The Problem of God and How Humans Have Tried to Solve it Across History

The “problem of God” is not God’s problem, it is humanity’s problem. Why is it a problem?—or perhaps better put, how is it a problem? This book addresses this double issue by asking three questions. Why and how does religion exist in the first place as a construct and what is it all about? What are some of the particulars, from antiquity to the present, across a panoply of cultures and civilizations, regarding how diverse human groups have wondered and worried about divinity? To what extent, while this is a theological narrative—exploring what humans have thought about what God (theos in Greek) is—is it actually an anthropological narrative: what are humans (anthropos in Greek) as a species? We are rational and irrational, guided by our minds and our hearts; we are supremely creative and incomparably destructive; our sense of obligation to forces beyond us with their own creative and destructive capabilities contends with our desire to be free of that sense of obligation—but then burdened with the responsibility of such freedom.