Many atheists like to PLUCK God out of the old-testament. It's basically a large-scale quote-mine in a sense because we don't believe God is just the God of the old-testament.
If we were Jewish we would see God as solely the God of the old testament in which case if you isolate the old testament, then yes God would just be another god that seemingly fought Israel's wars then disappeared implying invention.
To atheists that aren't thoughtful they are just basically coming up with as many "bible nasties" as they can then arguing God can't exist because of them.
It doesn't really work for reasons that don't occur to them. Those reasons are;
- Anthropomorphism/anthropopathism
- Strawman fallacy/cherry picking.
- Application/not contextual
- Motives are ignored, but C.S.Lewis deductively proved that motive is a key factor to morality.
- Scale.
I shall start with scale. The New Testament give reasons why the law was there. In terms of the scale of it and it's application, it was intended for probably less than 0.1% of humanity if we look at the total population over time whereas God's intention in the gospel was to bless billions of people. In summary if you want to look at it truncated, then it's as though God was saying, "Here is proof you can't live by my standards, so now let me myself satisfy my standard on your behalf by showing you for a short while just how ugly it has to be when trying to please a totally holy God without His righteousness being imparted to you, to prove humanity cannot be moral without God.".
When it comes to motives being ignored, God's motives in the old testament aren't always clear, yet it does state in the bible that God's nature is good. 1 John 1 says, "God is light, and in Him is no darkness whatsoever". In other places it implies or outright states that God cannot sin such as in Numbers 23 where it says, "God is not a man that He should lie". It also makes a distinction between human thinking and God's thinking in Isaiah by saying that as the stars are so much higher in the sky than the earth, so is the distance between our level of thinking and God's. In other words, because God is omniscient then God is saying there literally is no comparison, any moral motive we think is immoral according to huma reason, simply cannot be correct, but would only say something about the limits of human reason. We also cannot be trusted unless the person complaining about what God done in the O.T, is a morally perfect person that has no ill will towards God. This rules out any atheist commentary because they would have an anti-God motive even if the motive was hidden. Motives ARE hidden a lot of the time. Just going from outcome alone but not knowing why something was done, is by analogy like being shown someone being executed. If you only saw the execution and how terrible it was, you could easily infer the non-sequitur that the executioner was doing it for immoral or evil reasons.
Mostly when atheists reason out the cherry-picked canard, "the God of the Old Testament is evil/sadistic", their motives are atheist-flavoured. They don't show any real desire or attempt to understand anything about what the bible says and have a very clear and obvious desire to just take the O.T on face value and ignore anything else the bible says.
Bible scholars would tell you that the WORST way to understand the bible is by ignoring all of the other things the bible says pertaining to matters such as morality.
When atheist argue-from-outrage (AFO- informal fallacy)they do so towards God in the O.T by committing anthropopathism where they believe God should be endowed with their relative atheist feelings about morality. It's the mistake of humanising God, as though God should only see things from a human perspective. Logically speaking, this is quite absurd if you stop and think about it for a moment. A human being is a persona with a mind riddled full of error and fallibility. We reason incorrectly, we discount counter-intuitive concepts by confusing them with contradictions, we are riddled with all sorts of biases and our personal moral values differ wildly being mixed up with all sorts of devious motivations therefore not necessarily even being, "moral". To suppose a human being could judge an all-knowing God's actions morally is perhaps one of the dumbest things I have ever witnessed in life.
