God vs. Pan: Spitting at a Firefly

"When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."


(Note: the main part of this article has now been published as an article at The Stream.  I'll retain additional points below.)

II.  The "gods" are ignoble and incoherent, if taken seriously.  

Pan is said to be half goat, half human.   He is depicted as having sex with goats, and also chasing nymphs and other humans and quasi-humans.  

This is, of course, not only disgusting, but also incoherent.  Species mate with their own, and reproduce true to form.  Of course God, as Creator, is in a sense behind all reproduction, but not by means of his own physical body.  

Or take Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war, sun, and human sacrifice, and the patron god of Mexico City.  Take him, please, so he doesn't stain our alabaster cities with the hemoglobin of thousands of sacrifices every year, while his priests butcher the left-overs.  

No doubt there are difficult passages in the Old Testament.  But anyone who thinks there are simply no arguments for God which do not equally apply to Pan or Huitzilopochtli, is to fools roughly what Xerxes was to the Persian Army in its encounter with Greece. 

III.  Do Christian dismiss "all other possible gods," anyway? 

I am not sure that we do.  The early Christians were sometimes quite open-minded about the existence of the beings the Greeks called "theos" or "daimon."  Of course Christians like Augustine argued, from pagan sources themselves, that they tended to be either malevolent or ridiculous, but the pagans often knew that.  Indeed, the Arcadians were not averse to beating Pan's idol when the hunt failed.

Christians believe that other spirits besides God do, in fact, exist.  Some of those might possibly be spirits who have been given particular names by various cultures.  Some are good, some are bad, and some might have other business in the universe.  C. S. Lewis described these beings as eldila in his Space Trilogy.  The Chinese are indeed flexible about "gods, ghosts and ancestors," since spirits might turn out to be any of the three, without conflating them with Shang Di, who alone was above the Emperor.

We theists are thus able to be far more open-minded and empirical than skeptics like Mr. Roberts.  God is one thing.  If evidence turns up for the existence of other spirits, we do not automatically reject that evidence without looking at it first.  Nor do we automatically accept it.

Apple only has one CEO at a time.  But apples, there are many.  Whether or not one struck Sir Isaac Newton's nose, is an empirical question, not a matter for a priori and hasty decisions.  Let us not confuse ourselves, then, when the differences between objects with similar spelling are far vaster.

If you refute, or prove, the existence of some local spirit, that will have no effect whatsoever on God.  You cannot refute our Ground of Being by scoffing at some tall tale about a half-goat half-man, anymore than you can put out the sun by spitting at a firefly.