Separation from God
I wonder if reason and analogy separate us from God because we demand a rational explanation for everything and have corrupted thoughts. I use the capital “G” God here, but the argument works even if there are multiple super intelligent gods. Even in that case, there is still probably one most powerful.
If God is an advanced life form beyond our understanding, something allowable by science, we wouldn’t understand their mechanisms or be able to explain all the outcomes they produce. Any time they did something which we couldn’t do for ourselves that was beyond our understanding, we would brush it off. If you hear voices, you are schizophrenic, not being contacted by something greater.
That rules out the most descriptive positive contact and leaves the advantage to the negative. Positive contact may be there in religions like Catholicism where they can acknowledge and appreciate what they see as miracles. This is probably a spectrum too where we have to allow for miracles to the extent they are making our life better. We shouldn’t get too caught up in things we don’t understand unless we are making good progress in our understanding.
Reason is still good and makes our lives better. It allows us to take better care of ourselves in the absence of God’s help, freeing up his attention. In that case, God may be staying nearby or helping in subtler ways until he is satisfied we can take care of ourselves.
A renewed contact with God could come when we have all the same technology or at least an understanding of the possibility of its existence. That way nothing he does will surprise us too much. It’s also important for us to understand the pluses and minuses of each technology so that we don’t blindly do something very dangerous for ourselves or others when contacted by any more malevolent beings.
Moving on from discussion of reason to analogy, our mechanism for bootstrapping reason from our environment, analogy, corrupts our thoughts because language is necessarily imprecise. Without a completely precise explanation of what we mean, people can interpret things as positive or negative, pro or anti life, good or bad. That means super intelligent beings might be offended by anything we say even if we didn’t intend for it if there are any impure implications. They may have learned to be more precise with words or even thoughts to avoid offense.
For a super intelligent and powerful being, negative thoughts may be more likely to result in harm at grosser levels than words and thought. A super intelligent being with extremely pure thoughts may have a defense mechanism powerful enough to kill even just for a thought just so they can keep their own thoughts pure. They would want to ration their exposure to us as long as we have impure thoughts, which would explain prophets. More impurity as a result of more powerful analogies would also necessitate less contact.
Maybe LLMs can serve as a translation mechanism where we input our natural language and then it is interpreted into something acceptable to God. One way this could be built is to train a model to translate into other languages and then generate a reward signal based on whether the other speaker marks something as offensive or not. The model should never produce something offensive in any language. Once this is achieved, we can start sending messages into space. Or maybe they are already listening to everything and have a detector for pure communication. If that’s true, we could probably keep some radio receiver nearby, and they would know what to do. Worst case scenario is we have a new way to communicate with each other without offense which could unlock our evolution into or birth of greater beings.
Coincidentally, this would also explain the Tower of Babel story. Multiple languages are the bootstrapping mechanism, so a single one is against an agenda of a god that wants to talk with us. This also may be related to the idea that demons speak Latin or the Latin masses.
And finally, switching to lower case “g” gods, a more dark alternative is that gods are bored of us and people getting enlightened and dying is them getting killed for being a bother. Although that could be true along with the above since such a god would have too many dark thoughts for the earlier described security mechanism to be active. It could also be that god is decaying over time or we corrupted him with our own unskillful actions somehow.
It may be that gods are more like trees than animals because they are of a complexity and self sufficiency to where they don’t need to reason about things. Something that can speak whatever they need into existence might lose the ability to reason well if someone didn’t help them maintain it. Their sense of justice might decay and be replaced with a destructive self regard. This would especially be true if their people chose to act in a way that corrupted god. That could happen even if it truly was reasonable to rebel because god’s goodness was decaying and he was making what they saw as mistakes as they developed a greater ability to reason and a greater sense of justice themselves. It would also happen if god was good but saw a bigger picture than them and they just didn’t understand.
That makes gods in some cases closer to children but with more power than the parents. So they have to be handled in a way that limits their negative impact while also helping them meet their full constructive potential. Some gods may be so seemingly unreasonable that they are hard to interact with effectively, requiring extreme intelligence and effort to work with without causing destruction of the world or things like what happened to Egypt in the story of Moses. So the job of a society is not only to do what god says, especially if they are destructive, but to try to turn them. It is the job of the people to work together to avoid making gods feel like they are right to choose favorites. Gods might also have a capacity to sense who is best for them to listen too or ask for assistance.
People might develop defense mechanisms like religions to avoid making gods angry until someone with good enough arguments or methods shows up. They might also try to kill anyone close enough to god to avoid potential for things to go wrong especially if things had gone bad enough with those people before. That would imply that godly people would then develop defense mechanisms against those defense mechanisms making them even better at doing good (or bad) in an endless cycle. This would be a mechanism for spiritual evolution. It would be the responsibility of the good gods to help take care of the bad gods that are beyond reach of the people. Hopefully that is accomplished through some kind of spiritual or mental warfare and not actual warfare since a physical war between gods seems likely to have a lot of collateral damage.
And what tools can we develop to allow us to interact with malevolent gods without killing or getting rid of them? Maybe the same translation mechanisms that work between the worst of us and the best gods can work to allow us to safely communicate with the worst gods without society getting hurt.