If
you’re a Christian in a Western country, you can find an abundance of
information about the common worldviews of the day. You’ll find massive numbers
of arguments and counter-arguments for apologetics against atheism,
postmodernism and to a lesser extent Mormonism and Islam. (Stand to Reason has
some really good material on this.)
There’s
just one problem: If you don’t live in the West and you’re talking to people
with a different worldview than these, you don’t have a lot to work with. I discovered
this when I lived in Taiwan and started talking to people who followed a
polytheistic form of Buddhism. There’s not a whole lot of modern apologetics
directed at polytheism.
But the
earliest Christians were surrounded by polytheists. It’s no surprise then, that
early apologists were more helpful than later ones in dealing with this
challenge. (I found Tertullian’s arguments against Marcion particularly
helpful.) The following is my attempt to formulate a strategy for debates with
polytheists.
On the
surface, the claim that there is one God and the claim that there are many gods
seem pretty similar. But the differences go deeper than basic math. Actually,
the type of being posited by monotheists is completely different from the type
of beings posited by polytheists.
Monotheism
holds that there is a single being who created everything else in existence,
who is infinitely powerful, all-knowing and completely good. This being has
always existed and will always exist and cannot in any way be diminished. This
God is also a person (not an impersonal force) and thus is capable of making
free choices and communicating with people. In short, the God of all
monotheistic religions is the supreme being – the greatest being in existence,
by definition.
In
polytheism, however, gods are like humans only greater. They are extremely
powerful but not infinitely powerful; each controls an area of life, but some
can impinge on others’ areas, since life is complicated. For example, the Greek
god Ares was the god of war, but other gods like Zeus also influenced battles. The
gods were still way more powerful and more knowledgeable than human beings, so
it was important to be on their good side. In most polytheistic systems, the
gods are involved in the creation of the world, but it’s sort of a team effort.
(The creation stories vary between religions.) Gods in polytheistic systems
also tend not to be eternal. Most polytheistic religions have myths explaining
how the gods came to be. Thus, polytheistic gods are really powerful, but
they’re not infinite like the monotheistic God is. It’s just a different
concept.
Actually,
it’s logically impossible for more than one being to fit the monotheistic
characterization of God. Monotheists define God as the greatest possible being
(or at a minimum, the greatest existent being). There cannot be two greatest
beings, by definition.
Another
way of thinking about this is by looking at the idea of omnipotence. There
cannot be more than one omnipotent being. To illustrate this, let’s try to imagine
two “omnipotent” beings with the (very creative) names A and B. A intends to
move a rock to the north, while at the same moment, B intends to move it to the
south. Where does the rock go? If it goes to the north, B is not omnipotent,
but if it goes to the south, A is not omnipotent. If the forces cancel each
other out so that the rock does not move, neither being is omnipotent. The only
way around this is for A and B to agree on everything all the time, in which
case either one is subservient or they’re actually the same being.
So if I
were going to have a conversation with a polytheist, I’d start by asking
whether a being that fits the monotheistic definition of God exists. If the
polytheist is inclined to say no, you can pull out all the arguments for God’s
existence that have been articulated by really smart people elsewhere.
But
it’s possible that they’ll say, “Yes, your God exists, but my gods exist, too.”
At this point, I don’t think it’s necessary to prove that the polytheistic
deities don’t exist. We just need to persuade them to worship our God instead
of the polytheistic deities.
It’s
logically possible that there is a single omnipotent, omniscient,
omnibenevolent, etc. being (God) and also lesser supernatural being with real
but limited powers (gods). Many early Christians actually held this view. They
thought the Roman gods were actually demons.
Note
that this view is not henotheism. Henotheism is the belief that multiple gods
exist but the group one is part of worships only one. It places the worshipped
god and the non-worshipped gods on the same level. In contrast, a view that
places the worshipped God in a different category than the non-worshiped gods
is still monotheism, because it attributes to only one being the traits
ascribed to the monotheistic God. In fact, arguably the polytheistic gods
shouldn’t even be called “gods” on this view, since they are no longer on top
of the metaphysical food chain.
Next
question: Why should anyone give up the gods they’ve been worshipping and
worship ours instead? I have some ideas about that, but since this post is
already pretty long, that will have to wait for part 2.
In the
meantime, for those of you who have experience with evangelism in polytheistic
cultures: How do you go about it? I like my approach, but I don’t really have
anyone to try it out with, so I’d be really interested in hearing about your
experiences.
And for those of you who don't, the distinction between the God of monotheism and the gods of polytheism is still relevant. It refutes the atheist claim that atheists reject belief in God for the same reason monotheists reject belief in, say, the Greek gods. But, of course, the kind of being in question here is completely different. This also answers the claim that Christianity is just a rehashing of older myths about dying and rising gods. Christianity presents God as a fundamentally different type of being than do the myths it was supposedly based on. Thus, the distinction here is relevant even within Western culture.
