Do gods still exist today?

The Origin Story of Polytheism and Genesis

Hello, hello. Hi, everybody. My name is Cassian Bellino, and welcome to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host today. And the big question that I have as a curious and confused question is, is it gods, with a plural, or is it God, the singular?

I've always wondered that question when it comes to polytheistic religions and their origin, and then the origin story of our creator that came out of love and Genesis. So I'm here today with Dr. Joseph Miller.

I'm so excited to have a new guest on. Welcome to the show. How are you feeling today?

I am actually surviving pretty well today. It was kind of a crazy morning. I ride my bike to work, and it's about a 10-mile ride, and I decide, you know, I got this thing today, and I don't feel like, and I got to take stuff home later, and I want to take it on my bike.

So I took the one car we have, and my wife's like, I need the car today, and I didn't know. So I had to like between classes, drive home, get her to the car, ride my bike back right before another class, and then do this.

Oh my gosh. It was just sort of a crazy day, and I did it to myself. I was the bonehead that decided to change the plan without consulting my wife, and I did it to myself. But I survived. And you got a great morning bike in.

And I got my regular bike in, yeah. That's nice. And it was a little bit warmer when I rode it too, so it was a little 65 instead of 45, so that was a little bit better.

That's freezing. Oh my gosh. Where are you based out of again?

I'm out of Phoenix, Arizona, but it's the winter, and so in the mornings, it's a little.

Chilly. Oh, yeah. I've lived in Tucson. It's the strangest place. It's freezing in the morning, and then burning by noon, and then it rains, and then it's mosquitoes. It's insane. Yeah. But I enjoy it.

We lived in San Diego.

For 12 years, and Seattle for 12 years, and Oklahoma for four years, and I'm from Pennsylvania, born and raised, so I lived all over the place. And as long as you're at the place God wants you to be, you can find joy and happiness anywhere, so I'm enjoying it.

Yes. Yes, and amen. Well, I'm really excited to jump into this. I was kind of telling you before we hit live is that this is what got me into podcasting is I heard a podcast, and I've never been able to find it, so I feel like it was God reaching out to me of the crazy stories of polytheistic gods and kind of their creational myths, and it's a story of violence, and then we've got this God of love with intent that loves his people, that sends a suffering savior, and I'm like, whoa, I've never heard anybody talk about this, and so when we got connected and you said that you could speak on this, I mean, my eyes like lit up in my head, so I'm so glad that we're here today.

What do you know about this topic?

Genesis as a Theological Origin Story

Yeah, so this is a super important topic about where we came from, our origin story, right? Think about superheroes, right? They all got the origin story. The origin story, it's built into us. We care about the origin of where we started, but I can tell you for me, the interest in Genesis was much more recent.

I started writing and blogging and internetting, doing all that kind of stuff back in the mid-'90s when the internet was just brand new, baby new, and I've just been fascinated, but one of the things, I picked a name for my site, More Than Cake, because I was really disturbed by a lot of what happened I saw in the church where I felt just like the queen was said to say the people in France were starving, and she's like, well, instead of the substantial bread of life, the stuff that gave them nutrition, she said, let them eat cake.

Probably never said it, but it's like I felt like we got that a lot in churches where we get these sermons and messages that are like good confections. They're sugary, and they're sweet, and they're wonderful, but they don't give us nutrition, right?

I felt like, man, we've got to do better with this. Then as years went by, and I studied, and I spent 20-some years in pastoral ministry, and I started to pursue more the academic side of things, I started to see like, okay, people don't care about what the Bible says.

People, they just want to know how can I do this? What's the right choice to make in this life? Is it abortion, good or bad? Is it wrong to do things this to that person? We care about ethics because we care about our life, but we don't care about the Bible necessarily, but we hadn't built a culture where our pastors could point us to the truth of scripture to tell us why the Bible mattered.

When I started doing my writing for my first month, I did a Master of Arts in Science and Religion, and it was sort of like I got pulled to Adam and Eve. Then I started my PhD, and I wanted to do an ethics, but all the questions that kept driving me is like, how do I point people?

How do I pick an issue that people care about, and then use that issue that they care about and point it back to the Bible, that this is why the Bible matters? I actually started with the issue of racism.

That's actually what got me started in Genesis.

Wow.

I said, yeah. I said, how can we know that racism is wrong? Is it always wrong for all people, all times, all places? That led us back to the story of Genesis, Adam and Eve. That's why I think the story matters because we care about issues like race, racial discrimination, or other life issues, euthanasia, abortion, that kind of stuff.

Almost every big issue goes back to our.

Origin story. Yes. Wow. I completely agree with you. I feel like that is why I, myself, jumped on this because I got a flavor of what you were feeling back in the 90s of like, my personal account is being a Christian, and I still feel like I don't know what's going on.

I know what I'm supposed to do. I know that to fit into the picture of worshiping God, I should be going to church, but is my heart in church? We're logical beings. We want to do survival that makes sense.

To me, it didn't make sense because I wasn't learning the word of God. I wasn't actually learning why their hearts were so on fire for him. It led me to the same place of asking questions. It sounds like you did a lot more education than I did, and here I am deleting that, cutting it off, and getting some for myself.

I did it so you don't have to, right? Exactly. I got the dumb questions. You've got the smart answers.

I hope so. We'll see. You'd be the judge later on that.

No, you definitely know more than me, but when it comes to polytheistic origins, basically what I know is there was a lot of paganistic. I'm reading Exodus. I'm reading Leviticus, and a lot of people are kind of dipping their toe in, I want to say, multi-gods.

Then I know that we get to Baal, and I know there's Gilgamesh. I know whispers of these things, but I don't know how those things came to be. Then you've got the Genesis account, which seems like it was very disruptive to the people that heard it.

Could you kind of break down the history of how we got there and what happened?

Babel, the Nations, and Competing Origin Stories

Yeah. I think what's most interesting is if I were to trail how this story goes, and I'm using the Bible as my guide for this, right? I would say that there's God who creates us, and then we see the fall of humanity.

We start to see over time where people desired to become their own God. This is the story of the Tower of Babel, right? Tower of Babel, if you will, where the people said, let's build this tower and make our name great.

That name literally comes from ancient stories where it meant the gate of God. What they were trying to do is saying, we are going to be the dwelling place of where the gods are. Our town will be the place of, we're going to be our own gods, right?

We're building the gateway to heaven that we are our gods. This is what God had to disrupt. As the people get dispersed with different languages, they come up with different origin stories. They come up with different God stories based on their experience with the realities of what we as Christians would say would be the demonic or the spiritual world.

We'd say fallen angels have an impact on the world. As they started to encounter the world as it was, but had rejected the God who is, the God who created. I think that's where all these other stories end up coming from is encounters with the real world and the supernatural and the demonic and all that.

The stories come in, but they begin with this sort of mythology. This is why Genesis is different too. They begin with the human experience and then they reverse engineer it. We go from our experience as an analog to who the gods are.

Then they write the stories of the gods based on humanity is the center of those stories. Genesis claims to be something different. It's not a mythology of origins. It's a theological sort of a theo-history instead of a mytho-history, if you will.

It's a theological telling that begins with God and then ends with humanity and how we became and how we are and therefore how we should act. What's the right moral thing to do in any given circumstance?

Why does it even matter what choices we make when it comes to our daily life, the way we would honor God or dishonor God or honor our neighbor or dishonor our neighbor? Genesis then, because the idea is that it begins with God, it's claiming to tell us a true history of our origins, but it's theological in the sense of it's centered on the person of God and then that shapes the rest of it.

I think that's where we get these different stories at is the nature of the people who created and crafted them.

Yeah, absolutely. What you were saying at the beginning of the Tower of Babel and people breaking off, I'm walking through the history. If it was on a timeline, Babel happens, you get dispersed, your language changes, and then you start a generation of people while interacting with these demonic beings that are responsive and alive, but they're not your heavenly father.

They're not just made-up stories or a voodoo guy that's just spreading lies that enough people start believing and then that's your religion. It's a very real interaction. What I'm hearing from you is that people lived in a different land and there were demonic entities that were just not God.

I'm not saying demonic as like ghosts and ghouls, it's just it wasn't God. So we can therefore put it in the bucket of demonic that we're interacting with humans, that humans were like, oh, it looks like this is a supernatural being that's answering my prayers and sacrifices.

That must have been where we came from. Then from there, you get the stories of Baal. Then from there, that story of Baal isn't focused on the human creator and then kind of what you just said about Genesis.

What would be the story of somebody like Baal? That's the only example I have. If you have other examples, I'd like to see.

We'll come up with some other ones. We'll dive into a couple of stories. I know. It's what's in the Bible. It's mentioned Asherah pulls for the worship, Baal and the different gods. We're littered with them.

We can definitely get to those, but I do think that starting place where we recognize there's a spiritual reality out there that shaped that. Also, there's just human sin that shaped it. Some of those stories are really created by somebody's cult, their worship practices.

They need to justify, why is it we are sacrificing these children? Why is it that we require you to pay us money so we can say a prayer for you? A lot of these stories are used to just simply foster human greed, desire.

Some are to justify power. If I'm a human and I conquer your people, well, then I need to have a story where my God conquers your God. Otherwise, I can't persuade your people to follow my king. A lot of these stories get shaped to justify, again, the human experience.

Some of it's demonic. Some of it's just human sin and the desire to justify, but they begin with the cultic theology. Again, Genesis being different, it's the claim that it's a revelation of God. Out of that revelation flows the cultic practices, the worship practices of Israel.

Build a temple, but it's not like they built a temple and said, hey, we need to have a reason to justify why we have a temple. Let's write a story about God. There are Christian authors today who write and believe that that was reverse-engineered by Israel.

They had worship practices, and then they created and crafted these histories to justify the worship methods, like the temple practices. I just think that the Bible tells us something different. It began with that God who gave us a story of his creation, and that became a model, the seven-day creation week, the garden temple as a place of worship.

There's a mirror of the language of Genesis in the garden for how we see the language used in the temple. It was a place of worship. That was giving this picture. We go from a garden temple ultimately to God's vision of a global temple where we're fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and worship God across the earth.

That story is what produced the worship, not the other way around. That's a huge difference in how we see the Genesis story compared to the other ancient Near East civilizations.

Wow. I never even considered that it could be reverse. All I know is the Genesis. It's like, oh, so everybody had a godly experience that told them to build the temple, told them to build the tabernacle, laid out the Ark of the Covenant, or just the ground rules.

Then from there, they just got it wrong from the get-go, but that was... I didn't even think. I didn't even think that... Again, I would not say that these people were possessed by demons or demonized, but you're right.

Human sin comes into play of coveting and jealousy and greed of like, we do need to justify a temple. We weren't there. We don't know what the timeline is, but that makes sense. I think it would be a bit helpful if you gave me an example of one of these religions and what the story would be if you could just, I don't know,.

Five minutes on it. Yeah, yeah. Sure. Let's pick one that'll be helpful. One of the most popular ones that's known everywhere, and it's popular because there aren't a lot of records for a lot of other religions.

They're fragmented. Even the ones we have are usually fragmented, but there's a Babylonian creation epic, the Akkadian version. There's two different languages. There's an Assyrian version and there's an Akkadian version.

The Akkadian one is the one we're more familiar with. It's called Enuma Illish. Enuma Illish, it's interesting where you get this story of... This is actually the origins of humanity. There's different stories that we deal with the origins of the cosmos, the physical world itself, and then there's some that deal with the story of humanity.

This part of the story is really interesting though. Essentially, there's two classes of gods. There's the greater gods and the lesser gods. We won't worry about the names. They had their names and all that kind of stuff.

No one will remember it, so I won't bother with it. You can find it. It's on the internet or in my book, whatever. But you have the lesser gods. Shameless plug. You have the lesser gods, and because they are lesser, they're servants to greater gods, but they rebel.

They don't want to do the work anymore. From the jump, we have this idea that work is the job of the lesser. Work is the job of the slave. That's the way they see the ethic of work. That will be significant later when you think of the Genesis origin story and the nature of work.

They rebel against the greater gods. Well, the greater gods have to put down the rebellion. What they do is they come in and they defeat all these lesser gods because they're greater gods. It's right into the story, so that makes sense.

Then they kill one of them. They kill one of these lesser gods, and his blood flows out into the earth, the surface of the earth. Then the greater gods take that blood mixed with clay, and they shape humans.

Humanities are shaped from blood and earth. These humans then become the slave race. They become the race who will do the work that the lesser gods didn't want to do. Humanity now exists as the people who will serve the gods and do the work that's beneath the gods.

You see how that takes place in all kinds of civilizations. The king does no hard labor. Even in our culture, how we look at people who work with their hands, we think of them as unintelligent or less than or, oh, you couldn't go to college and use your head and get a real job.

We demean that kind of physical labor, but that's thousands of years old where we have these stories that tell us that physical work is somehow for the lesser, for those who are not created greater. That story of creation justifies why the pharaoh has slaves, and it justifies human choice to embrace in slavery.

If gods can have slaves, then humans can have slaves. That flows into the ethic. That's how.

That story then shapes civilization. Yeah. You've already touched on work, but even just the value of the human life is just an outcome rather than a purposeful, intentional design. Then what? You look at the heavens and the earth, you think of all the cycles on earth, you think of all the intricate and complex organisms on earth, and that just falls again within blood and clay?

Or is that just like even more subclass? Well, yeah. When you look at.

The rest of nature, you can look again. There's another part of Anumalish, again, that talks about the origins of the physical world. This is how we're explaining not just the physical world, but the seasons, like the spring and fall and summer, all this sort of stuff.

What's the explanation? How do we have this? Well, there's this story of two gods. One god is Marduk, and the other is Tiamat. Marduk and Tiamat are in battle. The god Marduk defeats the goddess Tiamat, he kills her in battle.

Then she's lying there dead, and it says that he comes over, stands over her lifeless lump, like a fish drying after it's been caught. He takes her body, rips it in half, and he sets up half of her body becomes the skies, and the other half of her body becomes the earth or the land.

Then he sets up guardians over her body that's the sky, and when the rain will come, and when the rain will be let loose, and when it'll be held back. This is the idea of the stars and all the beings, I guess you could say, the spiritual beings that are going to control the seasons.

When you look at the physical reality, again, it's a reality produced in death and dying, the destruction of one god to shape the physical material world. That tells you the value of physical life, not just human life, but all life.

It's created in bloodshed. We create our life as humans through bloodshed. Why not? Our life mirrors the life of the gods. There isn't a value for work, for stuff, for animals, for anything, let alone people, because it's all that.

The bloodshed ones are only some of it. There's some other stories in the Egyptian mythologies where one god, he's describing his existence. He was sneezed out of the snot that came out of his dad's mouth, and his sister came from snot, and he came from the spit.

Are we PG here? Is this adults who are listening? Anyway, there's some that are other bodily fluids, let's say, that were the source of the existence of gods coming into.

Existence. We'll go with that, yeah. Even with those where it's not through bloodshed, it almost seems like an accident, like an accident through a sneeze or through any.

Other production. Is that the right vein there? It can be accident. I'll say the nice way of doing this, the big, fancy educational words. There's one story where the god basically comes created. It's just by pure the semen of his father god's ejaculation that came out.

There's no female god. It's just the ejaculate that came out. Boom, I came out of this. It's all this physical base. The human sexuality, the baser functions of body produce these things. In other words, even if it's not by accident, even if it's intentional, there's certainly no love in that process.

There's certainly no tenderness or compassion. You compare that to Genesis. You see God as a craftsman shaping. He takes humans. Even when it says God shaped him out of the dust of the ground and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, there's an intimacy there that you get that you don't get in any of these other stories.

That Yahweh is there like this craftsman shaping and molding. In fact, he's hands-on. He's there. He's present. He's making it happen. Then in this tenderness of breath of life comes in and he gives us, he animates us and we become alive.

There's a beauty there that you don't find in any other story that just stands apart from anything else you read in these other stories.

Israel’s Resistance to Yahweh and the Pull of Polytheism

Oh my gosh. You answered so many of my questions just now. That is such a different story. But so when, if I'm an Israelite and let's say, um, I believed in, you know, the one where, uh, the God, the lesser God died, his blood and the clay mix.

Like would I be an Israelite really receiving that story? Because I like lived in one of those like separate towns and, you know, I'm trying to like map that moment of receiving the Genesis story from Moses of like, what?

No, that's not possible. Gods aren't loving. I need to sacrifice in order to make sure my family eats, you know, like what is that headspace that that Israelite was in?

Well, this is, that's actually the, that's actually such the great question because when you understand how this happens, so much of the old Testament comes alive because you're going to understand exactly why Israel was so resistant to accepting God.

Think about when, uh, Moses comes in to save Israel from slave, 400 years of slavery, right? Yeah. So he comes in and they have all these 10 plagues. Why are they all there? Well, all of these are showing the Pharaoh himself was the incarnate God.

Pharaoh just means incarnation. He's the incarnation of Osiris. He's the incarnation of, of Ra, right? He's the God made flesh. And so he's worshiped as a God. He's a manifestation of this God. So when Moses is doing all these things with blood in the Nile and frogs and cattle, all of those are attacking gods.

I mean, just think of the popular images we have where you see a God who has the head of a cow and the body of a human, right? These were depictions of the gods, right? They were the gods over these things.

So as Yahweh is using these plagues, he's saying, I'm the one true God. These gods you worship can't do anything. They can't stop me. And so then we can come back to that, but think about then fast forward about a year and a half later, Israel's ready to go into the promised land.

Now for 400 years, they don't know, I mean, they know about Yahweh. They know about the story, the promise, right, of Abraham, but they have had their children educated in a worldview about these polytheistic, these many gods.

And now they have hardship. They thought, hey, we're out of slavery. Life should be easy, but it's been difficult. So it's taken about a year and a half to get this journey from Exodus to entrance into the Canaan.

And they see these giant people there. Oh my gosh, why would God bring us here to only die in this land and our children will be orphans? Crying, right? So there's this whole sob story. What do they say?

Let us go back to Egypt. It would be better to live as a slave in Egypt than enter this land flowing with milk and honey. Why? Because we're afraid that this one God, Yahweh, can't deliver. I find a lot more comfort in the other gods.

And they had seen him deliver them, but that's how ingrained that worldview was. So you see this battle between the polytheistic worldview that shaped their lives, and they keep going back to it. In the period of the judges, they go back to it.

You see the decline of the judges. At the end, by the end, you see people got, you know, it says, hey, I'll sacrifice the first person that comes in my house to Yahweh. They syncretize. They do something, a violation of Yahweh's command.

Why? Because of the other cultures, it's okay. Or they hire a priest of a Levite to be their God, but they also have the other gods lined up. It's just, I'm lining up all my gods together. Yahweh becomes one of many.

You see that throughout all the prophets, but they kept going back to these polytheistic worship practices because that was everybody else. And God's, the worldview out of Genesis was radically different from anything else and could not coexist with that.

Take a minute. You're so right though, because I think that we read Old Testament and we're like those idiots, you know, like, what were they thinking? And then like, he's up at Mount Sinai, they come down, they already have a golden calf and then they kill 3000.

And it shows the seriousness of God being like, no, seriously, it's just me. It's just me that you need. But we are creatures of comfort. We are creatures of familiarity. So it's like, well, my mom and her mom and every generation I've known has sacrificed to this God, Asher or whatever it is, and I just met you, this Hebrew God that I know that this God has worked for generations.

I'm going to, you know, create a sense of security and I'll give you a chance Hebrew God, but I'm going to hold close to the things that I know have also been secure. So like, it kind of helps you sympathize with those Israelites of like, gosh, they're such idiots.

They kept going back to their sin. It's like, don't we do that? Like, isn't it when God creates a promise where like, no, no, I'll give you a chance God, because you, you might be right. You're probably right.

But I know, I know. It's kind of like eating healthy. It's like, yeah, I'm sure that eating healthy, but like, I also know that I love this food. So I'm going to keep eating it. I mean, that's a horrible example, but you know.

No, it's for sure. We do things that are bad for us, even though we know they're bad for us, because they're just what we know. So no, that's exactly right. And that's what they did. And so when we look at them, like, what a bunch of idiots, we failed to see that we're the same idiots in the story, right?

We're the same people that go back to do what we do. You know, the Proverbs talks about as a dog returns to his vomit. So we're doing the same thing, right? We go back because it's what's comfortable.

It's what's familiar. And when we're scared, we like comfort. We like familiarity, but God, you know, the Christian faith, the, what God called Israel to was a faith of danger. It was a faith that was counter-cultural and they had to give up.

Abraham, leave your family, leave everything, you know, go to this other place. That was so wildly crazy to leave it in a culture based on relationship and family and generational wealth.

To leave it all. That's insane. That's insane. That's insane. Okay. I love the example that you've given the Old Testament. It makes me think of like the Sadducees and the Pharisees in the New Testament and how they held on.

And you think like, well, aren't they holding on to the Hebrew God? Aren't they holding on to technically what God was preaching down their throats in the Old Testament? And then Jesus comes along and he's like, I'm going to drop the mic.

Brand new idea. I'm God. And they're like, Whoa, no. Like that's blasphemous for you to even say that. Would you.

Say that's the same thing? Or is that a completely separate thing? There's some similarities. There's crossover. They had essentially allowed their religious structures to blind them to certain truths that God had already revealed to them in the Old Testament.

So you get to Isaiah, for example, where God's saying, what are your sacrifices to me? They're a stench in my nostrils. And what are your fatted calves? Because you're living these immoral lives. And I think there's an analog there more to the Pharisees and the Sadducees where they knew what God was.

They knew what worship was, but they gave over to their own desire for wealth or power or to control certain things. This would be a little bit of a rabbit trail. I'll just kind of throw it out. But the Old Testament, there was actually an understanding that when you have the appearances of Yahweh, say, for example, as the three men that come to Lot and Abraham, there's these, or it says the angel of Yahweh is really a theop, it's an appearance of God.

It's an appearance of Yahweh himself. And so there is a sense in the Old Testament where there's one God, you know, hero of Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord God is one. That was always monotheistic, but God would manifest in these different ways to them.

And so the idea that Jesus was God in flesh, God, the son actually wasn't so much that it didn't align. It's just that they didn't believe that this could be the promised Messiah who would be God to take on the throne because they saw it happening a different way.

So in some ways it was radical for them, depending on who they were. In other ways, there is fulfillment of certain things revealed about the nature of God, but that's like really a whole separate study.

I just don't want to go into that, but I don't want everything about the Pharisees. They didn't understand some stuff. I just think that sin got in the way of them, blinded them to their own, their traditions in some ways that they had invented got in the way of seeing God for who he had revealed himself to be.

Interesting. It's almost like they're reverting all the way back to almost like the level that people from the Tower of Babel were at of like led by their temptations versus kind of following the one true God.

One thing that you just said kind of blew my mind. It just, it's something that you said. So it's a thought that I have. I'm not, you know, whatever. We're ping ponging.

It's your show. You ping pong all you want. That's a great game, by the way.

If I'm leaving a polytheistic culture of many gods, and now I have a God coming to me saying, I'm the one true God, but I'm appearing to the people as the separation of waters in Moses and a pillar of fire, like in a cloud that's leading you.

And then like an angel, like you would think maybe that person would be like, I just saw like four different gods, not just one God. And so kind of what you said of like the angel, like God appearing in angel form, God appearing in a human form.

Like, wouldn't those people be like, these are, I just saw five gods. It's not just because.

They would be used to that. Yeah. That would be certainly the temptation. That would be the temptation to interpret. Because remember worldview is going to shape the way we interpret all of these things that are happening in our life.

And they were consumed in worldview outside of the revelation, truth of Genesis. That's why Genesis is truly set apart. It's something that's so unique. It's so counter-cultural because it goes against everything they would have known.

And so you see the battle of that taking place, the world I know versus the world that is revealed through the truth of God's message in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, you know, get all the prophets and all of those sorts of things.

It's always battling against that. Just like for us, our battle with the New Testament is always through what, well, but wait, the culture says this is okay. What about this? Well, can't we just update the Bible to fit my world the way I see my life?

So we're really doing the same thing as those people. We just have more enlightened in our view ways of doing it, right? Well, yeah, but we're not backwards rubes like those Old Testament people. We're so smart.

You know, we can certainly update it now that we're wise, but that's what they thought all along. So when you start to see it that way, I think it's so much easier to see ourselves in this story. And it's so much easier to see the importance of this origin story of Genesis and how it shapes our ethical decision-making, the priorities that we make in life, the value for other people and other humans.

It tells us why certain actions are good and bad. It tells us the beauty and glory of work, that it's not punishment. All of those things come from that and all of those are counter to every culture and every civilization, but they also have some beauty.

Every culture and civilization recognizes some truth in those, but the Bible gives us that framework to know what is beautiful and what is ugly in any different cultural context. It transcends our culture.