I don't necessarily have a problem with that. That is how many of the Platonists would use the gods. Although, they would have to be very specific. Otherwise they are equivocating on the term supreme. There are certain aspects to the judeo-christian conception of God over the greco-roman ones that lend themselves to classical theism. The god of classical theism is not supreme merely in the sense that he is politically in charge of others or highest leader or most powerful in a merely relative sense.

However, this won't work as a refutation in the way they mean for the one God furthee objection to work as a refutation. You would end up objecting to any specific religious tradition having exclusive right to access over the true rational God. This would of course be upsetting for Christians, but it is not an argument for atheism.

Last edited by iwpoe (3/04/2016 12:12 am)

AKG wrote:

I'm ashamed to ask this, but this has been on my mind for a while. I know that God is nothing like Zeus, Horus or other ''gods'' but some atheist claim that how can we know God from the other supreme deities of other religions such as Chukwu from the Igbo religion or Chaos from greek mythology who due to being supreme could be identified with the God of classical theism. They also claim that the stories of these supreme beings could simply be analogies to understand them, and we don't have any warrant to choose one of them over the other as any of them could be the correct way to understand the God of classical theism. Any way to respond to this?

Well, the obvious response is that the gods of other religions, typically, are unlike the God of classical theism. They are purported to have come into being, to change, the be physically located, etc.

Of course, sometimes what is attributed to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob seems to be in tension with the God of classical theism. Classical theists say that those statements in the Bible (i.e. God having hands or eyes, God changing) should not be understood literally. There are other passages that support a more classical theistic rendering, and there are plausible reasons to read passages attributing, say, a body to God poetically.

Your interlocutors seem to be suggesting that the same may be true of the gods of other religions; the stories associated with them should be understood non-literally. As far as that goes, I don't really see a problem with it. The Christian classical theist will allow that, for instance, a Muslim classical theist could make the same move with regard to poetic statements in the Koran, so why not other religions. The classical theist isn't arguing that Christian particularism follows from classical theism.

The question is whether the move is a plausible one. New atheists, ever eager to pretend that all religions are basically the same, want to abscond from the need to examine particular religions. But that's obviously what's needed here. Could one try to explain all of Zeus's mythology as either non-religious (or hardly religious) or poetic/analogical/metaphorical? Sure. We still lack positive reasons for thinking that Zeus might be the God of classical theism, and we strain to see how much of the mythology surrounding Zeus helps to illuminate qualities of the God of classical theism.

But maybe the task can be carried out. Who knows? In the end, one will have argued that Zeus is the God of classical theism, simple, eternal, all powerful, all knowing, all good, etc. The final account of what Zeus is like won't resemble what anyone ever thought Zeus was like, and the ridiculousness which the One God Further objection is supposed to expose, is gone.