Introduction to the Old Testament

Before there was everything there was nothing. No people, no Earth, no sun or stars, no matter or energy, no space or time, no laws of nature like E = MC². Now you can’t get the stupendously huge and complex universe that we have today from absolutely nothing whatsoever, so there must have actually been something, at least some kind of potential or spark that got the creation process up and running. To determine what that first cause might have been, with enough information and know-how, you could work backward on cause-and-effect relationships—the purview of science. You would however eventually reach a point in the cause-and-effect backward chronology where there was an effect without a cause. You would then have what philosophers call a brute fact. At some point that’s just the way it was; no further revelation is possible.

       For the Abrahamic religions that brute fact is God. (For now I’m ignoring the possibility that the universe itself has always existed in one form or another, which would make the existence of a creator God superfluous.) But why couldn’t God have also been caused or created? To sidestep this bothersome possibility and claim a first cause, the Abrahamic faiths simply posit a supernatural being that was uncreated and has existed from eternity past. He just was and he just is—period. Why do Jews, Christians and Muslims accept such an unrestrained explanation? Because it’s revealed in books they believe were inspired by this very God. Jews say it’s their book, the Hebrew Bible (called the Old Testament by Christians). Christians partially agree but say an additional volume called the New Testament completes the accounting. Muslims also partially agree—sort of. They say that parts of the Hebrew Bible and parts of the New Testament were originally inspired by God, but those scriptures had become corrupted, which was rectified by an end-all revelatory volume of their own, the Qur’an.

       All three books come with the claim of being inspired by God and have a lot to say about God. By reading directly from the texts and between the lines the Abrahamic religions have established a common set of attributes for God: God has existed eternally; there was never a time when he did not exist. God is immutable; he was the same in the eternal past as he is today. God has no limitations to what he knows, what he can do, how good and just he is, and where his presence can be felt. God created everything else that exists out of nothing. This is quite a gobsmacking set of attributes for something that just is.

       Modern science might be closing in on a very different brute fact that may have been responsible for the beginning of everything, one that is spectacularly simpler than the God of Abraham. Hint: It involves a quantum state that might have always existed. This will be discussed later in the book. For now let’s start evaluating the believability of the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths. The best way to begin the process is to critically evaluate the book that started it all. The Old Testament makes a lot of claims about God, all written thousands of years ago by people who lived in a culture overflowing with illiteracy and pagan polytheism. They are claims of God’s existence, not proof of his existence, unless the Old Testament provides truly compelling evidence.

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Unless otherwise noted I’ll be referencing the King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible throughout this book. Not because it’s the best translation available (it isn’t), but because it’s the most widely used translation in America.¹ Occasionally I’ll quote from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). Very few, if any, arguments I’ll be making will depend on the version of the Bible that is used.

Notes:

1. Based on a 2014 report by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture (IUPUI: Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis), 55% of Americans most often read the King James Version, which far outnumbered the 19% who read the second most popular translation, the New International Version (NIV).