Where Did God Go? Bible Old Testament Analysis

[Blenton]

Reading over the bible (old testament), I was surprised that god apparently 'talked' to people all the time and yet he is now mysteriously absent. One other thing I noticed also is that as the 'story' continued, encounters with god decreased more and more while on the other hand population increased rapidly.

Could it be that god does not have omnipresence since keeping track of the billions of people on the planet today is too much?

 

[Cyrus]

Your question is framed in such a way that the existence of god is a known fact - this is not true.

 

[Gwilim]

This is what you get for arbitrarily picking a mythology and believing in it.

 

[Blenton]

Yeah well, to ask the question we have to assume god exists.

 

[Gwilim]

Not just that but a very specific conception of God. About the crudest one imaginable.

Ask a silly question get a silly answer: Gott is tot!

 

[Moridin]

The reason is that when you write a politically motivated piece of propaganda to sway people to accept your dominion, more often than not, you exaggerate.

There has actually been 66 declared miracles in Lourdes, where an impressionable young girl claim to have seen an apparition of the virgin Mary. Thousands upon thousands of pilgrims make the journey to Lourdes every year to wallow in the water that is claimed to have healing properties. Quite unsurprisingly, the "miracles" are always little things that might have gotten better anyways. No sudden regrown of a severed limb has been observed. Equally unsurprisingly, there are probably as many post hoc rationalizations for the lack of miracles in modern times as there are pilgrims that were not cured by the waters at Lourdes.

A typical post hoc rationalization is that too much miracles would remove the free will of humans to accept or reject god, but this contradicts Romans 1:20 that states that "For since the creation of the world God's invisible attributes-his eternal power and divine nature-have been understood and observed by what he made, so that people are without excuse." One of the major challenges facing Abrahamic theology in the coming years is to find an intellectually respectable position that does not fall into the irrational maelstrom of anti-scientific extremism, but also does not succumb to the encroaching swamp of liberal theology, where everything is mere symbolism.

From a materialist perspective, "gods" did not go anywhere since they did not exist as supernatural entities from the start, and such an "intellectually respectable" position alluded to above is a fantasy.