Pagan Pantheons

Common usage of the words "deity," "god," and "goddess" conflates almost all beings that simply are free of certain human limitations or that are in some way more powerful than humans.  Entertainment and casual conversations all reinforce this conflation.  The pagan pantheons of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse mythology are usually assumed to be actual deities within the context of their own stories.  In reality, whether or not any beings like them exist, (almost) none of them are an uncaused cause and thus are not really gods or goddesses, but beings that are free of certain spiritual and physical limitations that are a part of regular human life.  That has rarely stopped people from grouping them together.

Greco-Roman and Egyptian deities are generally not described as past eternal beings; they were in many cases brought into existence by other beings or by the uncaused cause of their respective theologies.  Athena, Zeus, Thor, and Ra are not the beings that brought contingent beings, much less time and the broad physical cosmos, into existence.  Thus, to sincerely call them gods even within the context of pagan philosophy is misleading at best.  Almost none of these beings existed before both humanity and other superhuman beings.  They, too, have causes without which they would not exist.

In Greek mythology, it was Chaos who preceded the other pseudo-divine entities.  In Egyptian mythology, it was Atum, although he is described as creating himself--an inherently impossible feat because one must already exist before creating oneself in order to create oneself.  None of their children or their grandchildren are truly divine because they lack the attribute of being uncaused.  Contrary to popular belief inside and outside of the church, absolutely nothing about a real or fictional entity makes them a deity unless they were uncreated and potentially have the ability to bring other things into existence.

How much power would a being need before it is a deity?  Does it need omniscience?  Omnipresence?  These are characteristics a deity might or might not have.  However, there are qualifies no deity could have: no being could do logically impossible things like make logical axioms false or lie and be honest at the same time, so the power to do literally anything is intrinsically beyond the power of even the uncaused cause.  None of these things, logically possible or not, are what would make a god/goddess a deity.  Sincerely calling Aphrodite or Odin a deity is a very dramatic exaggeration.  They are just superhuman entities, as are Frigg, Set, Hera, and other pagan pseudo-deities.

Unironically asking, as a supposed genuine objection to theism, how one knows Zeus is not God in response to the logical proof of an uncaused cause is just as asinine as unironically thinking Ares, Loki, or Artemis are in the same metaphysical category as Yahweh or the basic uncaused cause, whether or not it is Yahweh.  The beings of pagan pantheons are almost always not truly deities, and nothing but idiocy and confusion results from any position to the contrary.  It takes a fool to think the concept of a created mind-body composite like Zeus is the same as the concept of an uncaused cause that could create or shed a physical body at will.  No one even needs someone to explain this in order to completely avoid this error by just not misrepresenting concepts to themselves.