likely is the notion that it was a single incredible act by a single prime mover. Maybe, the gods are not individuals, competing against one another. Maybe, they are simply different aspects of a single creator. Hinduism, despite its bewildering variety, retains this belief and we can see that it is a logical progression which explains monotheism.

Many gods

Many aspects of a one supreme god

A single creator, amused by the stumbling and mistaken ideas of previous generations and now revealed in glory.

So, we understand how belief in a single God may have arisen. But such belief is problematic from the point of view of a non-believer. Simply put, there is absolutely no empirical evidence for any religious belief and all of them, regardless of the details, may be considered to have the same potential of being true, or false. Where they differ is in how we may logically explain their attraction.

Take the Greek pantheon as an example. It is easy to see how belief in the gods may have evolved. It is also easy to see how the relationship men had with their gods could be sustained. If you expect only that your gods will behave in the same way as men, but with far greater power and consequence, you are free to worship as it suits and to argue with the gods or even deny them as circumstances dictate. Such freedom is more difficult in monotheism. It is interesting that the first widespread monotheistic faith, Judaism, is far more comfortable with arguing with their God than is the later Christianity and Islam, both of whom have developed the concept of blasphemy to such a degree as to punish any questioning of their tenets or any straying from orthodoxy.

We must keep in mind that belief in any deity requires faith. That is, belief without evidence. Because of this, all are equally likely to be true or false. We are then left with a situation where such belief in gods that are men writ large is perfectly understandable but that belief in a single God, by its very nature perfect; omniscient, omnipresent and all-powerful, requires a far greater depth of belief. When something bad happens to a follower of Apollo, it requires no alteration in the follower’s beliefs because he already knows Apollo can be difficult. But if a follower of a single, loving God loses a child to illness or sees his city destroyed by the followers of a different god, how is this to be explained?

The answer, of course, is that it cannot. Believers resort to trite responses to explain the unexplainable. ‘God works in mysterious ways’. ‘It is not given to us to understand God’s plan’. ‘It is the will of Allah’. All of these reveal a serious problem that must be solved if belief is to continue but for which there is no real answer. If God/Allah loves us, why does bad stuff keep happening? Equally, references to free will and God’s promise not to interfere in the affairs of men again, are fraught with difficulties that non-believers are delighted to point out but which believers can only answer with a declaration of faith.

Ultimately, it is easy to explain the hows and whys of belief in the old multiple gods. Far harder though to explain why people in the modern world still cling to their belief in a bronze-age single God. Part of the answer lies in the comfort such belief offers. Part in the strength of childhood conditioning and confirmation bias. But a significant part also lies in the fact that most people of faith have a poor grasp of the finer detail and history of their religion. For example, numerous studies have shown how few Christians regularly read their bible or attend church. Christians and even Muslims, who either read parts of their holy book daily, or are read to, have an incomplete knowledge of their religion and cherry pick the parts which they choose to follow. In this way, they are not challenged. They are not called upon to think deeply about what they believe and are never called upon to justify it.

Is it more logical to believe in multiple gods? Not really. We may better understand such belief but that understanding itself precludes the ability to believe.

So, is monotheism a superior alternative? Hardly. The truth is that belief in such an invisible and difficult to understand deity is inconceivable without blind faith. Without a willingness to accept the teaching of your religion without question. Indeed, without the view that faith itself is a virtue that supersedes the accumulation of knowledge.

And if you do accept these things, then critical thinking, rationalism and logic have no place in your world view.