One fewer God?

https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/p/just-one-fewer-god

This piece has been making the rounds. It makes some reasonable points. It is indeed true that many atheists make bad arguments and/or fail to understand their opponents' positions (the same is true of many theists, of course).

Nonetheless, the "one fewer God" argument is better than the author suggests.

If you ask most monotheists why they don't believe in Zeus or Hera, you will often get responses like:

1. There is no good evidence of their existence.
2. Many of the stories about them are implausible or contradictory.

Brief reflection suggests these same points are readily deployed against the monotheistic God of the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran! On top of that, the God envisioned by most monotheists has the additional hard-to-prove attributes of omnipotence and complete benevolence. At least believers in Zeus don't have to deal with the Problem of Evil and the Paradox of Omnipotence! The "One Fewer God" argument helpfully directs our attention to the common weaknesses of monotheism and the polytheism it largely supplanted - and the ways in which the the former is even harder to defend than the latter.

Serious theistic philosophers have responses to these arguments. But my point is not that "One Fewer God" definitively resolves debates about theism (it doesn't!), but that it's a useful opening gambit, particularly for people who haven't thought seriously about the issues involved before.

I should add that debates about the existence of God are logically distinct from debates about the social and psychological utility of religious belief (e.g. - claims that belief in God incentivizes moral behavior, gives life meaning, etc.). It could be the case that theism is false, but socially valuable, just as there may also be other situations where false beliefs might be socially useful. "One Fewer God" is much more effective as an argument against the truth of theism than as an argument against its social value.