God: the biography, by Alexander Waugh

The unauthorised life of a child-murderer

If, as Robert Ingersoll, the wry Victorian refuter of Alexander Pope, commented, "An honest God is the noblest work of man", then any account of Him has to be partly a work of introspective psychotherapy. Pope put it this way: "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man."

Alexander Waugh purports to begin his search for information about the monotheistic God of Judaism, Islam and Christianity in a spirit of open-minded enquiry. Actually, a pretty overt apostate agenda underpins most of his observations. Did God have parents? A wife? Was (is?) He (or She) male or female? Waugh has dug up a surprising amount of evidence for God's femininity, at least in early forms.

Then there's the question of why God needed to create light. It surely means He must have been blind before he illuminated the world, Waugh says. And how does the capricious God who had 42 children killed by savage bears for teasing Elisha about his baldness (2 Kings 2:23-5) square with the rebranded God of love a few thousand years later, whose representative on earth said "Suffer the little children to come unto me"? Waugh mentions those murdered children several times.

In fact his witty narrative finds so many ambiguities that it effectively debunks the actuality of God. His sardonic, urbane tone is in the tradition of Gibbon or Hume, both of whom he quotes. In places God is very funny.

Waugh asks why God delivered only 10 commandments and points out that, of all the world's horrors, surely covetousness can't really be such a big deal. His list of other surreal laws that God gave Moses – all solemnly detailed in the Pentateuch – had me weeping with mirth. If a servant refuses to be freed, for example, "his master may bring him out to the door-post, [and] bore a hole in his ear with an awl" (Exodus 21:6). Consider the deadpan tone of Leviticus 18:23: "A woman must not offer herself to an animal to have intercourse with it. That would be a foul thing to do."

This pleasingly original book, with its seven chapter headings from Jacques's As You Like It "ages of man" speech, ranges from Nietzsche to Bishop John Robinson and from Chaucer to Milton and 19th-century hymnists. Wherever you stand – or think you do – on the God question, this is a good read.