A Catalogue of Gods who may or may not Exist
The Perfect God
In Western religions, God is traditionally said to be infinite, personal, and perfect. He may be immutable or mutable, the greatest conceivable being or Being itself. But, He is omnipotent, morally perfect, and personal. This is the conception of God which is most popular in my culture, and it is certainly emotionally satisfying. By definition, this is the greatest God one could have. I was raised with this conception of God, and most of my coreligionists have always believed in Him. But, more and more often, I find myself having difficulty doing so.
The most obvious wrinkle -- which spontaneously occurs to everyone who thinks about theology -- is the Problem of Evil. How could a perfect creator bring forth anything less than perfection? It almost seems like a proof:1 the best of all possible beings must produce the best of all possible worlds. How could it be otherwise? Could He will anything less than perfection? Of course not. If He did, there would be some defect in His will. Could anything constrain His will? Nonsense! This God is unlimited and unconditioned, He cannot be thwarted by anything. To suggest otherwise is to deny His attributes in all but name. And, sadly, our world is not perfect. Our world has war crimes and pediatric oncology wards.
To me, there is a second problem, which has much less existential weight. The traditional God is said to be infinite, but I suspect actual infinities cannot exist. I am not a mathematician nor a philosopher of mathematics. But, when studying Calculus, I got the impression that infinity is a useful fiction: there are no infinities out in the world, but we pretend there are because it allows us to do useful calculations. And, some thought experiments push me away from belief in actual infinities: Hilbert's Hotel, Thompson's Lamp, and the gang.
These considerations could lead someone to totally reject the existence of God, or to withhold judgement on the matter. But, equally, they could cause you to change your conception of God, and there are a number of proposals on offer.
Aesthetic Deism
Perhaps God remains infinite and omnipotent, but not perfectly good. Instead of caring about moral goodness, this God only cares about aesthetic values. I first encountered this idea from Paul Draper, who floats it in the SEP entry on Atheism and Agnosticism, calling it aesthetic deism.
The only difference, then, between the God of omni-theism and the deity of aesthetic deism is what motivates them. An omni-theistic God would be morally perfect and so strongly motivated by considerations of the well-being of sentient creatures. An aesthetic deistic God, on the other hand, would prioritize aesthetic goods over moral ones. While such a being would want a beautiful universe, perhaps the best metaphor here is not that of a cosmic artist, but instead that of a cosmic playwright: an author of nature who wants above all to write an interesting story.
As everyone knows, good stories never begin with the line “and they lived happily ever after," and that line is the last line of any story that contains it. Further, containing such a line is hardly necessary for a story to be good. If aesthetic deism is true, then it may very well be true that, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
This God may be awesome, but he is not good, and certainly not worthy of worship. He allows unspeakable horrors because they make for good art. He's an evil reality TV producer,2 but omnipotent and with better taste.
Still, it is an interesting proposal. I think that there are substantial problems with it. It has a Problem of Boringness and a Problem of Ugliness -- to my mind, the Katy Freeway conclusively proves that this God does not exist. In addition, I often have a hard time believing beauty is an objective feature of the world, rather than something subjective. If that's true, it's very strange that the creator of the universe cares about it that much. It'd be like if God only cared about riding lawnmowers.
The Impersonal Ground of Being
Many arguments for theism first conclude that there is a necessary ground of all contingent reality. From here, it is argued that this being must be personal, good, infinite, et cetera. But, these arguments are, notoriously, much more shaky than what proceeds them.3 Perhaps we can simply stop at the first stage? There is a first cause, a place where all chains of explanation end. It causes the cosmos and all within it; in It we live and move and have our being. But It is not a person, so It does not care for us.
This God is not necessarily inimical to traditional religion. The God of Advaita Vedanta is quite like this. And, while they don't like to admit it, some classical theists come close to confessing this God. But, it cannot exist alongside the Abrahamic religions as they are actually practiced, for good or ill.
The Benevolent Demiurge
Perhaps God remains perfectly good, but He is not omnipotent. Perhaps He can only make a perfect world through a long struggle with recalcitrant matter, making hard decisions and difficult tradeoffs along the way. More pessimistically, perhaps He can't ensure that everything will work out in the end, and He creates a world which could flower into something beautiful or decay into chaos. I could not blame such a God for creating the world. I don't know that anyone could without being an antinatalist.
This is the God of the process theologians. I have heard some Mormons defend a view like this. If I read him correctly, Plato advocates such a view in The Timaeus. If you want a heterodox conception of God which is compatible with Christianity, I think this is your best bet. Indeed, the New Testament does not talk as though all is well with the world: its world is subjected to futility and in bondage to decay, haunted by a menagerie of evil powers and principalities. And God does not snap His fingers and make things right, He accomplishes the salvation of the world through a very strange a circuitous route. The Nicene Creed does begin "I believe in God the Father, the Almighty." But, generations of apophaticists and analogy - enjoyers have happily said these words -- some were among their authors. With equal plausibility, I think a finite theist could gloss "almighty" as "extremely powerful" or something similar.
I don't know if I actually believe in this God, but I find myself doing so more and more as time goes on. I think I certainly would were it not for my religious commitments.
In contemporary philosophy of religion, the "evidential problem of evil" is often separated from "the logical problem of evil," and the later is usually taken to be much less troubling. This seems backwards to me, though I don't have enough space to say why.↩
Of course, not all reality TV is evil, I like watching cooking shows from time to time. But some of it is awfully fucked up.↩
For a well - reasoned example of this sort of argument, see this paper by Alexander Pruss.↩