Dale Amon at Samizdata has a fascinating post full of speculations on what kinds of gods could physically exist, and how they could come to be. It’s well worth reading.
I’d like to mention two things that Dale neglected to mention.
First, it’s entirely possible to conceive of god/dess as an emergent property of the universe. As life increases, intelligence (in the mathematical sense of information interchange) increases. The ability to think and plan is, in essence, nothing more than the ability to transmit information and switch states in the mind, and it’s possible that the ability to transmit information and switch states in the universe at large could result in something recognizably sentient, and far beyond human. Indeed, this is pretty close to describing my view of the Divine, on one level.
The other possibility is that god/dess could exist as a manifestation of belief. The possibility exists that reality is actually a shared hallucination, constructed of the intersection of all sentient beings’ conceptions of reality. In that sense, anything that enough people believe in is real. This is a little esoteric for me, but it at least is reasonable to posit.
That’s not too far from what Teilhard wrote and, according to his view, that is the actual purpose of the universe.
That is actually a subset of several of the concepts I discussed. You can reach that emergent intelligence from the nanotech road (all matter is embued with mind). Any form of ‘end of the universe’ being is likely to represent a great deal of emergent behavior.
I do understand that you are talking more in terms of intelligence of the form used in the sequel to AC Clarkes “City and the Stars’ written by Benford I think.
Yes, exactly. I think a lot of people get hung up on the Abrahamic model, which is god as a recognizable being, but with impressive powers. Once the “recognizable being” standard goes away, the possibilities for god grow much larger.