My question is not about one’s faith about God today. My question is more about factual proofs that Gods, Yahweh or other “false gods” mentioned in the Bible even existed as they are portrayed? Were the people of antiquity attributed to “God” all the things that they didn’t understand to make them feel better? Did the Roman God of War REALLY helped them win battles, or was it more a belief they had that made their gods real to them?
I ask questions about this because if gods in antiquity were factually and actively intervening in people’s lives in antiquity, it doesn’t seem that these gods are there anymore.. What made them stop acting in our lives, if they were real?
More importantly, if the God that Jesus was worshipping (YHWH) was in fact real, what PROOFS do we have of Him blessing his people, or not? Was it just the view or beliefs of the jews that made Him real? for example: They might think that God has bless them on an occasion, …, but was it REALLY the act of God?
If you can help me figure out if Gods REALLY existed, then why don’t we ALL feel his power and support today?
Thanks for your help on this
Hi Scratsi. Yes, I think you have got it. Although there are some instances in which we know a person consciously made up a god (eg, the Egyptian pharoh Akhenaten) most often cultures did not consciously choose to make up new gods. Their gods and their understandings of them in different circumstances evolved over time.
The first “gods” likely began as a belief in beings more powerful than humans that controlled natural processes like the sun, moon, lightning, thunder, earthquakes, floods etc ie, scary things we didn’t understand at the time. The earliest gods often were a community’s primary food source like buffalo in America and bear in ancient Japan. Another source of “gods” is the moral conundrum that we must kill to survive be it animals or even just plants. Gods evolved to “answer” these questions and make us feel better.
It is difficult for us humans to feel a connection with beings we can’t picture in our minds. So we begin to picture them in human form with human personalitues and characteristucs. And over thousands of years, our image of them evolves naturally as we encounter new challenges.
A great example of this is the Hindu system of “gods”. Many people believe that Hinduism is polytheistic when, in fact, it isn’t really. Hinduism believes in one ultimate “Reality” named Brahman, but they also believe that Brahman is far beyond human comprehension. [They might say for example “to think you know Brahman is to not know Brahman”. And there are early Christian writers who thought similarly about the Christian god.]
So Hinduism over time evolved a very complex hierarchy of many many “gods” each of which represent various qualities like love, wisdom, destruction, compassion, etc. (In fact there are so many that these qualities overlap a lot.)
There really is no equivalent word or concept in the West to these beings. The Greek gods, Catholic saints and Catholic angels are similar, but only in the sense that they are beings “of things”… like lightning, peace and charity, etc.
But all of this is not to say that these ” gods” and the rituals we perform are not “real”. They are simply the only way in which humans can conceive of and nurture a connection with the divine. As the Native American spiritual elder Longealker says, these rituals are a vehicle, a way for humans to feel like they are doing something to connect when in reality “Grandfather is all around us” and we dont necessarily need to do anything to connect with him.
I hope this helps 🙂
From a historical perspective we really have no way of proving whether a god intervened or not. This is a matter of belief and direct personal experience. And perhaps belief inspired by someone in our lives or in history whom we trust. In the end, it’s a matter of our own interpretation of our own experiences.
For example, we now know that all of the plagues in Egypt at the time of Moses were all natural events that occurred regularly although not usually so close together. So some people believe that the timing was divine.
We now know that there were great marshlands where the red sea narrows to where the Suez canal now sits. Bc of the many water plants this marshland was called the “reed” sea. And we know that at times the wind is strong enough there to blow enough of the water away for people to cross on foot. Again, some people see divine intervention that it happened at the time Moses needed it to.
The “manna” in the desert we now know most likely refers to a protein rich secretion of an insect that burrows in the sand at night. Their secretion pools at the top of the sand and if you gather it before the sun gets too hot, it can be used as food. Again, divine intervention? Some believe so, others don’t.
In my opinion, again, we each must decide for ourselves what to believe and place faith in – based on our own experiences or the experiences of those we trust & from the past or from today. Other people’s stories and accounts are not useless. They can inspire us. But we must decide if they are true to our own experience.
🙂
Not to be overly pedantic but Akhenaten didn’t really create his deity. The Aten, the solar disk, existed previously as a manifestation of the sun god Re. There’s even a reference in the Book of the Dead. What Akhenaten did create was a state cult devoted to exclusive worship. And most interesting, at least to me, was the development of a unique artistic style associated with this worship. It’s hard to find a poetic religious expression humbler and more pious than the so-called Hymn to the Aten which many scholars believe goes back to Akhenaten himself. It’s very moving. One decided advantage the Aten has over say, Yahweh, is that it is demonstrably present. Just look up! (There’s a funny passage in one of the Amarna letters where a foreign ambassador to Akhenaton’s court complains at his insistence on conducting court outside for hours under the blazing Egyptian sun!)
I suspect the most primitive conceptions of the divine were impersonal. The gods came later. Even Homer’s frisky gods were subject to moira – fate.
It’s probably a mistake to look for historical analogues behind the stories in the Hebrew Bible. Nobody does that for Hindu or Greek epic or Norse sagas which these stories most clearly resemble. The accounts of early Israel are just really good stories.
“I suspect the most primitive conceptions of the divine were impersonal. The gods came later.”
That’s a fascinating proposal. On the one hand, it makes a certain sense that one would start with some vague concept of divine forces or presence, and only later flesh that out with names, personalities, attributes, and myths, but on the other hand it seems to run counter the most obvious trend in the most obvious historical evidence we have: you start with random fanciful stories about anthropomorphic gods and faeries that each explains some mysterious aspect of the world, and in time, with some rationalist reflection, you end up with a single, universal, transcendent, and ineffable god. Random local deities of all sorts->monolatry/henotheism->primitive monotheism->philosophically sophisticated monotheism. The historical trend-line seems to run from the concrete, particular, and very human to the universal and transcendent.
Could you elaborate on your suspicion?
As far back as we can go most religious systems had both personal and impersonal aspects of divinity. Porphyry your schema is true as far as it goes. I’m assuming here that there is some kind of relationship between a culture’s view of “divinity” and its conception of personhood. Personhood is a historical invention. We had to work our way up to that. I think the original sense of divinity sprang from the existential experience of being alive in a world in which almost everything was beyond your control and understanding. Awe and wonder and terror came easily. What images do we see from pre-history? Stunningly realistic depictions of animals. Altars with bear skulls. Phallic symbols. Figurines with exaggerated womanly type sexual organs. Burial apparatus that appears to have been ritualized. I think the first sense of divinity must have come from the experience of birth and life and death itself.
One thing to remember as well is that most of the pantheons and myths we have from ancient cultures were the late sophisticated literary result of looong traditions.
Ideas of impersonal divinity still interest me. (I find the idea of Yahweh or Zeus being responsible for the universe revealed to us by the Hubble or the Webb telescopes to be hilarious.) Something like a Spinozan/Einsteinian sense of god as the sum of all the laws of the universe, known and yet to be known. But it cares nothing for individuals. In an age of science many people have an experience of the reality of that god. The most precious “revelations” that come from science are the ideas of Deep Space and Deep Time. What Ancient Near Eastern stickman can compete with that?
it cares nothing for individuals.
Why not?
I can’t answer for Stephen, but I share, what I think is his conviction, and my reason is simply that I have access to no credible evidence suggesting a personal being who cares about individual men.
I think the problem of the deus absconditus is very acute. If god is as powerful and intelligent as classical theists hold, if he yearns for me to be saved, and if there are things I need to do or believe in order to be saved, why doesn’t that omnipotent God just tell me plainly and unmistakably what to do and believe? After all, he is omnipotent, and he does love me and yearn for my salvation, right? If he is a father to me, who loves me more than my natural father, then when I beg him, sincerely, for guidance because I want to do what is right and to please him, why doesn’t he just answer me, speak to me like he spoke to Adam or Abraham? The more I think about this issue, the more difficult it is to accept. He looks an awful lot like the paradigmatic absentee father, who is uninvolved because he died long ago.
One could go the apophatic route, and say his manner of caring is inscrutable and unrecognizable (as such) to us. It looks to us like absenteeism and utter indifference, but really he cares profoundly. Perhaps, but I still haven’t been given *reason* to swallow that pill, and affirm a personal God who cares about individual men–even though by all clear indications he seems not to care. It *could be* but there are a lot of things that could–hypothetically– be though I’d be an idiot to assert as true.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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Robert