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Why not God as our subject?

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Certainly there are many Science Fiction writers who touch upon the subject of beings supreme to Man...but always Man is central in writing.

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4 answers

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With respect to the `no story arc' issue, there is a certain amount of latitude in frustrating the desires of an omnipotent being, as per the following dialogue by the logician Raymond M. Smullyan:

"Is God a Taoist?"

There's further discussion on this in Douglas Hofstadter's book `Metamagical Themas'.

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The answer lies in our ability to define 'God'. Note that while we talk of God, we are personifying an all-pervading aspect; and sometimes the language in which we write or speak becomes insufficient to define 'Him' [note that even in this case, 'Him' indicates that I am referring to 'God' as a male character]. So what is this aspect called 'God'? Ancient languages such as Sanskrit (of which I know a bit) talks of the concept called 'Prana' (how you pronounce it is another consideration) that leads to, and not directly is, the aspect of 'God'; and this implies both human and non-human sub-aspects. So while a story needs to be written, it is important to confine 'God' to the human characteristics (which has been already earlier pointed out), however that would not suffice given that it would seemingly not be sufficient to cover, if not conflict with, the non-human aspects. Hence, any attempt to write a story on 'God' would boil down to a lesser being of being a 'human'.

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Because God does not have a story arc. If story is the conflict between desire and what stands in the way of the fulfilment of that desire, God cannot have a story arc because nothing can frustrate the desires of God.

There are, of course, stories about gods. But those gods are really supermen. They have limits. They have desires. And they have forces that frustrate their desires. Thus they have the components of a story arc, and thus also they are, for all that matters in story terms, human.

The same applies to the animals in stories like Watership Down or The Wind in the Willows. In story terms, they are human too.

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There are plenty of SFF stories which deal with deities. There's an entire Forgotten Realms (D&D) series about gods being forced to take mortal avatars and walk the earth. The Belgariad pentology by David and Leigh Eddings (and less so the sequel pentology, the Malloreon) heavily features deities as significant secondary characters. Rick Riordan writes about Greek, Egyptian, and Norse gods in his various series. This thread has many other suggestions involving deities of various religions.

If you're asking why Yahweh, the deity of the three Abrahamic religions, isn't used as a character in SFF stories, the main reason is probably what mbakeranalecta suggests: there's no character arc. Omnipotence renders a lot of plot useless. ST:TNG's Q had to have his powers removed or had some ethical obstacle in his way in order to have a story.

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