Excerpts from "God" by Reza Aslan

I read the book around January 2025

There will be a life to come, of that Adam and Eve are certain. Why else bother with burial? They have no practical reason to bury the dead.

The assumption is that Adam and Eve do these things because they believe the dead are not really dead but merely in another realm, one that the living can access through dreams and visions. The body may rot but something of the self persists, something distinct and separate from the body—a soul, for lack of a better word.

There is hardly ever any sign of violence at all in these caves. Some of the animals are crisscrossed with sharp lines that are usually interpreted as spears or arrows piercing their flanks. But a closer look at the images suggests that these lines are not entering the animal’s body; they are emanating from it. The lines appear to represent the animal’s aura or spirit—its soul. As the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed, primitive humans chose the animals they cast upon the rock not because they were “good to eat” but because they were “good to think.”

Freud considered religion to be a neurosis: a mental disorder that fosters belief in invisible, impossible things and leads to compulsive actions and obsessive conduct.

Regardless, for this theory to hold true, one would have to prove that there are certain emotions peculiar to religious expression, or that all religious expressions trigger similar emotions—neither of which is the case

More than a century before Freud, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote that “the primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear.” A century after Freud, the French philosopher René Girard theorized that religion arose among primitive peoples to mitigate violence by focusing that violence upon a ritual sacrifice—a “scapegoat,” as he termed it

Despite everything we think we know, the evidence indicates that religion does not make people good or bad. It does not naturally police behavior or foster cooperation in society. It does not enhance altruism any more or less effectively than any other social mechanism. It is no more or less powerful in creating moral behavior. It does not inherently drive cooperation in society. It does not increase advantage over competing groups. It does not necessarily soothe the mind or comfort the soul. It does not automatically lessen anxiety or improve reproductive success. It does not promote survival of the fittest

if I am confronted by a bipedal entity with what looks like a head and a face, I think, “This being looks like me.” If it looks like me, Theory of Mind leads me to think it must be like me. And so, instinctively, I ascribe my human thoughts and emotions to the human-looking thing. This is the reason why children treat certain toys as alive, possessing personality and will. Give a small child a model car and she will perceive the headlights as eyes and the grille as a mouth. She will automatically play with it as though it were a living thing and not a hunk of molded plastic. Even as she is consciously aware of the distinction between animate and inanimate, living and nonliving, she will nevertheless attribute life to the toy. She will give it agency

In its simplest terms, HADD leads us to detect human agency, and hence a human cause, behind any unexplained event: a distant sound in the woods, a flash of light in the sky, a tendril of fog slithering along the ground. HADD explains why we assume every bump in the night is caused by someone doing the bumping.

HADD = Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device

According to the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer, our brains allow only certain types of beliefs to “stick.” His research shows that we are more likely to absorb, retain, and share an idea if that idea is slightly anomalous. If an idea violates one or two basic, intuitive assumptions about a thing, it has a far stronger chance of being recalled and transmitted

Thus we have the Greek historian Herodotus writing in the fifth century B.C.E. about the sacred forest of Dedona, whose trees spoke with human voices and had the gift of prophecy. Five hundred years later, the ancient Persian epic Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, tells of an encounter that took place between Alexander the Great and a talking tree that predicts Alexander’s untimely death. “Neither your mother, nor your family, nor the veiled women of your land will see your face again,” the tree tells the young world conqueror.

What seems clear, however, is that belief in the soul may be humanity’s first belief. Indeed, if the cognitive theory of religion is correct, belief in the soul is what led to belief in God

Embedded in the myth of the Garden of Eden is a collective memory of an era long ago when human beings were free from toil and struggle, when there was no need to slog day and night over the land. An era, in other words, before the rise of agriculture, when our ancient ancestors Adam and Eve were, to put it less biblically, hunter-gatherers. And that is how the ancient city of Urfa has come to be regarded in the collective memory of its inhabitants as the location of the Garden of Eden. Believers will point to the fact that, like the biblical Eden, Urfa is nestled between four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates, and that it, too, is located in what the Bible terms “the east”—that is, west of ancient Assyria. However, the main reason so many people around the world believe that this city rests upon the ruins of Eden has less to do with Urfa’s location than it does with what lies just ten miles to the northeast, atop a high mountain ridge called Göbekli Tepe, or Potbellied Hill. For buried there, just beneath a man-made mound on the very tip of[…]

THE GARDEN OF EDEN lies somewhere in southeastern Turkey, near the prehistoric city of Urfa (modern-day Şanlıurfa), a few miles north of the Syrian border. Or at least that is what the residents of the city believe.

The significance of a myth rests not in any truth claims it makes but in its ability to convey a particular perception of the world. The function of a myth is not to explain how things are, but why things are the way they are.

It is so old it predates the rise of agriculture, meaning that this enormous, intricately designed monument was constructed by seminomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherers wearing animal skins who had yet to invent the wheel.

No one doubts that the temple’s builders could have carved the central pillars into more well-defined human beings if they had wanted to do so. But they chose to represent them in a deliberately abstract fashion, which suggests they did not intend the pillars to represent actual humans, but rather supreme beings in human form.

The fertility of the earth became bound up with the fecundity of women, who hold the mystery of life within their wombs, so that, as the legendary historian of religions Mircea Eliade argued, the physical work of plowing the fields became akin to a sexual act.

It was around this time that the concept of the “immolated deity” first arose—the god who dies and is dismembered and from whose body creation springs. Think Phan Ku, the creator god of China, whose skull became the dome of the sky, whose blood became the rivers and seas, and whose bones became the mountains and rocks; or the god Osiris, who taught the ancient Egyptians how to cultivate the earth before being killed and cut to pieces by his fiendish brother, Seth, who scattered the pieces of his body along the fertile Nile valley.

Studies have shown that the agricultural revolution led to the consumption of fewer vitamins and minerals and substantially less protein. Only a few types of grain were suitable for early farming and an even smaller number of animal species were suited to domestication. The hunter survived on dozens of different species of plants and animals. If any species fell in short supply, he could simply focus on another

As the Israeli historian Yuval Harari observes, the bodies of Homo sapiens were adapted to running after game, not to clearing land and plowing fields. Surveys of ancient human skeletons show just how brutal the transition to agriculture was. Farmers were more susceptible than hunters to anemia and vitamin deficiency

We now know that permanent settlements came first, and then, many years later, farming arose. We were living in villages with booming populations, building giant temples, creating great works of art, sharing our technology for centuries before it occurred to us to grow our food.

The physical act of building the temple may have necessitated the planting of crops and the domestication of animals to feed the workers and worshippers gathered there. But to permanently settle, form, and modify the earth, to exert our will upon animals and utterly disrupt the way they are born, bred, and raised, to create artificial environments that mimic the natural world—all of this would have required a giant psychological leap in the way we think about the relationship between humans and animals, between people and the earth. More than a technological revolution, it would have required a revolution in the way we think about the human condition—a “revolution of symbols,” to borrow a phrase coined by the French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin. For our Paleolithic ancestors, that revolution came in the form of an institutionalized religious system dominated by belief in humanized gods

Ancient peoples did not worship slabs of stone; they worshiped the spirits that resided within them. The idol was not itself a god; it was imbued with the god. The god was thought to take form within the idol. However, the consequence of such a belief is that when the spirit of one of these “lofty persons” entered an idol, the idol became the spirit’s body. It reflected the god’s physical appearance on earth. Put another way, while no one in Mesopotamia would have considered the idol to actually be the god, most would have readily accepted the idea that the idol looked like the god.

The hero Atrahasis is known by many names. In the twelfth-century B.C.E. Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, he is called Utnapishtim. In the Greek Babyloniaka of Berossus, composed in the third century B.C.E., his name is Xisuthros, and the Sumerian god Enki is replaced with the Greek god Kronos. In the Bible, Atrahasis is called Noah, while Enki becomes the Hebrew god Yahweh. In the Quran it is Nuh and Allah

It was the Ubaid, and not the gods, who sometime around 5000 B.C.E. drained the marshes and drew canals from the Tigris and Euphrates, establishing the world’s first irrigation system. No one knows exactly when these inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia came to be known as Sumerians

The Sumerians referred to themselves as “the black-headed people.” Yet wherever they came from and however they arose, by 4500 B.C.E., the Sumerians had cemented their dominance over Mesopotamia by founding what is regarded as the first major city in the world, Uruk.

The Akkadian language survived in spoken form throughout the Middle East for three thousand years, until it was fully displaced by Aramaic in the first century B.C.E.

For example, the word for “god” in Sumerian is ilu, which means something like “lofty person,” and so that became precisely how the gods were envisioned in Sumerian writings: as elevated beings who had human bodies and wore human clothes, who expressed human emotions and exhibited human personalities.

THE MESOPOTAMIANS WERE polytheists, meaning they worshiped multiple gods simultaneously. Indeed, the Mesopotamian pantheon contained more than three thousand deities. There was Aya, the goddess of light, who was wife to Shamash, the god of the sun; Damu, the healer, and Girra, the god of fire and refiner of metals; Sin, the powerful moon god; Enki the wise, who together with Enlil, “the decreer of fates,” and An (or Anu), the sky god, made up the three most important deities in the early Mesopotamian pantheon. There were, in fact, so many gods in Mesopotamia that ancient scribes had to compile complex “god lists” to keep track of them all.5

An was both the sky god and the sky itself. Shamash was both the sun god and the sun. It may have been partly the need to better manage these natural forces, to maintain power and influence over them, that spurred the Mesopotamians to personalize these gods, to gradually transform them into a pantheon of individual deities, each with a specific sphere of influence—whether earthly, cultural, or cosmic—and each with a specific function in the lives of their worshippers

Each day a priest or priestess—depending on the gender of the god—would enter a temple’s chamber, wash, dress, and feed the idol, anoint it with perfumes and incense, embellish it with cosmetics, and, on special occasions, take it out for a stroll so it could visit its fellow gods in neighboring temples. It was only then that the masses would set eyes upon their gods; the laity was not allowed into the temples and thus had no direct access to the deities residing within.

The Indo-European pantheon of gods was constructed in the same way as that of Mesopotamia and Egypt, by deifying the forces of nature: Dyeus, the sky god; Agni, the god of fire; Indra, the sun god; Varuna, the god of the primordial waters; and so on

Early in Egyptian history, during what is known as the Pre-Dynastic Period (c. 5000–3000 B.C.E.), the Egyptians were pure animists; they believed that all beings were animated by a single, divine force that permeated the universe. This force manifested itself to some degree in gods and spirits but was itself amorphous—without shape, substance, or will. However, with the invention of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing sometime around 3300 B.C.E.—not long after and probably under the influence of Sumerian cuneiform—there arose a need to make this abstract force more concrete. It had to be visualized so that it could be etched onto the walls of temples or inked onto strips of papyrus.

while the Greek pantheon originally included dozens of different deities, each with a specific origin and function, by the time they were written about in Homer and Hesiod, they had more or less been condensed into twelve principal gods—known as the Olympians—depicted by the Greeks as members of one big family.

The earliest expressions of the Greek gods were not the heroic statues we are used to seeing in museums, but rather abstract representations made of unshaped blocks of wood or stone meant to express the god’s spirit, not its physical form. Hera, for instance, was represented as a pillar in the port city of Argos and as a plank of wood on the island of Samos. Athena was originally worshiped as a flat piece of olive wood that was washed and bejeweled, wrapped in garments, and carefully tended by a cadre of her priestesses

According to Zarathustra’s account of this experience written in the Gathas—the oldest of the ancient scriptures of Zoroastrianism, the religion he would ultimately found—this obscure deity revealed itself to be the sole god in the universe: “the very First and the Last.” This was the god who had made the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the god who had separated the light from the darkness, who determined the paths of the sun and the stars and who caused the moon to wax and wane.8 This god was unique in that it was not a tribal deity who had climbed to the top of a pantheon of other gods; there were no other gods. It was not connected to a particular tribe or city-state. It did not live inside a temple; it existed everywhere, in all creation, and beyond time and space. Although Zarathustra would come to call this god Ahura Mazda, meaning “the Wise Lord,” that was merely an epithet; this god had no name.

For Xenophanes and like-minded Greeks, belief in “one god” was based less on a theological argument than on their conception of the natural world as singular and immutable. After all, if nature is one, then god— “the Mind which shaped and created all things,” as Thales called it — must also be one. It was driven by their need for mathematical simplicity: If one is the origin of all numbers and the essence of mathematical unity—the monad, as the Pythagoreans termed it—then god must also be one. Finally, it was driven by their understanding of truth: If Plato was right that Truth, in its ideal, eternal form, is one, then god must also be one.

The Aten was already an important deity in Akhenaten’s family; his father, Amenhotep III, was associated with the god both before and after his death. But Akhenaten’s relationship with his god was unique; it was intimate. Akhenaten claimed to have “found the Aten.” His hymns to his god describe what can only be called a conversion experience—a theophany, or visible manifestation of god, in which the Aten spoke to him and revealed its nature. This experience left an indelible mark. For not long after his ascendance to the throne of Egypt, and at his god’s behest, Akhenaten single-handedly transformed the Aten from a minor deity of whom most Egyptians would have been only nominally aware to the chief god in the Egyptian pantheon, and then, a few years later, to the sole god in the universe. “Living Aten, there is no other except him!” the young pharaoh decreed.

Yet the Magi of Cyrus’s royal court who revived Zarathustra’s theology completely reimagined it, first by transforming Ahura Mazda’s six divine evocations into six divine beings who, along with Mazda, became known as the Amesha Spentas, or “Holy Immortals,” and second, and most dramatically, by transforming Zarathustra’s two primordial spirits—Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu—into two primordial deities: a good god named Ohrmazd (a contraction of Ahura Mazda), and an evil god named Ahriman. Zarathustran monotheism became Zoroastrian dualism.

Monotheism, it must be understood, is not defined as the sole worship of one god: that is called monolatry, and it is a fairly common phenomenon in the history of religions. Monotheism means the sole worship of one god and the negation of all other gods. It requires one to believe that all other gods are false. And if all other gods are false, any truth based on belief in those gods is also false. Indeed, monotheism rejects the very possibility of subjective truth,

However, the notion of a single god who encompasses within itself all of our virtues and vices, all of our qualities and attributes at once, simply made no sense to the ancient mind. How could one god be both mother and father? How could one god create both darkness and light? The ancients were perfectly willing to acknowledge the presence of such conflicting qualities in human beings. But they seemed to have preferred their gods to be neatly compartmentalized according to their distinctive attributes; all the better to beseech them for particular favors or needs.

“Though alone,” the pharaoh sang to his god, “you overflow in your forms…you rise and you shine, you depart and approach; of yourself you make millions of forms.” But that explanation did not seem to satisfy his subjects.

What the ancient mind seemed willing to accept was the existence of one all-powerful, all-encompassing “High God” who acted as the chief deity over a pantheon of lower gods who were equally worthy of worship. This belief is called henotheism, and it quickly became the dominant form of spiritual expression, not only in the Ancient Near East but in nearly every civilization in the world

In each case, in every empire, and throughout all of Mesopotamia, as the politics on earth changed, the politics of heaven changed to match. Just as in the face of fear and terror, the free citizens of Mesopotamia’s independent city-states abandoned their primitive democracy and voluntarily handed absolute power to their kings, so, too, did the citizens of heaven make one or another of the gods the unchallenged ruler over the rest. Theology shifted to conform to reality, and the heavens became an amplified projection of the earth.

Akhenaten not only destroyed the idols of the other gods; he forbade his artisans to carve the Aten into a statue or cast it as an idol. Officially, the Aten could be depicted only as a featureless disc with rays of light descending upon the earth like divine hands blessing all creation (the hands being the sole humanistic feature Akhenaten would abide). Although the great hymns written in Akhenaten’s time use the masculine singular pronoun “he” to speak of the Aten, the god displays no human qualities, exhibits no human attributes, and has no human emotions or motivations in these poems. And that, as much as anything else, explains why Akhenaten’s monotheistic movement, like that of Zarathustra, ultimately failed.

This explicit identification of a tribe with its national god had profound theological implications for ancient peoples. When Yahweh helped the Israelites crush the Philistines, it proved that the Israelite god was more powerful than the Philistine god, Dagon. But when the Babylonians destroyed the Israelites, the theological conclusion was that Marduk, the god of Babylon, was more powerful than Yahweh.

The problem is that no archaeological evidence has ever been unearthed to indicate the presence of Israelites in ancient Egypt. That is a remarkable statement considering the sophisticated bureaucracy of the Egyptian state in the New Kingdom (the period in which the Moses story is supposed to have taken place) and its legendary penchant for record keeping. What’s more, although the Egyptians regularly employed slave labor, the role and social status of a slave fell into one of three categories: slaves who had been captured in war, slaves who had sold themselves into slavery in order to pay a debt, and slaves who were, like indentured servants, duty bound to the state for a set period of time.

But perhaps the most confusing element of the Moses story has to do with the deity he encounters in the desert. Yahweh’s origins are an enigma. The name does not appear in any of the god lists of the Ancient Near East, an extraordinary omission considering the thousands of deities included in these lists. There are, however, two hieroglyphic references to Yahweh in Nubia dating to the New Kingdom period—one at the temple built by Akhenaten’s father, Amenhotep III, in the fourteenth century B.C.E., the other at a temple built by Rameses II in the thirteenth century B.C.E.—that mention something called “the land of the nomads of Yahweh.”

There are, for instance, two separate creation stories written by two different hands: Genesis chapter 1, in which man and woman are created together and simultaneously, and Genesis chapter 2, the much more popular Adam and Eve story, in which Eve is made from Adam’s rib. There are also two different flood narratives, though, unlike the two creation stories, these are woven together to create a single, conflicting account in which the flood lasts either forty days (Genesis 7:17) or one hundred fifty days (Genesis 7:24); the animals are brought aboard the Ark in either seven pairs of male and female (Genesis 7:2) or just one pair of every kind (Genesis 6:19); and the flood begins either seven days after Noah enters the Ark (Genesis 7:10) or immediately after he boards with his kin (Genesis 7:11–13).

Although the Yahwist material is about a hundred years older than the Elohist, the Elohist tradition represents the older deity. In fact, while we know next to nothing about the origins of Yahweh save that he was likely a Midianite god, El is one of the best-known and most well-documented deities in the Ancient Near East.

At best, they practiced monolatry, meaning they worshiped one god, El, without necessarily denying the existence of the other gods in the Canaanite pantheon.

The early Israelites worshiped El by many names—El Shaddai, or El of the Mountains (Genesis 17:1); El Olam, or El Everlasting (Genesis 21:33); El Roy, or El Who Sees (Genesis 16:13); and El Elyon, or El Most High (Genesis 14:18–24), to name a few. And while it may seem incongruous that the Israelites living in Canaan would have so eagerly adopted a Canaanite god as their own, the influence of Canaanite theology runs deep in the Bible—so deep, in fact, that it isn’t always so easy to draw a clear distinction ethnically, culturally, or even religiously between the Canaanites and the Israelites, certainly not in the early history of Israel (c. 1200–1000 B.C.E.).10

And while the Bible is replete with passages, mostly composed by the later Priestly writer, condemning the worship of all these other gods, those condemnations only prove that these gods were indeed worshiped by the Israelites, both regularly and, as their presence inside the Temple of Jerusalem indicates, officially. King Saul, the first king of Israel, even named two of his sons after the god Baal—Eshbaal and Meribbaal—alongside the son he named after Yahweh: Yehonatan, or Jonathan

As Moses stood atop “the mountain of god” to receive a new covenant from Yahweh (the Ten Commandments), meant to supplant Abraham’s covenant with El, the Israelites down below had already reverted to the worship of Abraham’s god, fashioning for themselves an idol in the shape of a golden calf—the primary symbol of El.

When Elyon gave the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of man, he fixed the borders of the people in accordance with the number of the gods; Yahweh’s own portion was his people. DEUTERONOMY 32:8–9

While there’s some evidence for the presence of a “Yahweh-only” sect in Jerusalem, the monarchy itself neither discouraged nor encouraged the worship of other gods; they merely focused their worship on their own national god. As the renowned biblical scholar Morton Smith wrote, “the attribute of the god of Israel [Yahweh] was merely that of the major god of any ancient near-eastern people…to be greater than the gods of their neighbors.”

And so all the historical arguments against belief in a single god were suddenly swept away by the overwhelming desire for this tiny, insignificant Semitic tribe to survive. “I am Yahweh, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil. I, Yahweh, am the maker of all these things” (Isaiah 45:6–7).

If a tribe and its god were indeed one entity, meaning that the defeat of one signaled the demise of the other, then for these monotheistic reformers suffering exile in Babylon, it was better to devise a single vengeful god full of contradictions than to give up that

The very testament of faith in Judaism, known as the Shema (“Hear O Israel, Yahweh is our god, Yahweh is one”), was composed after this transformational moment in Israelite history, as was most of what we know today as the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. Even the biblical material composed before the Exile—that is, the Yahwist and Elohist sources—was reworked and rewritten by the Priestly and Deuteronomistic writers after the Exile to reflect this newly found vision of One God.

Logos is a technical term in Greek philosophy meaning “reason” or “logic,” though even those definitions fall short of its true sense. For the Greeks, Logos was the underlying rational force of the universe. It is, in other words, divine reason—the mind behind creation. The Logos is what Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and Plato meant when they talked about the “one god” as the singular, unified principle steering all creation.

Indeed, the entire purpose of John’s gospel is to demonstrate how the abstract, eternal, divine essence of creation, which is both separate from God and one with God, was made manifest on earth in the form of Jesus Christ: “And the Logos became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).

As previously mentioned, the god-man is arguably the single most successful minimally counterintuitive concept in religious history. In fact, practically the only religion in the Near East without a firm tradition of deifying human beings was the religion of Jesus himself: Judaism.

For while all the other god-men of the Ancient Near East were thought to be one of many human manifestations of one of many gods, Jesus was considered the sole human manifestation of the only God in the universe.

In fact, in the polarized debate over whether Jesus was a man or a second god, and in the absence of a compromise between these two positions, which would not be reached until the middle of the fourth century C.E., a great many in the early Church accepted the view that not only were there two gods in the universe—one god named Yahweh and another god named Jesus—but these two gods were enemies.

At the same time, Marcion recognized Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible, as the creator of the world. In fact, he seems to have read the book of Genesis literally. But his reading only made Jesus and Yahweh seem more dissimilar. What kind of God, he wondered, would make such a wretched world—a world of want and destruction, of enmity and hate? Did not Jesus say that “you shall know them by their fruits?” (Matthew 7:16). If that was true, then the fruits of this God appeared to be rotten to the core.

A large number of Greek-speaking Christians, whom we today refer to loosely as Gnostics (from the Greek word gnosis, or “knowledge”), also differentiated between the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God of Jesus, though, unlike Marcion, most Gnostics refused to acknowledge Yahweh as the creator of the world. They believed creation was the work of a lesser god called the Demiurge, or “fashioner,” a deformed and imperfect deity who foolishly believed himself to be the only god in the universe.

Marcion, however, was undaunted. He returned home and began successfully preaching across Asia Minor, where he found an audience receptive to his doctrine of two gods. In fact, the ditheistic church that Marcion founded became one of the largest in all of Christianity. It thrived in large parts of Turkey and Syria right up until the fifth century C.E.

Attributing his success to the Christian God, Constantine put an end to the persecution of Christians in Rome and legalized Christianity upon his ascension to the throne. However, the new emperor had very little understanding of his adopted faith; he seems to have thought the religion was a kind of sun cult. What mattered most was that, as far as he understood, Christians believed in one God. The man who had fought so many battles to reinstate the rule of a single emperor over Rome seems to have instinctively recognized the political advantage of adopting a monotheistic religion system, though Constantine’s slogan was a bit different from the one favored by Ignatius and the Church leadership. He preferred “One God, One Emperor.”

When, a few years after Augustine’s death, the Church at the Council of Chalcedon (451 C.E.) affirmed its position that Jesus Christ, while truly God, was also truly human—“the same essence with the father as to his Godhead, and the same essence with us as to his manhood”—Christianity not only effectively annulled the postexilic Jewish conception of God as singular and indivisible, it surrendered itself completely to humanity’s oldest and most deeply embedded impulse.

The Jews would get their wish. When the walls were breached and the Persian army victorious, King Khosrow handed Jerusalem back to the Jews, who promptly unleashed a wave of death and destruction upon the city’s Christian inhabitants. The Byzantines rebounded. Heraclius reconstituted his army and forced the Sassanian troops out of the cities they had so recently conquered. In 630 C.E., he recaptured Jerusalem, sending the Persians back to their capital city, Ctesiphon, in defeat, but massacring the Jews who remained.

we arrive at the inevitable end point of the monotheistic experiment—the climax of the fairly recent belief in a single, singular, nonhuman, and indivisible creator God as defined by postexilic Judaism, as renounced by Zoroastrian Dualism and Christian Trinitarianism, and as revived in the Sufi interpretation of tawhid: God is not the creator of everything that exists. God is everything that exists

The ancient Arabs were already familiar with Allah, who was likely conceived as the Arabian equivalent of the Indo-European deity Dyeus, or its Greek counterpart Zeus: that is, as a sky god who steadily rose through the ranks of the Arab pantheon to become High God. But it’s unclear whether the Arabs thought of Allah as a personalized deity or as a kind of abstract spirit, somewhat akin to the divine force that the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians believed underpinned the universe.

And unlike the hundreds of other deities recognized by the ancient Arabs, Allah seems never to have been represented by an idol, which would make sense if he was perceived as an animating spirit without physical form.

They thought of Allah as a material being who, like Zeus, had sired both sons and daughters. Indeed, Allah’s three daughters—Allat, who was associated with the Greek goddess Athena; Manat, who was likely connected with the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar; and al-Uzza, who was the Arab equivalent of Aphrodite—played a central role in ancient Arab spirituality as Allah’s intermediaries.

First, he firmly embraced the exclusivist connotations of his monotheistic system. It wasn’t enough for the Arabs to believe that Allah was the sole God in the universe; they had to deny the existence of any other god. “Oh my people. Worship Allah. You have no god but Him!” (Surah 7:59).

After all, if God is indivisible, as tawhid demands, then he cannot be separated from his words. He is his words. Therefore, his words must be as eternal and divine, as unchanging and unchangeable as God himself is. So if the Quran happens to mention Allah’s hands or eyes or face, it means that Allah must literally have hands and eyes and a face. Never mind the theological twists and turns necessary to make sense of such a view (Does Allah have only two hands? Why not three, or a thousand? Would not two hands restrain or limit Allah’s all-encompassing power?)

It is that last attribute mentioned by Abu Hanifa—God’s creative power—in which the paradox is most spectacularly revealed. The issue is fairly straightforward: If God is indivisible, and God is Creator, how could there be any division between Creator and creation? Are they not necessarily one and the same?

The only way to make sense of the unity of the Creator is to accept the unity of all creation. In other words, if God is one, then God must be all.

If God is indivisible, then nothing can come into existence that isn’t also God. At the very least, Creator and creation must share the exact same eternal, indistinguishable, inseparable essence, meaning everything that exists in the universe exists only insofar as it shares in the existence of God. Therefore, God must be, in essence, the sum total of all existence.

Indeed, for most Sufis, the mistake of Christianity lies not in violating the indivisible nature of God by transforming God into a human being; rather, it lies in believing that God is only one particular human being and no other. According to Sufism, if God is truly indivisible, then God is all beings, and all beings are God.

God did not make us in his image; nor did we simply make God in ours. Rather, we are the image of God in the world—not in form or likeness, but in essence

There is a modern term for this conception of the divine: pantheism, meaning “God is all” or “all is God.” In its simplest form, pantheism is the belief that God and the universe are one and the same—that nothing exists outside of God’s necessary existence. As the pantheistic philosopher Michael P. Levine puts it: “Nothing can be substantially independent of God because there is nothing else but God.” In other words, what we call the world and what we call God are not independent or discrete. Rather, the world is God’s self-expression. It is God’s essence realized and experienced.

Either way this fundamental truth remains: All is One, and One is All. It is simply up to the individual to decide what “the One” is: how it should be defined, and how it should be experienced.

But perhaps we should consider the possibility that the entire reason we have a cognitive impulse to think of God as a divine reflection of ourselves is because we are, every one of us, God

As a believer and a pantheist, I worship God not through fear and trembling but through awe and wonder at the workings of the universe—for the universe is God. I pray to God not to ask for things but to become one with God. I recognize that the knowledge of good and evil that the God of Genesis so feared humans might attain begins with the knowledge that good and evil are not metaphysical things but moral choices. I root my moral choices neither in fear of eternal punishment nor in hope of eternal reward. I recognize the divinity of the world and every being in it and respond to everyone and everything as though they were God—because they are. And I understand that the only way I can truly know God is by relying on the only thing I can truly know: myself. As Ibn al-Arabi said, “He who knows his soul knows his Lord.”

It is no coincidence that this book ends where it began, with the soul. Call it what you want: whether psyche, per the Greeks; or nefesh, as the Hebrews preferred; or chi’i, as in China; or brahman in India. Call it Buddha Nature or purusa. Consider it comaterial with the mind, or coexistent with the universe. Imagine it reuniting with God after death, or transmigrating from body to body. Experience it as the seat of your personal essence or as an impersonal force underlying all creation

You are God.