When something isn't fully understood, the gap which stretches between our minds and the truth can be filled with anything at all.
It is a bridge of adultery, monsters, gods, ghosts and myths: atheists contend that man invented god precisely to prevent any other idea being poured into the chasm. I think I said before that the progression of science continually takes bites out of the body of god, and pares down his territory until he is an endangered species.
The atheist bible, when somebody is brave enough to write it, it will state that man created god in his own image and not the other way around.
(Modern atheism is gradually accumulating its own list of tenets and literature. It used to be defined simply through its absence of belief in a deity or deities. Now atheists proselytise, the most significant example of this in England being the advertisements on buses which state that there is probably no God. Disparate concepts of atheism will one day be laid down in a book of severe gravitas.)
Lack of understanding about the way the universe works prompted the birth of polytheism - one god who delivers thunder (and whose anger must be appeased); one god who regulates crop growth (and must be pleased); one god who distributes sickness to those who have sinned (and so those who are ill are heretical) and so on. By Occam's razor, it makes sense to reduce the ever-growing crowd of beings, multiplying so rapidly that they press at the edges of the world, to a single one.
There is another advantage conferred by stating that monotheism can do the job once carried out by an uncountable number of polytheistic inferiors: the synthesis of an infinity of reticulated images of the creator of numbers (who is distinct from the creator of fish; who is distinct from the creator of planets; who is distinct from the god of war, who is....) weaved into the likeness of the monotheistic rainbow.
It takes an artist of rare genius to depict such a creature: at once meek, terrible, loving, jealous, calm, vengeful, simple, taut, light, horrible, human, vain, comprehensible, nihilistic, glorious, appalling. Where does a composite image of sharp contrast come from? In what furnace is it born?
What machine, similarly, churns out the composite, dizzying images of the nightmare, where a horrendous snake sucking greedily upon the putrefying corpse of a lion, twisted in and out of the dead creature's ribcage like a long, sickening thread, represents the unfulfilled desire for carnality?
The machine is the same one, of course. What is a complicated image of monotheism is the psychotic implosion which causes us to wake up as though fitted with electrodes. I am unsure whether art begot the nightmare, or the other way around - but the visibility of terrifying monotheism and the vulnerability of the sleeping human have sustained each other for millennia.
