A History of God

there is not one unchanging idea contained in the word ‘God’ but the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.

A second wave of immigration was linked with Abraham’s grandson Jacob, who was renamed Israel (‘May God show his strength!’);

Buddhists, as we shall see, would deny that their visions and insights are derived from a supernatural source; they see them as natural to humanity.

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. This

In Babylonian myth – as later in the Bible – there was no creation out of nothing, an idea that was alien to the ancient world. Before either the gods or human beings existed, this sacred raw material had existed from all eternity.

Despite its other-worldliness, religion is highly pragmatic. We shall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound.