One of the cool things about the “God is an imaginary character” hypothesis is that it does such a good job of predicting the actual behavior of the gods. In any situation, you can predict exactly what a god can and cannot do merely by knowing what an imaginary supernatural character can and cannot do. That means that god (or any other magical, imaginary being) can do anything you can imagine—but only in a story. And he/she/it/they cannot do anything more than that.
This makes gods much better at magic than at science. Magic is easy to imagine: all you have to say is, “A, then poof, then B”. Magic is a literary shortcut, a way to get out of explaining the exact process by which A supposedly produces B. Science, by contrast, requires that you understand what you’re talking about.
Take creationism for example. Ken Ham says a lot of stupid things, but there’s one thing he’s got exactly right. There is no way anything as elegant and amazing as evolution could possibly have been created by the God of Genesis. The people who told the Genesis story simply did not know enough about biology and genetics and heredity to even begin to conceive of a process like evolution. All they (and their imagination) had to work with was superstition and naive observation.
As a result, the Genesis creation story is exactly what you would expect from an imaginary deity: ordinary observations, somewhat tainted by ignorant misconceptions, assigned to one or more creators by means of magic. Literally translated, “gods said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
How do sound vibrations in air lead to the emission of photons? Primitive Bronze Age tribesman had no idea, so poof, magic. You know that if somebody big and tough says, “Do something,” you’d better do it, or he’ll punch you. Life in ancient times was brutal, and so it was easy to imagine somebody so big and tough that if he/they said, “let there be light,” the light would be too scared not to start existing.
And that’s pretty much all the gods can do. Within the story, they have whatever power they can draw from your imagination and willingness to believe. But whatever you can’t imagine, or aren’t willing to believe, they can’t do. And if you don’t know, or refuse to believe, what science finds out about reality, then your gods have no power to create or use science. They can do magic, because magic is easy to imagine, but they can’t do science because that requires genuine understanding, which is incompatible with superstition.
Imagine how many lives would’ve been saved if the 10 commandments included simple, easy to communicate things like:
Thou shalt not go to bathroom upstream.
Thou shalt wash thy hands before cooking.
And why wasn’t the magic potion of bat shit, brimstone and charcoal used against those iron chariots?
The important thing to understand about the difference between reality and magic is that when a wizard or a god says “let there be light”, he has to be talking to something (magic staff) or someone (spirits) to carry out his command. Since we don’t know who or what that is, we can call it a black box, but Christian God is not supposed to have any such a thing just alone in the void.
So whatever this black box is which is capable of creating life, the universe, and everything de-personifies Christian God into a mere physical mechanism which inevitably created the universe. Being a universe creating machine is a thankless job.
Punchline: And god’s wife said, “Are your legs broken?”
he has to be talking to something (magic staff) or someone (spirits) to carry out his command
Go forth and violate all the conservation laws that I did create. Let there be energy from nothingness! Let there be heat without there being cold. Let there be light and dark and let them divide the one from the other at huge energy cost that I shall not pay. Let there be inter-convertible mass and energy and let that interconversion be painfully hard except for when I, the LORD, or gravity, do it.
Maybe god is gravitation?
First, a quibble. Genesis 1 is certainly not a Bronze Age text. And while the social structure was probably technically tribal, the term “Primitive Bronze Age tribesman” connotes a nomadic Bedouin-like figure, where the author(s) of Genesis 1 were urban elites, likely living in the neo-Babylonian empire, the pinnacle of civilization at the time (where they were probably considered rubes from the sticks, but still).
/pet peeve
There is a sense in which civilization is magic, and you correctly identify the echoes of this in the account of divine creation by fiat. Certainly prior to the rise of agriculture and urbanization, there were forms of animism, sympathetic and apotropaic magic and the like. But the idea of casting a spell, saying some esoteric formula in order to command invisible agents to do your will, is probably a product of social stratification and the division of labor. Where the boss-man, a member of an authority figure’s elite cadre, need only point his finger and speak to see his will done, it’s not that far of a leap to the idea that this ability to coerce labor is the essence of power, and that the realm of nature might be so commanded as well by a sufficiently potent figure.
Ok, I’ll grant you that quibble, though I suspect the story itself is significantly older than the text that records it.
Sure, the Enŭma Eliš is a Bronze Age text. I doubt that there’s a much older specifically Israelite pre-biblical precursor to Genesis 1, though. The older story from that tradition is Genesis 2-3, a very different kind of myth. Genesis 1 seems to be an inversion of and a reaction to Babylonian mythology typified by the Enŭma Eliš, and I wouldn’t expect such a product to come about prior to significant cultural contact, which took place at the time of the Babylonian exile.
Interestingly, the Enŭma Eliš notably lacks the divine command angle; Marduk creates largely by doing; cutting up the body of Tiamat, primordial chaos, to create the earth and the sea, micromanaging the phases of the moon, etc. Though he does also explicitly “use magic” to achieve some of it.
Hmmm. Evolution is an elegant explanation for what we observe about life on Earth, but it’s a horrific thing in itself. How many trillions of organisms died horribly because they weren’t well suited to the environment they found themselves in? One of the common arguements used against “Darwinists”, is the is/ought fallacy that because we say this is the way the world works, that we approve of it.
That depends on your point of view. My rebuttal to the creationist argument is to point out that the populations that died are the ones that weren’t evolving. Evolution itself is a pretty cool collection of mechanisms that provide a population with sufficient variability to enable survival of the organisms that are better suited to the environment, resulting in adaptation to changing circumstances and expansion of the ecology.
Extinction is a disease for which evolution is a natural defense. After all, extinction would still happen even without evolution, but the survival of the ecosystem might not. So evolution is a good thing, for contexts where the survival of life on earth is considered “good.”
Even where the bible correctly detects and provides advice on manipulation of natural processes, its explanation of the mechanisms at work are limited by human imagination. Deuteronomy 23:13-14 is a prime example: use an entrenching tool to dig a latrine, not because deadly organisms too small to be visible may be exposed to food and water supplies, but to spare the camp the wrath of a god who accidentally steps in dooky. The abortifacient mentioned in Numbers Ch 5 is similarly oblivious, describing a recipe for microbial food poisoning simply as “the bitter waters that cause the curse”. An omniscient, or even technologically advanced, entity could have provided the author with a factually accurate, even if overly simplistic explanation of the mechanisms at work. Even if obscure and puzzling to a contemporary audience, it wouldn’t be regarded as out of place, merely an additional element of “divine mystery”.