On the Non-Appearance of God

In 2014 I published a history of atheism, Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan). And I remain fascinated with the fact that God has so often been conspicuous in His absence. So I put together a list of some of the most important moments in which He proved a no show and handed them over to GPT 5, which now claims sufficient familiarity with my style to be able to craft an essay in “a wry, amused, idea-forward Stephens tone.” (I like “idea forward.”) Here is the result: idea entirely mine, examples all mine, most of the actually wordings the AI’s (though presumably selected through an analysis of my vocabulary), and style intended to be mine—though probably even more “wry” and “amused” than I might have managed.  And now I can spend the rest of the morning reading the news or going for a walk or whatever we humans are supposed to do in this AI-ified world.

      God is wonderfully real in the early pages of Genesis. Not metaphorically real, not “felt in the heart” real—really real. He walks, He talks, He strolls through the garden in the evening breeze like a homeowner checking the irrigation system. [Note: this was the worst of the AI’s wordings.] He behaves more like a Mesopotamian super-being than an ineffable First Cause. He even needs to ask questions (“Adam, where are you?”), which is odd behavior for an omniscient being but endearing in its way.

      By Exodus, He has grown in size and in special effects. Now He’s a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night—a perfectly designed GPS for nomads who, inconveniently for the story, left behind no archeological trace. Forty years in the Sinai and they seem to have left less evidence than a pack of Scouts on a weekend hike. But the God character is still very much present. During that alleged wilderness sojourn, smoke is said to have risen from Yahweh’s tent at mealtimes, as if the Almighty were frying something.

Yahweh on a 4th-century BCE silver coin

      And then—He recedes. Slowly. Quietly. Almost as if the writers got more sophisticated, or more embarrassed, or more human.

      In the later books of the Hebrew Bible, God is a distant rumble. The prophets claim to hear Him, but He’s no longer dropping by with dietary instructions. By the time you reach Ecclesiastes, the presence has thinned so dramatically it’s hard to distinguish the text from an early entry in existentialism. “Utterly meaningless,” says the Old Man. “All is meaningless.” Not quite Dawkins, but you can smell atheism brewing. God appears mostly as cosmic background radiation—a power whose existence cannot be verified or denied, and whose intentions certainly cannot be deciphered.

      Then come the Gospels, and the silence becomes deafening. Jesus talks constantly about “the Father,” “the One who sent me,” but the Father never shows. The only time we’re told He speaks is in a voice from heaven so brief and ambiguous it could have been thunder. And then, at the moment when Jesus—if anyone—deserves divine company, that company fails to materialize.

       “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Whatever your theology, those words land like a stone. In Christianity’s central scene, God is again conspicuously absent. Not a cameo. Not even a whisper. The script calls for the deity, and He doesn’t show.

      And it’s not just Western religion that gives us this disappearing act. The Buddha—ever the minimalist—was asked about God and shrugged (in the gentlest, most enlightened way possible). The question, he said, “does not edify.” Which is Pali for: This isn’t helping, and also we have no evidence.

      Across these traditions, a pattern emerges: humanity stumbling toward the divine and finding mainly silence, or smoke, or absence with very good lighting. What begins as a tangible deity—walking, talking, barbecuing—dissolves into metaphor, then mystery, then a question that, as the Buddha reminds us, doesn’t especially improve us to ask.

      And perhaps that’s the charm of the whole saga. For thousands of years, we’ve been trying to see someone who, by every textual clue, isn’t in the room. The poignancy—and the comedy—lies in the fact that we keep imagining Him anyway.