One God versus many

[Belacqua]

multiple gods all with different purposes

To change the topic a little bit, it might be relevant to bring up the view, held by many historians, that monotheism allowed the conditions which make modern science possible. 

If the world is run by many gods, then the way the world works might vary from place to place, according to their local dictates. Or they might move around or compete with one another, changing the local laws of nature as they do so. 

Monotheism posits a single transcendence which holds the laws of nature consistent always and everywhere. For Christians, there is God the Father, who is the Ground of Being, and then there is Jesus, who (according to John 1:1) is the Logos. "Logos" is a Greek term, lifted from the Stoics and others, who used it to refer to the set of principles, order, and logic by which the world operates. 

Science depends on the metaphysical assumption that behind our subjective experiences of things, there is a "real" order to things which is universal and consistent. Truth isn't what I think it is in Tokyo after three glasses of wine, or what you think it is after a four-day video game binge. It is what a totally unsubjective viewer would hold to be true, after all personal desire, distortion, and ideology is removed. Since this is impossible for human beings, the ideal viewer for science, the viewpoint which science aspires to, is that of God. 

This is why Nietzsche holds that most of us aren't fully atheists yet. If we hold that there is a non-subjective transcendent capital-T truth over and beyond what people experience, then we are still believing in a monotheistic view of things. 

As always, I have to add that this is not the angry changeable sky-daddy God which people here argue against. This is the God of the theologians, which is what educated people talk about. Remember that it was Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, who began to write again about Aristotle's empirical epistemology, and posited that since God was omnipresent and the world acted through his Logos, that the study of how the natural world works constitutes the study of how God acts. This set the stage for the revival of empirical research in the work of Leonardo and others. Not that science had shut down before that -- far from it! -- but Thomas provided new metaphysical grounding for why empirical science was good. It also allowed a revival of what Neoplatonists like Hypatia of Alexandria had taught -- that the study of mathematics was the most direct way of knowing the Divine Mind -- short of direct revelation.