D'Angelo is mad he weaponized web design against Quora users for years because he would go bankrupt otherwise, and now he is going bankrupt anyway. Adam is at war with god, not OpenAI.
Stab in the dark here, but I would not be surprised if such a phrase is untraceable in origin due to long usage. There are many ancient stories where men battle with gods and they are analogous to fighting nature. Especially considering many gods are considered to be those that control nature and who's moods are characterized by it. We can even find references in the bible but I don't read Hebrew so idk if these are direct translations and not bothering to check changes from versioning. But I suspect that this phrase, in some form or another (battling with god, fighting god, etc), is rather old and not even unique to westerners. So I wouldn't be surprised if the phrase is older than language itself. But I'm not a linguist or historian and this is pure conjecture. Just someone who enjoys language and mythos as hobbies.
My guess would be that it's from Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), which leans on the story of Sisyphus. She never actually uses the word "war", but does use various war metaphors ("see how deep the bullet lies", etc.).
To me, it's a "Deal with God" not being at war with God. Deals with gods and deals with devils seem to have something in common, in a way which is topical to discussing OpenAI.
That's the perennial debate about the song. Does Bush want to swap places with her ex-lover, or does she want to swap places with God so that God can feel the pain of continually running up that hill? My take has always been the latter, given the Sisyphus metaphor (Sisyphus was condemned by a god to keep rolling a boulder up a hill). It's not war, no, but there is clearly some major hostility.
For me personally, likely Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice.
One of those random books you purloin in youth, and a total departure from her standard narrative fiction fare. It's a retelling of the original cosmic myth from the... rebellious perspective.
Where does the phrase, "is at war with God," denoting opposition to fundamental laws of reality, come from?