Do gods still exist today?

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 a 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.

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. And it was a little bit warmer when I rode 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 lit up in my head. So I'm so glad that we're here today. What do you know about this topic?

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 nineties, 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 the church where I felt like, just like the queen was said to say, like the people in France were starving.

And she's like, well, you know, instead of the substance of 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. And I felt like, man, we've got to do better with this.

And 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 my 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. And so when I started doing my writing for my first month, I did a master of arts and science and religion.

And it was sort of like, I got pulled to Adam and Eve. And then I started in 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, point it back to the Bible, that this is why the Bible matters.

And I actually started with the issue of racism. That's actually what got me started in Genesis.

And I said, yeah. So I said, how can we know that racism is wrong? Is it always wrong for all people, all times, all places?

And that led us back to the story of Genesis, Adam and Eve. And 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 kind of what you were feeling back in the 90s of I've, 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? And it can't be if we're logical beings, we want to do survival that makes sense.

And 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.

So it led me to the same place of like asking questions. And 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 of that.

Okay. No, you definitely know more than me, but when it comes to polytheistic origins, like 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 like multi gods. And then I know that we get to like Baal, and I know there's like Gilgamesh.

I know whispers of these things, but I don't know how those things came to be. And then you've got the

Genesis account, which seems like it was very disruptive to the people that heard it.

So could you kind of break down the history of how we got there and what happened? Yeah.

So 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? Yeah. I would say that there's God who creates us, and then we see the fall of humanity.

And 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.

And that name literally comes from ancient stories where it meant the gate of God.

And so 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. And this is what

God had to disrupt. And 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. And so 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.

And so 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 sort of reverse engineer it. If we go from our experience as an analog to who the gods are, and then they write the stories of the gods based on humanity as 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 theohistory instead of a mythohistory, 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? And so 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.

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

Yeah, absolutely. You know, what you were saying at the beginning of kind of the Tower of Babel and people breaking off, you know,

I'm like 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.

So they're not just made -up stories or like a voodoo guy that's just spreading lies that like enough people start believing and then that's your religion.

It's a very real interaction. It's 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 like 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, you know, a supernatural being that's answering my prayers and sacrifices.

So that's must have been where we came from and kind of is and then from there, like you get the stories of like Baal, like, and then from there, that story of Baal isn't focused on the human creator and then humankind, 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, we'll come up with some other ones.

We'll dive into a couple stories. I know it's what's in the Bible as much, you know, Asherah pulls for the worship, you know,

Baal and the different gods and we're littered with them and we can definitely get to those.

But I do think that starting place of where there's a, we recognize there's a spiritual reality out there that shaped that.

Also, there's just human sin that shaped it. So some of those stories are really created by somebody's cult, their worship practices, right?

They need to justify why is it we are sacrificing these children? Why is it that we require you to give, you know, pay us money so we can say a prayer for you?

And so a lot of these stories are used to just simply foster human greed, desire.

Some are to justify power. You know, 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.

So a lot of these stories get shaped to sort of justify, again, the human experience.

So 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 is that is a revelation of God.

And 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 didn't have a reason to justify why we have a temple.

Let's write a story about God. There are Christian authors, you know, today who kind of write and believe that that sort of was reverse engineered by Israel.

They had worship practices and then they sort of 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 is 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.

And so it was a place of worship. And that was sort of 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. And that story is what produced the worship, not the other way around.

And 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. You know, all I know is the Genesis. So 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.

And then from there, they just kind of got it wrong from the get go. But that was, I didn't even think.

I didn't even think that like, and again, I would not say that these people were possessed by demons or demonized, but you're right.

Like 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 kind of gave me an example of one of these religions and kind of like what the story would be if you could just like,

I don't know, five minutes on it. Yeah, yeah, sure. Let's pick one that it'll be helpful. So 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 different, 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, right? And 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 one's this part of the story is really interesting though. So 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. So, but you have the lesser gods.

Shameless plug. So you have the lesser gods and they are, because they are lesser, they're servants to the greater gods, but they rebel.

They don't want to do the work anymore. So 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.

Okay. That will be significant later when you think of the Genesis origin story and the nature of work. But so they rebel against the greater gods.

Well, the greater gods have to put down the rebellion. So 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. And so then they kill one of them and they kill one of these lesser gods and his blood kind of flows out into the earth, the surface of the earth.

And then the greater gods take that blood mixed with clay and they shape humans.

So humanities are shaped from blood and earth. And 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. And so humanity now exists as the people who will serve the gods and do the work that's beneath the gods.

And so you see how that takes place in all kinds of civilizations, right? The king does no hard labor, right? 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 get like a, you couldn't go to college and use your head and get a real job.

Like 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.

And so 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, right? So that flows into the ethic, right?

That's how that story then shapes civilization. Yeah. I mean, you've already touched on work, but even just like the value of the human life is just kind of an outcome rather than like a purposeful intentional design.

And then what, you mean 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. So when you look at the rest of nature, you can look again.

So there's another part of Anumalish, again, it talks about the origins of the physical world, right?

This is how we're explaining not just the physical world, but the seasons, like the, you know, spring and fall and summer, all this sort of stuff.

So 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. And so Marduk and Tiamat are in battle. The god Marduk defeats the goddess

Tiamat, he kills her in battle, and 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, right?

And 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 becomes the earth or the land.

And 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.

So 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.

So when you look at the physical reality, it's again, it's a reality produced in death and dying, the destruction of one god to shape the physical material world.

And so that tells you the value of physical life, not just human life, but all life.

It's created in bloodshed. So we create our life as humans through bloodshed.

Why not? Our life mirrors the life of the gods. So there isn't a value for work, for stuff, for animals, for anything, let alone people, because it's all that.

And that's just 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's like he was sneezed out of the snot that came out of his dad's mouth, and his sister came from snot, and he kind of came from the spit.

Are we PG here, or is this adults 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.

So we'll go with that. Yeah. But 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. It can be, you know, okay, so one of my,

I'll say the nice way of doing this, big fancy educational words. So 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.

And there's no female god, it's just sort of the ejaculate that came out, boom, I came out of this. So it's all this sort of physical base, the human sexuality, the human, the baser sort of functions of body produce these sort of things.

So in other words, even if it's not by accident, it is 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, and 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, this craftsman shaping and molding and fashion, his hands on, right?

He's there, he's present, he's making it happen. And then in this sort of 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.

Oh my gosh. You answered so many of my questions just now.

That is such a different story. So if I'm an

Israelite, and let's say I believed in the one where the lesser

God died, his blood at the climax, would I be an Israelite receiving that story?

Because I lived in one of those separate towns, and I'm trying to 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. What is that headspace that that Israelite was in?

Well, 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 Moses comes in to save Israel from slavery.

400 years of slavery, right? So he comes in, and they have all these 10 plagues. Why are they all there?

Well, all of these are showing that Pharaoh himself was the incarnate God. Pharaoh just means incarnation.

He's the incarnation of Osiris. He's the incarnation of Ra, right? He's the

God made flesh, and so he's worshipped 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 say, 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 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 3 ,000. 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, or Asher. 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 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? We're like, no, no, I'll give you a chance, God, because 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 fail 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.

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, 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 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. 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 sort of 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 understanding that when you have the appearances of Yahweh, say, for example, is the three men that come to Lot and Abraham, right?

Or it says the angel of Yahweh is really a theophany. It's an appearance of Yahweh himself.

And so there is a sense in the Old Testament where there's one God, the hero of Israel, the

Lord your God, the Lord God is one, right? 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 in 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 really a whole separate study.

I just don't want to go into that, but I don't want to poo -poo everything about the Pharisees. They did understand some stuff.

I just think that sin got in the way of them, blinded them to their own 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 the level that people from the

Tower of Babel were at of led by their temptations versus kind of following the one true

God. One thing that you just said kind of blew my mind. 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, 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 sort of things.

It's always battling against that. Just like for us, our battle with the

New Testament is always through, 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 a 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. Now, Genesis is a pretty big book. It's not just Genesis 1 and 2 of the creation story.

Like compared to other polytheistic regions, like it goes into Cain and Abel and Adam and Eve and, you know,

Noah's flood. Do those stories get seen, mirrored, counter -cultured in other polytheistic creation stories?

When you say like Genesis is like truly a phenomenal account, is it because it's a different depiction of something portrayed in another religion or is it something portrayed that's never been heard before in a different religion?

No, I mean, you see certainly some of the main themes repeated in other ancient

Near East cultures and civilizations. They had these other mythologies that had grown up about the first two humans.

What did they look like? Who were they? How were they created? Got it. What's the origin of the material world of reality?

Almost every civilization I think we've looked into that we have record of has some sort of flood story, which is always interesting.

And so historically the way we got that interpreted was, oh, well, all these things, if you assume that there is no

God or the natural world is all there is, then you have to explain that similarity through evolutionary purposes, right?

We needed these stories to survive or we needed these stories for some sort of thing. But from the biblical framework, it makes sense.

From the Christian worldview, all of us created, we all knew the beginning. I mean, Adam and Eve were old enough to know some of their great, great, great, great grandkids.

They could have heard these stories even before Moses, the revelation is given to him for Genesis, Exodus, Viticus and Numbers.

And so you see analogs to those stories. The Christian would just argue that through revelation, we have the original story, right?

That wasn't through the telephone game, right? That we're playing this, this story got passed down. And my grandmother, grandmother, grandmother told me this story once about this first couple named

Bob and Jane. Well, actually their names were Adam and Eve. It's like, okay, well, man, let's correct some of those things.

So whether it's flood stories or those, we see it. But I think those others going back to the

Tower of Babel are the distortions of the true history that we get in the scripture.

That's the way I would argue it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just to be cognizant of our belief, of course we do.

It's the belief that we put our life and trust and soul into. Of course, we're like, we're the true story. But I think it is notable of,

I've had a couple conversations of Noah's flood. And it's like, when you talk about the flood of Gilgamesh, it's like, okay, so was

Gilgamesh the real account or was Noah's the real account? If they're so similar. But when you say like, we need to justify this story, are you saying like,

I've talked to Ken Hamm about this and he was like, well, this is what the Ice Age, you know, like he brings in a very realistic sense to it.

And I'm not here to like debate, like, is it local? Is it global? But is it a sense of like, this was clearly an event that happened to a lot of people, but they interpreted within their religion.

And we're saying, no, this was because of the God. Yeah, I think that's the big framework for it.

I mean, to get into details of all those is really all, you know, whole shows and ideas and that kind of stuff. But yeah,

I do think, I do think we all were dealing with the same stories because those stories had a kernel of truth, right?

It's not because those stories had a common myth or a fiction at their foundation. They were powerful, enduring stories across cultures and civilizations, spanning thousands and thousands of years, because there's a kernel of truth in it.

So now we're saying, well, which story is the true story? And this is where you need to have arguments and apologetics about, can we trust the

Bible? Is it the right source? Or is the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Numa Elish or the

Egyptian Memphite theology? Which one is telling us the true truth about this?

But that's okay. I think that's a discussion and a debate

Christianity wins because we have the most evidence to support the reliability of the scripture to tell us the true history of our origins and why it matters for the way we live our life.

Yeah. Great use of where apologetics play a huge role in this, because for me, I'm like, oh, apologetics, we talk about this, but like, this is the application of it here is like when it's up against these other competing religions with similar stories.

So well done. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Um, I know that I kind of got it wrong with the

Pharisees and the Sadducees, but any other places in the old Testament or the new that these origin stories of Genesis really come to life for the

Israelite because they're up against these old thinking ways, these old thoughts, this old paradigm that they're living in.

Yeah. I think that when you go through the scope of, for example, even the judges, right.

And the book of judges, and we see that there's a perpetually the people fall into sin.

And that sin is usually the thin of polytheism, right? They're going back to their system of false gods there.

Something is happening. And so every story, there is something along those lines that you see that.

And it's interesting because there's something about this early judges that are selected by God. Then you start to see the decline of the civilization where people start to select their own judges.

And then you see the book of judges and with what I call the unrighteous judges like Samson, right?

Who is basically, he's a judge, but he's a corrupt judge. And this is showing how corrupt and morally depraved the people have become.

I mean, he's going to marry into the Philistine line, right? Because even though that was said, don't do that.

Why? Because when you marry into these people, it's not an F this is actually a pretty significant line of thought.

We can always trace this too. It's not because there was an ethno preference for people of descendant of Abraham, right?

There's not an ethnic privilege. It's not a racial distinction that's being made. It's a religious distinction.

When you marry into these people of false gods, you end up adopting their false gods. You marry the family.

And this is why God forbid that when they came into Canaan, right? Because they would marry their gods.

And that's exactly what happened in those things. So I think even this is where, and I don't know if this will totally answer your question, but I think this is really a critical piece of understanding like Genesis 10, the table of nations, right?

So -and -so begets so -and -so, and it traces back to Adam. This is the genealogy of Jesus, right?

That he goes back to Adam. Adam is the son of God, who's the son, you know, all this sort of tracing of that back to Adam and Eve.

There's one piece to this that sets Genesis apart from all these other polytheistic stories.

And this even gets to some contemporary stuff about different origins, about, you know, evolution and those sort of things as well.

But all of these other competing stories had an explanation for humanity that allowed us to tribalize, to dehumanize the people outside of us.

So if I'm a Canaanite and I'm worshiping my god and I come across the Amorite and they have their god, well, my people are better than their people.

My god is better than your god. I don't have to treat you as fully human or respect your existence.

My god, I have stories that's defeated your god, so I can attack you, I can kill you, I can enslave you, right?

But Genesis chapter 10 with this table of nations, here's the power of that. God chooses

Abraham. He says, I'm going to select Abraham, but not because he's better than everybody else, not because he's ethnically pure.

Matter of fact, he comes, his origin story is the exact same as everybody else's origin story. Everybody goes back to Adam and Eve, one founding couple.

Yet he says, I'm picking you. Why? Because eventually through you, all nations will be blessed. All ethnos will receive the promise of salvation.

So even though I'm telling you conquer these people, the Canaanites, and wipe them from the land, it's not because you're ethnically superior.

It's not because you're better than. Matter of fact, it's you're just as bad. You keep making all the boneheaded mistakes.

But by faith, I've selected you based on my good name as Yahweh. And now I'm saying they're going to be punished for their sin, but I'm going to give them an opportunity that eventually they can come with the same salvation hope that I'm giving you.

And all nations will have this hope. And we see throughout the Old Testament, all the times God says, oh, you know,

I've been dealing with this people and their time of judgment has come. Why? Because he's given people outside of Israel opportunity to respond to him.

So God is working in all the nations, but all the nations are rebelling. And eventually then that leads to and points to the person of Christ who stands at the cross and the cross is lifted up and the fulfillment of God's promise of blessing to all nations comes to all of us.

So the idea of tribalization and dehumanization of others is eliminated in the table of nations because it gives us a genuine history, which is why

I don't think we should dehistoricize it or make it some sort of mytho history that it's like, oh, these aren't real.

They are real. There's real people. There's real histories there. Yeah, there could be gaps. And sometimes it lists a name and that name could be an individual.

Sometimes the name, I think, could be groups of people. I have no problem with that. We're taking a case by case basis, but it's real history.

It's a real history of humanity that we all have one common source, Adam and Eve. And who's this father of Adam? God, Yahweh.

All of us are made. That's Alem Elohim in the image of God. All of us have sacred work and we don't have the right to do to each other what we see in the other nations who worship the many gods.

I see how you studied race based off of Genesis. Yeah, there you go. That makes a lot of sense.

So again, I'm coming into this conversation with what I like to call a Sunday school mentality of not knowing much, just truly coming in pretty ignorant.

But when you say those things, it makes sense. But then I immediately switched back to like, well, this seems like it was just really taking place in one region of the world.

And then you've got people in Asia minor and then you've got like the Turks and then you've got, you know, the people of the

Greek pantheon and then you've got people in Africa. Like it's so spread out. But what you're talking about, like these tribes of like in the

Canaanites and the hematites, like the Hittites, it seems like those are really close by. Those are tribes like a couple of kilometers away from one another.

What about like the people in China minor that are, you know, they're not like when what you're saying of like they are equally

God's people. We all came from the same descendant, but like this motion of God seems to be happening in one geological area.

Do you have an explanation for that? Yeah. So it's the it's the question. What about the people have never heard kind of thing or what?

Yes. How is how is God's justice just or fair if they don't have the same opportunity here like we've had the opportunity here, right?

That's a natural question. So I do think there are hints of this in the Old Testament where we see where God is working.

Like, for example, Jonah, he sends Jonah to the Ninevites, right? The Ninevites, that was the they were the capital of the people who had conquered northern

Israel. And that's why Jonah hated him. Those are the people that had conquered his family, his brothers, his sisters, his cousins and enslaved them.

He's like, why would I give a chance? And he knew something was true about God. He said, Yahweh, I know is a forgiving

God. And if he gives them the chance to repent, what if they do? I don't want them to repent.

I want them to be condemned. Right. So we see in the Old Testament that God is a

God of over all nations. And somehow he was working with them to bring in an understanding of his not bringing knowledge of him.

Now we get that we take that back to the person of Jesus. And let's, you know, kind of move ahead a little bit in the

New Testament context. I've had a friend who was in the missionary field years ago. And he told me this story.

This is this story goes back 30 years. But I think this is true today and how we kind of answer it. We take that thread from the

Old Testament and we kind of weave it together through history into a modern context. So he went as a missionary to the

Philippines. And he had this dream one night and he said, OK, I want you to go in when you wake up in the morning, go stand at this intersection.

You can see a sign of where he was supposed to stand. Stand there and wait for me. And he wakes up and he says the dream was so vivid.

And he's like, I was just, you know, I ate French fries or whatever, some crazy food. I'm not going to go. Second night has the same dream.

Go stand at this intersection and wait. Second day wakes up in the light of day.

That does sound stupid. I'm not going to do it. Third day he goes and he says, OK, I give in.

I'm just there's no way to get this out of my head until I do it. Goes and stands at this intersection. He's standing there like, see

God, I know it's just my imagination. All of a sudden somebody comes up to him and says, are you the man I'm supposed to meet?

And he's like, what? Yeah, he's like, he says, I've been praying to God for years that if he's real, show himself to me.

And he told me in a dream to come stand here and wait. He says, when you get there, I'll have somebody there that can tell you about me.

And he said, I've been waiting here for three days. So think about the power of that story. And I say that because when we think about what about those who've never heard?

What it tells me is this. I don't know how God did it. I don't know how he dealt with all of those people and all these other nations and how he offered himself to them as an opportunity to come to his salvation knowledge.

But I trust that God did do it. I trust that he's been faithful to his holy good name, that when he says he wants all nations to be blessed, that all have had this opportunity to come to salvation, that he really meant it, that he gave away for this to happen.

And so I don't have a record of it in the Bible. I have hints about it in the Old Testament. And I have stories in my modern life that tell me there are ways that he could have done this.

And so I just kind of trust him that, yeah, he made a way and found a way to do it. Yeah. Yeah.

We can just as easily say like, there's no chance every single person on earth, all over the world has a chance to meet

God. That's just impossible. That claim could equally be made any other way because we simply as humans don't know, like, who are we to say that's impossible when it's like, well, who, who are we to really define what that parameter, like God could technically do that.

But how would we know? It's weird for us to claim that there's no way for us to know when you're right.

We have evidence of it today. We have evidence of it in the New Testament. We have evidence of it, you know, in just God's claims and promises.

Yeah. It's an appeal to ignorance, which is not a reason for determining what is truth. Just because I don't know something is true doesn't mean it's false.

But as you said, you have Old Testament examples, New Testament, we have Cornelius, who had a dream and a vision.

And we see that in contemporary world. We see there's been more people in the Middle East over the last decade have come to faith in Jesus Christ than the past 500 years.

And those stories don't make it out because a lot of people still get killed if they come to faith in Jesus. But a lot of them are based off of they have had a vision or dream, and then they end up connecting with a missionary who got sent there.

Those stories are happening a lot. And I have no reason to doubt that God says is who he is.

He's a holy, just God, and he's faithful to his word. If he says he'll make a way, he'll make a way to those who seek him, he will show himself.

And I trust him, even where I don't have knowledge of how or how he's going to do it.

I trust him. Yeah. Yeah. It's what we're called to do is have that faith. But it is difficult in a logical world to have that type of blind faith where you're like, well,

I don't know. So it would be reasonable to say that it's probably false because I don't have proof of it versus like,

I don't know, but who am I to say it's not true? That's not really my call, but you're right. We can't be ignorant and assume it's a negative.

But wow, really amazing stuff. I'm curious today, if we kind of put a 2024, 2025 lens on this discussion, do we still have polytheistic gods when it comes to Darwin, when it comes to Buddhism?

Are people still those isolated towns from the Tower of Babel? We try to think that this is from the past and it was a long time ago.

And, you know, we have more technology than we've ever had. We're so well -educated. Are we now?

Or kind of like, does this polytheistic religion still exist? Yeah, I think there's something that we're still going to claim as our ultimate truth, our ultimate reality.

We may not call it God, but it still functions as these gods did. The ones who we, something we put our trust in to be the ultimate answer to everything.

So you could have Darwin who, that Darwinian framework of naturalism, there is no

God, what explains this? Natural selection. And then you can have origin stories based on that.

And the origin stories there, of course, the problem is it grades humans higher, lower on a scale of fitness to survive.

And that's where you end up with the tribalistic views of, you know, lower races and higher races.

That was built into the culture before, but he actually traded in that to justify his natural selection.

So he said, you know, when you have evidence, he used as evidence, for example, proof that natural selection is true is that you have this small

England, you know, this UK, here we are in England and these white Europeans can conquer these massive nations of indigenous peoples outside of us.

Why? Because nature has equipped us and made us superior to these other peoples and these other lands.

And so he traded in the racism of his day, this philosophical idea that there are different races of humans.

And he sort of attributed to that a scale of being a hierarchy of being, and that's why you get the Darwinian scale, like fish, like little fishies to humans.

And always the more Africanized features of those people are the lower on the scale of evolution.

This is why they always tried to, you know, you know, there was experiments done in the early 20th century to try to hybridize people of African descent with monkeys and actually, you know, create a human.

Oh yeah. Experiments done in the Soviet Union, people did this in, well, yeah, well before it was in Russia.

And so, and even later in the Soviet Union, but supported by a lot of people from the West to try to find these sorts of things.

So our origin story, again, we have the gods, whether our god is nature and it's going to tell us who is right, who's more valuable, who's less valuable, or our gods are technology like AI.

I just shared a story with my class today, because we're talking about the sort of the end and AI, this is, look this up, there's, there's in psychology today, there's articles about this called ghost spots, people trying to upload their deceased loved ones, they take an image, or they take the diary that they wrote, they upload the stuff into an

AI, and then they recreate an AI version. And the idea is that we are resurrecting our dead loved ones into cyberspace, right?

We are, we are becoming eternal through our capacity to upload our consciousness and our identity into these

AI identities. And there's tons of, there's actually companies in South Korea, in the

United States, who are dedicated to, they call it grief technology here. But how do you deal with the death of a loved one?

Well, let's recreate them through technology. And so we're doing this right now. Well, what have we picked?

We've said technology will be the one will be what gives us eternal life. Well, that's what gods traditionally, we thought they would do for us.

So there's a ton of ways we do that. And we've shaped, shaped our, our technology, our world around us to fit our belief about where we came from.

And you think of even what you said at the beginning of like, they created the temple, and then they had to justify it by creating the story.

It's like the same thing with AI. Like AI was created by humans. And it's like, what are they going to say with, like, was the evolution?

Because like, we know a history way before AI, but like, they're going to say that was the beginning. I don't know. I'm just throwing it out there.

You could lose, no, it's true. You see it inside, you know, the sort of dystopian movies, like, oh, we worship

God, you know, and his name is Bob. And who is Bob? I just think of like Minority Report.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get that stuff all littered with that kind of story, right? You forget

Mad Max. Well, it was the one where he finds the kids, and they have one of those little viewfinders.

And they have a whole origin stories that they've invented about who were the first two humans, and he was the first one.

And they have skyscrapers, and they have different names for them. But they don't know what any of it is. But they've invented stories to explain what they see.

Right? That's exactly what we do. Wow. Wow. Yeah, I guess my original question, like, is it

God or gods? And it seems like we know what we believe, but it doesn't exclude the fact that there are other gods still today that do exist.

So I mean, you've clearly outlined such a strong argument for like, why our God is the one true

God, but it is interesting to note, like the presence and the source and the evolution of those other gods ancient, but also today.

So thank you. Wow, this was this. This aged my brain is the best way

I could put it. So thank you. Thank you for coming on. This has been an incredible discussion.

Can so for more than cake, how can people learn more from you, Dr. Miller? Yeah, so if people want to check me out more than cake .org

.com, because then you'll get a bunch of cake recipes. And but more than cake .org, you can kind of find me it'll actually take you to my sub stack.

I used to do web design for years for 30. I got tired of it. And so I'm on sub stack now. But I side note, you know, nobody cares.

But I used to Google suppress a lot of my stuff, because I deal with a lot of ethical issues from a

Christian worldview perspective, which they don't like. So I point my domain there indirectly, because as soon as I attach it to my site, they suppress all my search results again.

So I'm sort of trying to circumvent that a little bit. But if you go there, you'll find a link to my sub stack. And yeah, sign up there, you can get it free.

You can subscribe monthly, you know, pay me five bucks. And you can leave comments and engage and we can dialogue.

There's all kinds of options. If you want to kind of connect with me there, social media, you can find my links there.

I'm on mostly active on x at Jr. Miller 777. So I'm pretty active there.

Cool, cool. And use that podcast every week. Or would you say the sub stack is more so your content? I do podcast.

So I have a we have a couple things I do. I have two podcasts out right now that I do one is called raise the roof, are a

Z the roof. And right now we're going through all kinds of books that destroyed the world.

So we're dealing with old stuff like this. Tomorrow morning, we're actually recording live Jean Jacques Rousseau.

And then we're dealing with how to, you know, world through a worldview framework. And then by the next fall, we'll be at like pivot of civilization with Sanger.

And then we're going to look at more contemporary writings and how they shape our worldview. And so we'll deal with all these questions with these ideas to see how they're thinking shape.

So raise the roof is my big one I do, but you can find my other podcast called the Schaefer dialogues. I do that as well.

That's on my sub stack too. That's amazing. And if I was a student, and I wanted to learn more from you, what class are you teaching?

Oh my gosh, next spring? Yeah, I teach Christian worldview at Grand Canyon University.

So that's my main course. I teach that I teach about 300 students a semester, usually four instances of that course.

It's the class that was I was in just before I came into you. It's quiz day. So students were not very happy today, but it was so good.

But and so I teach Christian worldview. And so I've got a lot of my videos, actually, I've got about 24 videos, all two to five minutes long on worldview, you can check those out as well on more than cake .org.

And that'll give you a lot of the worldview content. And like I said, if you subscribe, you can kind of ask questions, engage with me.

And I'm happy to, I'm trying to build a community there to filter out the trolls.

And so that we can have meaningful dialogue there. Yeah, yeah, I feel you there. I'm building the same thing and having other people at the same place as you that want to talk about the same things is so important.

And I mean, especially with you in the room. I mean, I'm the idiot in the room, but like someone that's well educated and guide, like,

I'm here to raise my hand. You're here to answer. We both play a part. Yeah. Well, don't, don't, don't undersell yourself like that.

There are no idiots in the room. At least in this podcast, they're planning on social media, but they're not here.

You're wonderful. Thank you. Well, you're wonderful. Thank you so much for an hour of your time today, this Friday.

I'm so excited to share this and I'm excited to find another reason to have you back on the pod. You're always welcome. So thank you so much,