So taking Falterer’s idea and giving it a more sci-fi treatment, you could make your novel take place in the present or future but rely upon Falterer’s history as its underlying bedrock: perhaps the true history of Exodus becomes important for some reason and some characters discover the real story.

You’d need a future-time sci-fi concept that relates to Exodus. Maybe a viral outbreak was the real story behind the “plagues” that preceded the migration of the Israelites. How that virus’s DNA was incorporated into the human genome affects how we have to fight off the infection today. Maybe an antagonist is using his knowledge of the real Exodus events and the agreements of the Twelve Tribes to locate and find/destroy an ancient sample of the original, unmutated virus at the tomb of Moses at Mount Siani.

Or whatever. I can’t easily come up with a novel-worthy concept in one sitting, but this is the sort of thinking I’d be doing if I wanted to target religion using fiction (fighting fire with fire .

The best known example is certainly The DaVinci Code, in which we discover that the original religion of Christianity was centered on both a male and a female spiritual leader, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, who married and had a line of descendants who would have been a royal lineage. But a misogynistic version of Christianity in which Mary was a prostitute arose and squashed the real one, so those descendants had to be kept secret; they were the “royal blood,” or sangre real, a term that over the years had morphed into san grael or “holy grail,” which in actuality is a family and not a cup. In other words, it presents a plausible alternate history that utterly repudiates an established religion, and while it’s a work of fiction it nevertheless makes thoughtful readers consider what sorts of religious history have been blotted out by religious institutions.

Another one I recently read is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which takes place in a future time when society has gone entirely laissez faire (in other words, you wouldn’t want to live there). In this time a right-wing religious leader has taken over the Pentecostal church and seems to be responsible for launching inexplicable cyber-attacks on people who are connected to the Multiverse, an advanced version of the Internet. The attacks actually kill people in real life, a la The Matrix. The revelation toward the end is that when the Pentecostals speak “in tongues” they are actually speaking an ancient human language that evolved along with the human brain, and that allowed people to transfer information by effectively programming each other with words. At a historical time called the Infocalypse this language was replaced by dogmatic religions and non-inherent (i.e., “made up”) languages like the ones we speak today, and that Infocalypse survives in human memory as the Tower of Babel story in the Bible. The attacks on the network users in the story turn out to have been attacks using this ancient language, which still works on our brain structures and can be administered in visual or viral form. It’s a lot to absorb all at once, and I have no idea how Stephenson pulled it off, but like The DaVinci Code it’s a stellar re-imagining of religious history, both Judaism and Christianity. It actually deals with a lot more religious historical specifics than I’ve hinted at above.

Were I to write an atheist novel I would do something like these stories have done. I’d try to upend established truths from one or more major religions by building the story’s underlying concepts around an alternate history.

As they move into the wilderness, it becomes apparent that Moses is completely unprepared to lead so many people through it. He quickly loses the respect of the people and they fall into anarchy. Distinct tribes arise among them (perhaps all 12, if you can make it fit.) Through diplomacy, Moses brings them together, and the leaders try to form a set of rules for a structured society that cares for all men as best it can, and according to the ethics of the day. The talks take place on Mount Sinai. They get close to forming an agreement, until an unrelated squabble at the foot of the mountain divides them once more, and they leave to return to their tribes, arguing. Only Moses and Aaron are left on the mountain.

Disgusted, Moses realizes he alone doesn’t have the ability to stop men squabbling and oppressing one another. He brings together the treaty they had been working on and rewords it as though it came to him from God. He tries to abstract God as much as possible by making up rules that no idols of God can be carved etc., but he knows that any God figure will ultimately be used by authorities like those in Egypt, to oppress people. He just can’t think of a quicker, easier way to bring people together to travel through the wilderness. Aaron is critical of the idea that an extra higher authority is needed.

The book closes just before Moses descends the mountain, while Aaron sets as much of it on fire as possible, to catch everyone’s attention.

“You’ve set a god in stone,” Aaron warns him just before Moses begins speaking. “You’ve made a Pharaoh from words themselves, and set in stone. That’s a pharaoh no one can conquer.”

Moses stands there for a while, looking at the crowd, who’ve fallen silent in awe of his theatrics. He smashes the two tablets against a rock on the mountain, then tells the crowd that no law, no man, and no god lasts forever, but he has brought from the mountain a law from a god who has promised to help them through the wilderness to the promised land, if only they’ll help one another.

The end! Woo! Best novel idea ever! Clap clap clap!

Write a High Fantasy novel, only instead of elves, dwarves, and dragons, feature God and Satan and angels and demons.

You should check out Ted Chiang’s stories, like “Hell Is the Absence of God” and “The Tower of Babylon”. He is as close as you can get to my favorite SF writer, but he’s frustratingly non-prolific. The first story is a great one set in the modern world where a literal Old Testament style God is very real. The second one looks at the classic story as if it really happened but with some SFnal twists.

One idea I like, but which has been done already a few times in Star Trek and probably many other places, is the idea of Yahweh being real, but not as we think. For example he could actually be an alien. (I actually find this possibility although vanishingly remote, still more likely than the standard story. See when you die, Alien Yahweh will just load your sorry atheist butt right into his virtual Matrix hell! Yikes!)

There’s another problem: you could still find out when the Rapture is not happening. Most pre-tribbers also believe in imminence. With your time machine it would be possible to determine that it won’t happen in the next, minute, hour, week, year–whatever point in the future you could reach. That wouldn’t set right with them. Of course, they could claim that the future isn’t fixed; that whatever future you visited wouldn’t necessarily be the one that would happen to you. But that would obviate the other problem as well and effectively blow the whole point of the plot out of the water.

The weird thing is that the closing shot is of the scientist continually resetting the machine for a slightly nearer future each time. The clear implication being that he is going to discover the day and the hour of the 2nd coming. At the rate he was going, it would’ve taken him a few hours at the most. So, they contradict the Biblical teaching. This man CAN discover the day and hour. They probably end the movie to avoid such a conundrum.

A handful of normal people go about their normal lives. Religion is never mentioned.

Epistaxis:

Personally, I think that’s the best suggestion. Demonstrate a world where God or gods aren’t given a thought, yet the universe and people work like they always have.

At the end we learn that the time machine cannot go more than a few years into the future even though there’s no inherent technical problem…can you guess why not?

Polly:

Uh, it’d give the time of the Rapture away, and we aren’t supposed to know “the day or the hour”? C’mon! That’s it, isn’t it? What do I win?