Each of Reza Aslan’s previous books made a lasting impression on me. God: A Human History is no different. It is an empowering study that relies on impeccable scholarship and yet reads with the lyricism and emotion of great literature. All the while, Aslan maintains a page-turning narrative that shows how we have made sense of God throughout history by assigning human attributes to our divine beliefs.

Aslan starts with the first humans of “Adam and Eve.” He explains how they performed burial rituals that sought to embrace an afterworld where the deceased took on spiritual forms. He shows how this idea of a transcendent soul in the afterlife has been part of every culture throughout human evolution. Then, with the birth of agriculture, the humanization of gods intensified as it was fitting to transfer the powers of the gods from heaven to earth so that humans could fulfill the harvest.

With the Sumerians’ invention of writing, humans had the ability to chronicle history, and with the power of writing came the “compulsion to humanize the divine.” This led to the widespread worship of idols. Each idol became a type of adobe where a spirit dwelt, often with a degree of superhuman powers. However, this super humanization of the gods reached a point of folly with the Greeks, casting doubts on the legitimacy of the divine.

The idea of monotheism didn’t emerge until the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten and later on the Iranian priest Zarathustra (founder of Zoroastrianism) experienced singular visions of god as a ubiquitous creator of the cosmos. Even though ancient civilizations believed in a “High God” that governed among their many gods, they had a hard time accepting the concept of an all-encompassing god.

Only by stripping the gods of their human qualities could the idea of a single god be elevated as the “creative substance underlying the universe.” But the evolution of a singular god depended on merging Abraham’s High God named “El” with Moses’s Midian God named “Yahweh.” With the upstart of Christianity, the “god-man” of Jesus only complicated the notion of how to understand the abstract, eternal, and divine essence of God. Such complication required the inception of the Trinity. It wasn’t until Muhammad received God’s final instruction to humankind that he was able to put a seal on Zoroastrian Dualism and Christian Trinitarianism in order to identify God/Allah as the only god.

For Aslan, Islam represents the totality of monotheism through the idea of tawhid, which seeks to understand God’s essence as a divine unity of oneness. The God of Islam resembles no created thing, nor do created things resemble God. This unified belief in God seeks to satisfy a oneness with Him, a starting and returning to God’s divinity, which is the sum of all things. To achieve this divine relationship, believers must dehumanize God and become one with the pure existence of an entity without name, essence, or personality.

Aslan arrives at a brilliant point where he makes clear that whether you believe in science or God, you rely on an understanding of the “animating spirit that underlies the universe.” Both science and God are essentially the same, both offering plausible or impossible platforms from which to carry out one’s belief, depending on your choice.

God: A Human History is provocative, fascinating, and earnest. Aslan steers us towards a more appreciative view of God’s origins and how we can develop a deeper relationship with God. He enables us to construct a picture of God that almost seems to take on the same direct access to the divinity in which Sufism strives to achieve. This is a book that reflects scholarship at its finest, but it’s also a brilliant piece of literature to understand God in a clearer and more inspiring way.

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Rating	4.5 (1162 ratings)
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Category	Agnosticism