Why "Yahweh" and not Zeus?

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In an episode of the BBC comedy/drama “After Life” (created by one of Britain’s staunchest atheists, Ricky Gervais), a conversation about God/gods develops between Gervais’s character and an office coworker. Gervais is obviously made out to look like the sensible one, and his opponent a deluded fool, but it does address a question that I’m still trying to formulate a definitive answer for. Why the God of Christianity, and not Zeus (or Osiris, or Allah, or the Great Spirit, etc.)?

Please bear in mind the link below contains dialogue that would be considered extremely offensive, but I want to state clearly that I’m not on Gervais’s side at all. I simply would like to know how a genuine theologian would counter Gervais’s argument, as opposed to someone deliberately written to come off as an idiot.

After Life - God - YouTube
 
I believe that Chirst suffered His Passion to help us to have faith in Him and trust Him, to make us understand that God loves us infinitely, that God is good and mercifull and that God is near to us so that we may totally trust Him and open our heart to Him, be in communion with Him and be saved.
The christian faith is unique because it gives a very concrete and unique meaning to the concept of divine love: in fact God’s love actualizes in the acceptance of a terrible physical suffering; the God of the christian faith loves us so much that He is willing to suffer a painful death in order to save us. In the christian faith, love is not only a theoretical and vague concept; Christ’s Passion is a clear and concrete realization of the concept of divine love which teaches us what is the true meaning of love.
The christian concept of God and of divine love is the highest possible concept. I find that the idea itself that God loves us so much that He chose to assume the human nature and accepted to suffer crucifission in order to save us, expresses such a high concept of God and of divine love that it can comes only from God and it is certainly a truth. This concept is fully convincing for me, it proves itself by itself and makes superfluous any other arguments .
 
What Catholics believe God is is far more comparable to the “philosopher’s god” of the ancient Greeks (the One, the Unmoved Mover, the First Cause, the All, the Good, and the Boundless) than Zeus or any other member of the then commonly worshipped pantheon.
 
The question is actually addressed by Dr Taylor Marshall in his book Thomas Aquinas in 50 pages. He talks about how the early pagan authors talk about a “supreme God” that created the “Lesser Gods (i.e. Zeus,etc.).” I would highly recommend his book if you want to think about God in a rational way and have a deeper understanding of who God is. He also talks about Atheists love of using the moral argument against God and how best to understand it and fight against it. He also discusses the essa = essentia which is the understanding of ‘where’ God comes from. None of the atheist arguments are new and the church doctors do an amazing job of obliterating those arguments.
 
Christ is the only deity whose, birth, life, deth and resurrection is foretold.
 
I’ll be sure to pick up a copy of that book!

All the same, the concept of a supreme God creating lesser gods poses another conundrum, in that it contradicts the very first Commandment, i.e. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Why would God create an entire pantheon of deities (and more besides) if He was going to forbid anyone from worshipping them?
 
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FatherMerrin said:
Please bear in mind the link below contains dialogue that would be considered extremely offensive,
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Why so offended? I was expecting a bunch of bad language or a disrespectful exchange. It was just two people debating their beliefs. That is a healthy thing
 
It’s very simple really.
  1. There is no evidence for Zeus.
There is more than enough evidence for the God of the Bible.
  1. Zeus didn’t create the universe.
The God of the Bible created the universe. “In the beginning there was nothing and darkness was on the face of the deep… and god said let there be light!” Gen 1:1. The creation of the universe from nothing is the greatest miracle in the Bible.
  1. Zeus himself is dependent on another for his own creation.
God said to Moses, “I AM WHO AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” Exodus 3:14

The God of the Bible’s existence doesn’t depend on anyone or anything.
  1. Morality, Zeus is most likely a figment of human imagination due to him being similar to a human. Human lusts, human greeds, and human envys. Zeus is a rapist and an adulterer.
The God of the Bible gave us the Ten Commandments the cornerstone of morality. Jesus himself is perfect.
 
FatherMerrin said:
Allah, or the Great Spirit,
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The Church considers Allah to be the God of Abraham per the Catechism (CCC 841).

Many Native Americans’ conception of the Great Spirit was also very similar to the Christian God, who created the world and gave life. Missionaries noted this similarity in their conversion work.

These conceptions of God are very different from Zeus and other mythological gods, who basically acted like humans with superpowers and had whole ranges of human traits and faults.

Edited to add, I think sometimes people who are not so familiar with God and have not read about comparative religion don’t really see a difference between our God and these made-up Gods, because to them all forms of God are equally fictional. They’d also probably see some of God’s actions in the OT as being similar to stuff Zeus or Odin might do, because they don’t appreciate the nuance or lesson or, for Christians, the foreshadowing going on.
 
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JMMJ said:
Why so offended? I was expecting a bunch of bad language or a disrespectful exchange. It was just two people debating their beliefs. That is a healthy thing
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I was once posted a link to an article that the moderators felt contained “sacrilegious material,” although I tried to clarify in the same post that I wasn’t agreeing with or supporting any of the content. Because of the misunderstanding, I was banned. That’s why I had to go the extra mile this time to make sure my intent was crystal-clear.
 
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One playful concept that I realized after learning Jesus is God is that in Greek Theology God is a foreigner, while with Christianity, God grants us friendship, which is why (as a Mexican), we get to call him, “Hey-Zeus.”

Thanks for asking the question, and thanks be to God! I have been waiting years to share that line!
 
With you first couple of comments, I can already visualize Pandora emerging from her box.
 
The bottomline is that the Greek pantheon does not make sense. The Greek gods act in capricious and immoral ways. St Augustine shows this extensively in the City of God. One of his striking statements is that Felicitas, being the goddess of happiness should be all anyone needs, why bother with the other gods?
 
FatherMerrin said:
In an episode of the BBC comedy/drama “After Life” (created by one of Britain’s staunchest atheists, Ricky Gervais), a conversation about God/gods develops between Gervais’s character and an office coworker. Gervais is obviously made out to look like the sensible one, and his opponent a deluded fool, but it does address a question that I’m still trying to formulate a definitive answer for. Why the God of Christianity, and not Zeus (or Osiris, or Allah, or the Great Spirit, etc.)?

Please bear in mind the link below contains dialogue that would be considered extremely offensive, but I want to state clearly that I’m not on Gervais’s side at all. I simply would like to know how a genuine theologian would counter Gervais’s argument, as opposed to someone deliberately written to come off as an idiot.

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His argument is that if one can accept that God has always been around, then the good world could just a well always have been around. There are people that believe that there is no creator. Of course the Abrahamic religions believe in creation ex nihilo by God.
 
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Science doesn’t suggest that this planet, the universe, etc has always been around. I thought the steady-state theory wasn’t that widely accepted anymore.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Science doesn’t suggest that this planet, the universe, etc has always been around. I thought the steady-state theory wasn’t that widely accepted anymore.
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Many theories exist in the scientific community. One that was strong was Big Bang later augmented with one or another inflation theory, but then there were incompatibilities there. Big Bounce was theorized also, and more recently, modified GUP (generalized uncertainty principle) which is a cyclical model.
 
In my opinion, as an atheist, all gods are equally likely to exist in so far as those believing in them do not make testable claims. So a god who has announced to a prophet that a disaster will happen on a particular day (and it doesn’t) is less likely to exist than a god who is said to have created everything in some way and does not intervene in the world. Sometimes two people will say they believe int he same god but attribute different qualities to the god so that it is unclear whether they believe in the same god. For example I would say that the God of young-earth creationists certainly does not exist but that I cannot disprove the existence of the God of Catholics.
 
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