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read Genesis 1 as history or science, so the question of credibility does not arise. Which is fine, but while such worries are pseudo problems due to category mistakes in genre analysis, the trouble with not trying to relate the language to reality is that one misses out on coming to grips with the absurd folk-philosophy of language running through the myth.
    For many biblical commentators and philosophers, God does not have any form and only appears in human form. Nice thought, but unfortunately this is not what the Bible teaches in texts where the humanoid form of Yahweh is assumed to be his true form (e.g., Exod. 33:20–23), the one he is assumed to have even in heaven. The Christian philosophical reinterpretation of this is nothing more than a strategy of evasion by people who cannot admit to themselves that they, too, no longer find it possible to believe in “God” (aka Yahweh), any more than they believe in Zeus. The Greek philosophers did the same thing with the Greek gods when they began to find their representations too crude. Believers will continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
    YAHWEH'S MIND
    The people who wrote the Old Testament also made the fatal mistake of constructing Yahweh with what today appears to be a rather unflattering psychological (cognitive, conative, and affective) profile. 12
    First of all, the mind of the god of the Bible exhibits a library of provably errant knowledge. When Yahweh speaks in the first person in the texts of the Old Testament, the deity is often depicted as making statements that include references to historical, cosmographical, geographical, biological, and other types of phenomena that we today know are not factual. What betrays the all-too human origin of the divine mind is the simple fact that the ideas Yahweh entertains about reality are hardly better than the superstitions and misconceptions in the indigenous knowledge systems of the people who worshipped him. 13
    Thus Yahweh himself believes that the universe was literally created over a period of six days (Exod. 31:17) and that there is an ocean above the stars behind a firmament from where rainwater falls to the earth (Gen. 1:6; Job 38:34). 14 He also believes that the landmass of the earth floats on water (Deut. 5:8; Ps. 24:2) and that there is literally a place underground where the dead live as shades according to their nationalities (Num. 16:23–33; Deut. 32:22; Job 38:16–17; Isa. 7:11; Ezek. 26:19–20; 32:18–32; Amos 9:2). Yahweh also believes in mythical creatures like the Leviathan, Rahab, Behemoth, sea monsters, flying dragons, demons of the field, malevolent spirits of the night, etc. (cf. Job 40–41; Isa. 30:6; Lev. 17:7; Isa. 34:14; Amos 9:3; etc.). He even assumes that thought issues from the heart and emotions from the kidneys (Jer. 17:10; etc.).
    Yahweh also believes in the historicity of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, all as depicted in the biblical traditions, at least according to the texts in which he speaks to them and in subsequent stories in which his character refers back to them as though they were real people (see, for example, Ezek. 14). But if these people as they are depicted are fictions (as scholars have established), how can Yahweh—speaking to fictions and referring to them as reality—not himself be fictitious? Surely such factually errant beliefs on the part of Yahweh prove this god cannot exist as depicted. 15 Even if we insisted that what we encounter in these texts are simply the errant beliefs of humans and not a god's own thoughts, we have lost any grounds for believing that the character of Yahweh has any extratextual counterpart. Who would Yahweh be without Adam, Abraham, or Moses as depicted in the texts anyway?
    But there is more about the divine mind that seems rather absurd. It is not just Yahweh's beliefs about the world that sometimes seem all too human. The deity also exhibits all-too-human needs or desires that drive him obsessively in pursuit of