Inheriting Zeus: From the Pantheon to the Possibility Space

If oxen and horses had hands, and could draw with their hands, they would draw the gods to look like oxen and horses. Xenophanes of Colophon, c. 570 BCE

Two and a half thousand years before the science of psychology described projection, Xenophanes had already noticed something embarrassing about the gods. If horses worshipped, he wrote, they would worship horse-shaped gods. The observation is older than the philosophy that explains it, and it has never been satisfactorily answered by the traditions it embarrasses.

This essay takes Xenophanes seriously and follows the projection forward in time. The God of the major monotheisms, I want to argue, is not as new as the traditions claim. He is, in important respects, the same family of being as the gods Xenophanes was critiquing, dressed in metaphysical clothes the older gods never wore. The contradictions that have made monotheistic theology fragile for two millennia were imported rather than created. They follow from putting a Greek personality into an absolute frame and then expecting the absoluteness to be defensible. The essay closes with a proposal for how to hold the question differently, one that recovers, in modern form, something the Mu’tazila were close to before their tradition foreclosed on it.

I. The Scene the Greeks Lived In

For most of human history, the world was unpredictable in ways modern people struggle to imagine. Rain came or did not come. The sea calmed or swallowed ships. Plagues arrived without warning and departed without explanation. Children died. Crops failed. The mind, being what it is, refused to leave these events uninterpreted. If there were patterns, there were patterns. If there were no patterns, there must be agents. So agents were invented, or perhaps glimpsed, depending on your metaphysical mood.

The Greeks populated their universe with such agents on an industrial scale. Poseidon governed the sea, Zeus the sky and weather, Demeter the harvest, Apollo plague and healing alike. Each god had a temperament. Each had domains of competence and limits beyond them. Each could be approached, propitiated, flattered, and occasionally betrayed. The relationship was transactional in a way that strikes the modern religious sensibility as crude, but it was not foolish. It was a working theory about an opaque world. You did not understand why the sea was rough today, but you knew Poseidon could be moody. You did not understand why your child had a fever, but you knew which god to ask.

What gave the Greek system its psychological coherence was that its gods were morally mixed. Zeus was a philanderer. Hera was vengeful. Apollo could be cruel. Aphrodite was capricious. When suffering arrived, it was not a theological scandal. It was simply what gods do when they are bored, slighted, or competing among themselves. The Trojan War, in Homer’s telling, is partly a god-on-god proxy fight in which mortals get crushed because mortals always do. There is no expectation that the gods are good in any unified or absolute sense. There is only the expectation that they are powerful, partial, and worth keeping on side.

This is important to notice, because it tells us something about what religion was originally doing. It was offering causal stories for an opaque world, and it was providing a vocabulary of obligation, ritual, and exchange to make that opacity feel less arbitrary. The gods did not need to be moral. They needed to be there.

II. The Long Consolidation

What happened over the following millennia is one of the strangest intellectual transitions in human history, and it deserves to be told without the usual triumphalism. The pantheon shrank. Local gods became regional gods. Regional gods became national gods. National gods became universal gods. And the universal gods, eventually, became one God, claimed by Israelite religion and inherited by Christianity and Islam in modified forms.

Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God traces this consolidation in detail. The transition from polytheism to monotheism is often described as a refinement, as if our ancestors gradually shed the embarrassing crudity of multiple gods and arrived at a more sophisticated truth. What actually happened, on the account Wright and others have given, looks more like a merger. The functions of many gods were absorbed into one. The personality, however, was not shed. It was concentrated.

The God of the Hebrew Bible gets jealous, makes plans, has favourites, and intervenes in human affairs with the directness of any Olympian. He smites cities. He floods continents. He selects nations and abandons them. The New Testament softens some edges and sharpens others. The Quran inherits and elaborates. In all three traditions, God remains a person of sorts. He has a will. He has preferences. He has emotions, or something close enough that the texts use the vocabulary of emotion to describe him.

This inheritance might have been harmless if the metaphysical claims had been left at the Greek level. But they were not. As the gods consolidated into one, the new God was given attributes the old gods never claimed. He was declared omnipotent, beyond all power. He was declared omniscient, beyond all knowledge. He was declared omnibenevolent, beyond all goodness. And this is where the trouble began.

III. The Problem the Greeks Never Had

The trilemma attributed to Epicurus, preserved six centuries later by the Christian apologist Lactantius in his treatise On the Wrath of God, sets out the problem of evil with a clarity nobody has improved on. If God is willing to prevent evil but unable, he is not omnipotent. If he is able but unwilling, he is not good. If he is both able and willing, why is there evil? And if he is neither able nor willing, why call him God at all?

The Greeks never had to answer this. Their gods were not claimed to be all-good or all-powerful, so suffering required no defence. Suffering was simply what happened in a world where the powers above were many, partial, and often in conflict with each other.

Monotheism inherited the personality of the old gods but assigned that personality attributes that made the old explanations impossible. If there is only one God, and he is all-good, and he is all-powerful, then every drought, every famine, every disease, every dead child, every massacre, every catastrophe becomes a question that demands an answer. The Greek shrug is no longer available. There is no second god to blame, no domain Poseidon failed to manage. There is only the one God, who could have stopped it and did not.

The history of theology since is in significant part the history of trying to answer this question without giving up the inherited personality. The free will defence, given its most influential modern form by Alvin Plantinga, argues that moral evil exists because God values human freedom, and a world with free creatures who sometimes choose wrongly is better than a world of moral automatons. The soul-making theodicy, associated with John Hick, argues that suffering is the necessary cost of developing virtues like courage, compassion, and patience. Leibniz argued that this is the best of all possible worlds, however unflattering the evidence appeared. Each of these moves is interesting. None of them is fully satisfying. The free will defence struggles with natural evil, the kind of suffering that no human chose. The soul-making theodicy struggles with the distribution of suffering, which falls so unevenly and so often on those least equipped to be improved by it. Leibniz, famously, was satirised by Voltaire after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, when the optimistic theology collided with tens of thousands dead.

The deeper problem, and this is the observation worth dwelling on, is that none of these theodicies were ever needed by the Greeks. The Greek gods were never claimed to be perfectly good, and therefore the suffering they permitted or caused required no elaborate philosophical defence. The problem of evil is a problem that monotheism created for itself by insisting on attributes the older religions never claimed. It is a wound that theology keeps trying to heal without removing the knife.

IV. The Dissident Traditions

It would be a mistake to suggest that all monotheistic thinkers accepted the inherited picture without resistance. The Islamic Golden Age in particular saw extended debate on exactly these questions. The Mu’tazila, a rationalist theological school flourishing in the eighth and ninth centuries, argued that human beings have genuine moral responsibility, that good and evil are accessible to reason rather than determined arbitrarily by divine command, and that God’s justice requires that humans be the genuine authors of their actions. Against them, the Ash’ari school emphasised divine omnipotence and predestination to the point where human actions became, in their account, created by God in the moment they occurred. The Mu’tazila lost the internal political argument, partly for reasons unrelated to the strength of their case, and orthodoxy moved toward the Ash’ari position. But the rationalist tradition never disappeared. Ibn Rushd, known to the Latin West as Averroes, continued in the twelfth century to argue for the compatibility of reason and revelation, with consequences that would shape European thought through Thomas Aquinas.

In Christian theology, the Molinists made a related move. Luis de Molina, a sixteenth-century Jesuit, proposed that God possesses what came to be called middle knowledge. God knows not only everything that is and everything that could be, but also everything that any free creature would do in any possible circumstance. On this view, God knows all the counterfactuals without determining the choices. The position is technically elegant, though it has its critics.

Spinoza in the seventeenth century took a different route entirely. He identified God with nature itself, removing the divine personality from the picture and treating God as the necessary and infinite substance from which all things flow. The God of Spinoza does not love, does not punish, does not have plans. He is the system, not an agent within it. This view scandalised his contemporaries. He was excommunicated from his synagogue at twenty-three. But the position has persisted in various forms, and many serious people, including Einstein, have located themselves somewhere near it.

What these dissident traditions share is an unwillingness to accept the inherited Greek personality dressed in monotheistic robes. They sense, correctly, that the contradictions cannot be patched. The personality has to give.

V. The Chess Game

Let me put my own view on the table. I want to argue that the entire knot examined above is generated by a single assumption we did not actually need to make, the assumption that God must be an agent within the system rather than the author of the system. Strip that assumption out and the contradictions dissolve. What follows is the analogy I keep returning to, offered not as a finished theology but as a way of holding the question that I find more honest than the inheritance allows.

Imagine God as the designer of a chess game. He created the board. He designed the pieces. He determined the rules by which knights move in their crooked path and bishops travel only on their diagonals. He knows every possible game that could be played from the opening move forward. He knows the full tree of possibilities, the millions and millions of paths that two players might take through the space he designed.

But he does not determine which game is actually played. The players move. Their choices generate the path. The pieces fall where the players send them. God knows the structure of all possibility without determining the actuality.

It is worth being precise about what this framework determines and what it does not. The categories are determined. The kinds of things that can happen in a universe like ours are fixed by the rules God authored. Cancer is possible because cellular replication has to admit error for evolution to function at all. Earthquakes are possible because plate tectonics is the mechanism that keeps the atmosphere habitable. The category of disease, like the category of health, belongs to the architecture of the system and is not negotiable within it. But which specific instances occur is not determined. No particular person had to develop this particular cancer at this particular time. The framework makes the category possible. The actual occurrences are generated by the chance interactions of real bodies in real environments and by the choices real agents make within them. God designed the kinds of moves available in chess. The actual game depends on the players.

This analogy resolves several problems at once. It preserves God’s omniscience, but as omniscience of possibilities rather than omniscience of a predetermined script. It preserves genuine human freedom, because the path is genuinely generated by the choices made within the system. It removes the contradiction between divine foreknowledge and free will, because what God foreknows is the possibility space, not the particular outcome that emerges from free choices within it. And it makes sense of moral responsibility, because the players are genuinely the authors of the game they play.

The standard objection to such views is that if God knows which game will actually be played, then his knowledge is the same as predestination. The response is that this objection assumes time is a film reel God has already watched. If instead we treat the actual path as something genuinely generated by choices within the system, then God’s knowledge is of the tree, not the line drawn through it. This is closer to viewing reality as a branching possibility space, a structure God authored, than to a single determined sequence God witnesses.

This view also relocates God’s relationship to suffering in a way that the inherited personality cannot. God is not a player. God did not move the pieces that resulted in this war, this disease, this dead child. The players moved them, within the system God designed. The responsibility is theirs. The consequences are theirs to bear.

VI. The Harder Question

The chess analogy handles moral evil cleanly. Wars happen because people choose them. Cruelty exists because cruel choices are available within the system. Theft, betrayal, violence, neglect: all are moves within a system that permits them, made by players who are genuinely responsible for making them.

But natural evil is harder, and any honest version of this view has to confront it. The child born with leukaemia did not make a move. The tsunami did not result from a human choice. The earthquake levelled a city without consulting anyone. These are not moves within the game. They are features of the board itself.

There are two responses available. The first is to bite the bullet, and to bite it harder than is often done. God designed a universe with thermodynamics, plate tectonics, viruses, and cellular replication errors, and these are non-negotiable features of any system rich enough to produce conscious life.

This is not a hand-waving claim. The physical universe we live in is precisely the kind of universe in which the events we call disasters become possible, and it is no accident that the two features come together. The same plate tectonics that produce earthquakes also drive the carbon cycle that keeps the atmosphere stable enough for complex life. The same imperfect copying that produces cancer is what drives the evolutionary variation that produced consciousness in the first place. The same thermodynamic gradients that mean stars eventually die and ice ages eventually come are the gradients that organise matter into complexity at all. The same nervous systems that allow suffering allow everything else that conscious creatures do. You cannot extract one half of the package and keep the other. A universe stable enough to permit life is by the same token a universe whose stability is finite. A universe rich enough to contain conscious beings is a universe whose richness includes everything that can go wrong with conscious bodies in conscious environments.

The anthropic line of argument is sometimes used to defend theological optimism, as evidence that the universe was tuned for us. It is more honestly used in the other direction. The fine-tuning of physical constants that permits stars, planets, and minds is the same fine-tuning that permits supernovae, tectonic catastrophe, predation, and disease. There is no possible universe in which observers exist to ask why there is suffering that is not also a universe rich enough to contain suffering. The question is built into the conditions of its being asked. To imagine a universe with biology but no death, with minds but no nerves, with stars but no entropy, is to imagine descriptions that do not refer to anything. These are not universes. They are wishes.

This is a hard answer, but it is honest in a way the older theodicies were not. It does not pretend that the child’s suffering is improving her soul, or that it is part of some greater good we cannot see. It acknowledges that the universe contains genuine tragedy as a structural feature, and that this is the price of its containing anything at all.

The second response is to argue that natural evil only looks like evil from a finite human frame, that from the perspective of the whole it forms part of a meaningful pattern we cannot see. This is the move the older theodicies make, and it should be resisted, because it amounts to telling the suffering that their suffering is fine actually, just from a vantage point unavailable to them. It is the move that has discredited theology in the eyes of most who have lost what they loved.

One thing more needs saying here. The framework view is not a counsel of passivity in the face of natural evil. The categorical possibility of disease is built into the system, but the actual incidence of disease has been pushed back substantially through human work. Smallpox was within the framework of what biology permits, and it has been eradicated. Polio is almost eliminated. Bacterial infection used to mean death from a minor wound; after antibiotics, most of us never think about it. Childbirth killed mothers routinely for most of human history, and now in most of the world it does not. The framework remains. But the path the players take through it can be changed by what the players learn to do. Science is, in this picture, the accumulated record of human moves that improved how the game is played. The chess view does not surrender to suffering. It locates the response to suffering where the response belongs, with the players, and it suggests that the proper religious posture toward natural evil is not resignation but the patient work of understanding and intervention.

The first answer is better. The universe is structured in a way that permits both consciousness and tragedy. The two come together. This does not console anyone who is grieving, but it is at least not insulting.

VII. The Architecture of Experience

There is one further structural feature of any universe in which conscious beings exist, and it matters to the question of suffering even though it does not justify any specific instance of it. Conscious experience is not a flat register. It works through contrast. A creature that knew only pleasure would not experience pleasure as pleasure. A creature that knew only health would not experience health at all. Health would be the unnoticed baseline against which nothing stood out. Happiness is partly recognised through its contrast with sadness, peace partly through its contrast with conflict, freedom partly through its contrast with constraint. The most ordinary states of well-being depend for their being felt at all on the categorical existence of their opposites.

This needs to be stated carefully because it sits near a theodicy that the rest of this essay has already refused. The argument is not that any particular person’s suffering is justified by someone else’s corresponding joy. The argument does not work at that scale. It does not say that the cancer ward is necessary so that healthy people can appreciate their health. That move is monstrous and the essay has no interest in making it. The argument is structural. It says that the architecture of conscious experience is contrastive at the categorical level. Without the categorical possibility of pain, the experience of comfort would not register as comfort. Without the categorical possibility of loss, attachment would not feel like attachment. Without the categorical possibility of death, life would not be felt as life.

This is consistent with the chess view. The framework God designed contains the possibility of suffering and the possibility of flourishing because the experience of either depends on the categorical existence of the other. A universe designed for only one of these would not, on reflection, be a universe in which the one could be experienced. It would be a universe in which there was nothing to experience at all, because experience requires the structure of figure against ground, and figure requires the ground. Eliminating the possibility of all suffering would eliminate the experiential structure that makes flourishing recognisable.

Heraclitus saw this in the sixth century BCE. It is disease, he said, that makes health pleasant. The Taoist tradition built an entire metaphysics on the inseparability of opposites. The phenomenological tradition in the twentieth century made it a feature of consciousness itself. The observation crosses cultures and centuries because it is hard to deny once you have noticed it. The chess view absorbs it naturally. The framework includes both poles of every contrast because consciousness, if it exists at all, requires both poles to function.

This still does not console the person whose specific suffering is real and unchosen, and the argument should not pretend otherwise. The distribution of who suffers and how much remains a function of how the game is played within the framework, not of any divine apportioning. But it does add one further reason to think the framework is the shape it is, and not some other shape we might naively prefer. A universe of only one pole would not be a universe of fulfilled longing. It would be a universe in which longing was not possible, because the conditions for it had been engineered out.

VIII. What Remains of God

A view of this shape raises an obvious question. If God designed the system and stepped back, what work is God doing in this picture? Is this not simply deism, the eighteenth-century view of God as a clockmaker who built the universe and walked away?

It is close to deism, but it does not have to collapse into it. The cleanest version of the view holds that God is the ground of being, the author of the possibility space, the condition for there being anything at all rather than nothing. God is not an agent within the universe, intervening in particular moments, but the source of the universe as a whole. This is closer to the God of Spinoza, or of Ibn Arabi in the Sufi tradition, than to the personal interventionist God of Sunday school and Friday sermon. It is a more austere picture, and it gives up many of the consolations the older view offered. There is no God who hears the particular prayer. There is no God who suspends the rules to save a life. There is no God who arranges affairs to teach a lesson.

What remains is the system itself, the rules of the system, and the players who move within it. What remains is the human responsibility to play well, to choose well, to bear the consequences of the moves made. What remains is the recognition that suffering, when it comes from human choices, is human work, and when it comes from the structure of the system itself, is not anyone’s punishment.

This is a less consoling theology in some respects, but it dissolves the contradictions that the inherited picture cannot resolve. It does not require us to defend an all-good all-powerful agent against the evidence of a world that contains the things it contains. It does not require theodicy. It does not require us to pretend that the cancer ward is part of a plan.

IX. The Inheritance We Can Now Refuse

The argument running through all of this is not that there is no God. It is that the God most of us inherited is a confused composite, a Greek personality wearing monotheistic clothes, a being whose attributes contradict each other and whose actions cannot be reconciled with the world we live in. The problem with the inherited God is not that he is dead, in Nietzsche’s phrase, but that he was never coherent in the first place.

It is worth saying plainly what this view recovers. It recovers something the Mu’tazila were close to before the tradition foreclosed on them. They held that humans are the genuine authors of their actions, that good and evil are accessible to reason rather than imposed by arbitrary divine command, and that God’s justice is intelligible rather than capricious. These are the same commitments the chess view requires. Where the Mu’tazila lost the argument in the ninth century to an orthodoxy that preferred a more powerful and more personal God, the choice has not actually been settled. It has only been postponed. Every generation that inherits the question has the option to reopen it, and the position the Mu’tazila held is still there, waiting to be picked back up by anyone willing to do so. The tradition closed a door it did not have to close, and the door is not locked.

What we inherited instead is a theology that consolidated the pantheon into a single figure and assigned that figure metaphysical attributes the older gods never claimed. The result has been a contradiction it has been trying to manage for two thousand years. The contradiction can be resolved, but only by giving up the inheritance. The God who designed the board is not the God who punishes the moves. The God who authored the possibility space is not the God who weeps at one funeral and ignores another. The God who is the ground of being is not the God who picks sides in football matches.

The board exists. The rules exist. The players move. The consequences follow. Everything else, the tradition has spent two millennia inventing. So the question is the one the Mu’tazila were forced to stop asking, and the one the tradition has been postponing ever since. What might theology look like if it allowed itself to know less about God in order to know more truthfully?

A brief note. This essay is a personal philosophical reflection rather than a piece of systematic theology, and it is offered in that spirit. The argument is mine to defend, but the question it ends on belongs to anyone willing to take it up. I would rather hear the disagreement it provokes than agreement that has not been earned.