Are all gods literary creations?

Yes. Completely. Totally. Irrevocably. Gods are human texts — they are artifacts of narrative consciousness, projections born of fear, hope, pattern-recognition, and the singularly human inability to accept that we are temporary sacks of meat walking around on a wet rock for a century or less and then we rot.

This isn’t to contend that there isn’t a God. Notwithstanding the ardent and utterly sincere convictions of devout believers and pur-et-dur atheists alike, nobody really knows. Faith is faith, not knowledge. That’s kind of the point.

But let’s be clear: the gods we’ve created — our conceptions of deities — are stories. And stories are survival tools. And survival tools don’t have to be true to be useful.

What we call “God” is — at root — a metaphor that got completely out of hand. It started as “something big must be making the thunder,” and it turned into 13th-century scholastic theology, forever wars and televangelists in rhinestone suits talking about seed money. You can track it. Like the evolution of a meme. Fan fiction for the cosmic unknown.

And here’s the tragicomedy of it: we are meaning-intoxicated animals. We can’t not make stories. We assign agency to everything — weather, disease, luck, death — because randomness is somehow unbearable. And so we invented gods in the same way we invented narrative arc: beginning, middle, end, justice. You need a god to make the story feel like it ends on purpose with the ultimate defeat of the evildoers (them) and high-fives all around for the good guys (us).

If you look across cultures, gods begin to resemble nothing so much as the people who invented them. The Greek gods are horny, jealous, violent narcissists. The Christian God is a strict, all-seeing Father figure — like a cosmic principal with omniscient hall passes. The Hindu gods are avatars of moral and metaphysical complexity — a polyphonic reality rendered into countless manifestations and local forms.

Ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes nailed it half a millennium before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth:

If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods’ bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.

As it is, each god is a kind of ventriloquism. We create them, and then they speak back to us in the voices we gave them.

Oh, look! God said this land is ours. Somebody press those words into a damp clay tablet with a cut reed and make it official. Now we can expel the trespassing infidel who worship false gods. As we slaughter, rape and maim, we’re piously heeding the wedge-shaped marks baked in the hot kilns of the Lord. Pay no attention, Dorothy, to the man behind the stylus.

“You can safely assume,” as writer Anne Lamott noted in her 1994 book Bird by bird, “that you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

A universal coincidence. So yes, the gods are literary, not literal. They are created in language, shaped by metaphor, dependent on context and tweaked with every new generation.

More to the point — they behave exactly like literature. They change with interpretation. They vary by translation. They are debated in seminar rooms and churches and synagogues and temples and mosques and comment threads. They’re full of contradictions and retcons and narrative conveniences. They suffer from continuity errors and unreliable narrators. Sometimes pages and whole chapters are ripped out of holy narratives, only to reappear in altered forms later.

People live and die for the gods. Pray to them. Worship them. But that doesn’t make them real. That just makes the ideas behind them powerful.

The fact that something is made up doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. Anyone living in the Age of Trump can surely testify to this. And that’s the core human dilemma. The things we invent are often the very things that make life livable. Music. Literature. Justice. Love. God.

But there is a difference between invention and discovery. Between what is imagined and what is discovered.

Gravity was discovered. The second law of thermodynamics was discovered. The creator in Genesis (the book of Bereshit in the Torah and the deity described in various surahs of the Quran)? That’s an authored character, composed and revised by redactors and scribes and councils — just like Homer’s Odysseus, just like modern stage interpretations of Hamlet.

So yes: all gods are literary creations. We authored them. We gave them backstories. We gave them moral codes. We gave them dominion over light and dark, fish and fowl, time and fate. And then we turned around and said: “This is not a mere story. This is Truth.”

That’s the twist. That’s the human move. We make something up, and then a generation or two later we forget we made it up. It was good for Paul and Silas, it’s good enough for me. To believe in a god is to participate in a fiction so immersive and so absolute that the very category of “fiction” becomes invisible.

As post-Impressionist painter Henri Rousseau is said to have mused: “God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favour.”

Not all fiction is false. But all gods are fiction.