We all have our theories, I'm sure. What interests me, however, is what people who believe in the God of today think about this, assuming they agree that there was some evolution from those gods to this one. (Or do you agree? If you think this God is sui generis, then why do you think so many make the mistake of seeing an intellectual lineage between belief in the early gods and belief in this one?)

This is what has been bothering me lately and maybe you can help me with this: We have an image, correct or not, of ancient or early "theology," if you will, as being rather concrete. The volcano blows, therefore, the god who controls the volcano must be angry; we must propitiate the god to appease his anger and make the volcano stop blowing. The Greeks and Romans, if you read their myths and epic poetry, had just such an idea about the gods. Judaism apparently also grew out of a tradition in which you made offerings to God to keep him happy. Prayer is a direct descendant of this view of god as able to be bargained with. Clearly, our ancestors viewed God, or the gods, as persons of a sort--not humans, of course, but as intentional beings.

We now know that volcanos can't be propitiated by spilling chicken blood or what have you--or most of us in the modern world know this. And many of those who believe in God no longer feel comfortable using the word "person" to describe it. They've become very sophisticated in their view of God's intentional stance and "mind." They are careful to remove as many crumbs of personhood as possible from their description of God so as not to be mistaken for the primitives, if you will, who literally believed the gods heard them with something like ears and could be bribed with things the gods "liked" or "wanted" into not doing things that harmed humans and their property.

So what bothers me is this: If this sophisticated modern God is real, where was it for all those years of human history when people were worshiping things that weren't really God? Why is this age privileged with the first view into the real God? What's so special about the modern theist that he or she can see this real God when all those other poor saps couldn't? Looked at another way, how can the modern theist be certain that they're not just as much of a sap as all those pious ancestors?