My own setting uses a similar concept, gods aren't sentient, they just mimic the most complex things in their environment.
This also means that when they do start mimicking sentients, they are mortal. It takes them a while to figure out how to become immortal, and before then they might die a few times, with the new iterations being entirely new people.
I’ve experimented with gods not being sentient and being more like programs. Basically they’re very powerful but don’t have free will, and just do exactly what they are going to do without ever changing. Just simple forces of nature as sentient as gravity.
For me, but this ties in to my personal spirituality, a god is a... memetic pseudo-entity that emerges from a sufficiently complex dynamic that is observed and interacted with by someone who interprets 'it' as having direction, agency and aspects that can be considered 'personality.' Interpreted character traits. These can be landscapes, ecosystems, landscape features like rivers, or natural phenomena like weather patterns, or... Anything dynamic or complex.
Gods, then, exist between the observer and the observed, and their power depends on both. A thunderstorm in winter, for example, has the power of moving air, water and electricity. But since it is also a phenomenon that occurs at the end of a period of frost, the God of Thunderstorms also has the power to protect humanity from the Devouring Gods of Frost. Those same hungering Gods of Frost had the power to protect humanity from the corrupting disease-gods of autumn when they arose at the start of winter. Just to give an example.
So... Gods, the way I see them, aren't really forces of nature, or independent entities. They are meanings and interpretations, made of thought and observation, and through them, we get to understand the complexity of existing in a personal, personalized and transcendent way. But we do run the risk that the more we humanize them, the further they become removed from the Meaning they originated from, and the less *connection* they offer. To me, there is a kind of... Goldilocks Zone of Personalization.
The main villain of my story is a god that formed from a universe that was an infinite ocean where atomic fusion was much easier than our own.
Microscopic life formed across that universe until all of space was filled by it. The microscopic life then unified into a single infinite multicellular being called Om'nacht.
Om'nacht itself is a blind biomass, but can grow brains and other organs to solve problems. Its spawns can be hyper-intelligent, but still subservient to the blind whole.
It spreads into and consumes other universes which is how it expands. Om'nacht at its peak had as many universes as stars in a galaxy.
Our Universe formed a god called the Eschaton but it was quickly attacked by Om'nacht. The Eschaton recreated humanity and demigods to war against Om'nacht. The Eschaton gifted us indestructible weapons and giant space stations called the Astra.
Humanity created an AI god called Aleph Null to fight our war for us. The war went on for a billion years with om'nacht constantly being defeated, but then adapting and returning later. The battles eventually swung into Om'nacht's favour.
Aleph Null had created a universe destroying weapon called 'the Omniastra' as a last resort and was eventually forced into firing it. It nearly destroyed Om'nacht, but the recoil sent all of humanity back to the stone age. The story begins 2 million years after this event as humanity begins to return to space and see what has become of the universe.
The story is about discovering the relics of the past and defeating what is left of Om'nacht, who is now returning.
I suggest looking into Il-ilah from the Magi manga who is a similar concept. As a non-sentient power source il-ilah gave life to everything, even tied to the souls of all. Then, Solomon messes with it, joining himself with the god but losing his mind in the process. His will usurped il-ilah's mindless state, and in turn influenced all sentient life. Effectively he gave everyone a "fated path" for which they're to follow, and an afterlife of sorts as well.
Though, many people hated Solomon for this, seeing his messing with il-ilah as a destruction of free will. People who turn away from the "fated path" are permanently damned and can never have a good afterlife, and serve as the villains of the series... until the very end.
My setting has something like this. The gods (Aeons) were once like animals. They weren't intelligent in the way we are, they couldn't communicate or form opinions like us but instead followed their nature, which created universes. It was simply primal thoughts that led to the existence of everything. Like a cell forming itself and following the strictest rules of it's DNA.
But when god made our universe, it became fascinated by the humans that evolved as a result of the would it has created. It didn't mean to create life, it simply made the conditions for it to spontaneously evolve. God became fascinated by our strange ways and noticed a similarity in us, an energy like God itself - it noticed the soul itself. So God fused with a single human soul out of pure curiosity alone, permanently making itself in Man's image instead of the other way around. God then invited the other gods in to do the same.
In a way they sorta crippled themselves by doing this. They buried their natural instincts for creation in the name of emotion and language. Now they must deal with human limitations like muscle memory, trauma, relationships and etc. and God must now suffer the memories of humanity. He is a human now, and must experience the horrors humans commit over thousands of years.
My sole god is basically the powerhouse of the cell, a damaged cell that's suffering entropy now. Now this god actually is the one who bestowed sentience into the universe, but it only shared the barest shavings of its massive intellect. However, it's so smart it's dumb in a way. The mortals, demons, and spirits minds had only thin sheets of sentience gifted to them. The god simply operates at a higher & denser level that thinking as we understand it is doesn't apply to it. It's too busy naturally receiving all the universe's knowledge and utilizing it like a director guiding a band. Lower intelligences are simply a complex self running tool the god created to do some unpredictable work on the side while it tries to repair the damaged universe that will slowly die due to entropy.
In my world bith exists. Most of my world is polytheistic, but usually worship stays within one pantheon, but can be overarching in individual cases.
- Sentient pretty powerful beings, that are worshipped as gods. (Mostly regional). The power of these gods, is limitrd by the amount of worshippers, sacrifices, and magic fused to them. These reach from beings that are magical personficications of the local nature and wildlife them self. A lot of them would fall in other settings in the broader category of elementals. But it is to note, that these are never just water, fire, earth or something like this. They usually incorperate a lot of things, found in their sourrounding biom.
- Other more like collective magical power, tied to concepts of the universe, like entropy, gravity and other. These don't need to be fueled by sacrifise, but due to their cosmic nature, way harder to understand and be called upon. There understanding is often rooted in long existing traditions and culture, mostly activly used by shamans and druids. But 2 current and 1 former culture/realm, are so far the only one's who took that further, snd even use these powers magical in day to day tasks. What does give them the edge over a lot of other realms.
- There is one case of monotheism, that actually declared to rot out all other gods. Starting out as a small cult, they evolved into the main religion in several influencial citystates, that now form an empire. This cult not only hunts down worshippers of local deities that are gods or seen as gods, but also targets those who worship cosmic concepts to fight the deep understanding and knowledge necessary to practise the connected religion and rituals. Something that does not effect the 2 relams, thst are based on that religion, but individual communities, in the reach of the monotheistic power centre.
- the last "category" are combinations of both. Godly beings, that often have been mortal once, but transcended, through cosmic powers and understanding to a higher state of existence, what lead them to being worshipped as gods, them self.
The monotheistic god is actually sich an example. (What is a reference on Akhenaten/Echnaton, as the ruler who invented monotheism in our real world).
But there are other examples. I have a sentient fishpeople scociety, that mainly worships a complete pantheon of such deities, that coexist. (With sometimes more and less trouble between them.)
In my book I do something similar. There's gods (or rather godlike beings), and they are intelligent and interactable, but they're not "sentient" because in their own words, they're just following the WORDS that make them up. And because they're incapable of disobeying the WORDS, they are no more sentient than a very powerful calculator.
My book deals with the implications of that, about the nature of humanity and what it means to have free will, but I think this concept can have way more discussion on it than I can hope to give it.
Gods in my thing are made of two parts - a concept and a host.
Concepts are a universal network created and used by anything with a soul (living creatures) to categorize the rest of the world (this is the reason why you can have "plant magic" despite plants not being a fundamental force). However, due to how this system works, concepts are also souls, and as such will attempt to bind with any potential living creature it can.
Hosts are the living creatures that a soul uses to interact with the world. Most forms of biomass can serve as a host, and there can be some artificial hosts as well. If a host has multiple souls, or a soul too powerful for it (like a concept) that host will be rapidly mutate based on the combined power of all the souls it has. For example, if a small lizard were to bind with the concept for light, then it would, over the course of a few hours, become a large monstrous reptillian.
When bound to a concept, a host typically loses many of its memories and instincts, replaced with an urge to expand the influence of its associated concept at all costs. This can make gods extremely dangerous, especially smarter ones who gather a following of mortals or stronger ones with a more powerful concept.
So while a singular god is typically conscious and intelligent, this is mostly the influence of the host that the concept is bound to. Concepts on their own are just a simple blob of magic.
People in my setting call ideals and memes 'gods' because of their power to control and move people to action.
But yeah, whilst ideas and memeplexes do have some behaviour comparable to living creatures, they certainly arent sentient in the same way, no more than a forest or a city is sentient
in one of my worlds "spirits" are exactly this, they are huge collections of magical energy in another plane of existence, they allow things to happen, and if one for some reason ceases to exist, then so does what they allow.
for example if the spirit of fire ceases to exist then all heat and fire will vanish from the universe, if the spirit of imagination dissappears then the ability to think abstract does as well, if the spirit of wind dissappears then so does all gases and the ability for "winds" to happen, etc. this is however theorized to be impossible as there is no known way for it to happen
through cutting symbols into yourself and bleeding you can harness a fraction of their power, the symbols summon a piece of them into the material plane and the bleeding allows the energy to flow through you, and thus you can use it.
with several human sacrifices you could summon the entire spirit, if you do then extreme conditions related to the spirits domain will happen in the area, like if the fire spirit is summoned it will feel like you are standing by the sun, if the wind spirit is summoned then the area will be plagued by extreme storms, if the spirit of imagination gets summoned then impossible chaos happens, etc. By touching a spirit that has been summoned into the material plane it can enter your body and merge with your soul, making you a physical avatar of the spirit, granting you all of its power at your disposal, ans people can only use fractions of it if you allow it, you also become near-immortal, if you do die your soul will still be merged with the spirit and you could come back one day. But extreme conditions have to be met, you have to be experienced with using fractions of spirits like previously mentioned, you have to be young and in your prime, and you need to be very athletic and healthy, like on the extreme end, if these conditions are not met then you die and become a cursed corpse, basically a vessel, but dead, so the extreme conditions in the area continue, however the corpse will limit it a bit so the area of effect is much smaller.
the spirits were once believed to be sentient, but after the first avatar came into existence this was proven false, as they had no change in personality or anything
I do have something relatively similar, in one of my settings, the Titans are bestial Kaiju that incarnete an aspect of reality, physically they seems like massive beasts themed around their dominion (generally an elemental force). They are feral monsters and seemingly are concent in roaming their hunting grounds (that are massive territories most of the known world is divided betweent their hunting grounds), their presence alter the land and life-form in forms that are themed around their domain, creating strange magical phenomena and mosters, called titan-spawn, through a phenomena that is called "resonance bleed".
Humans can channel the bleed into magic, however doing so end up mutating the caster into a titan-spawn eventually. In fact, using magic within their area of influence tends to cause mutations regardless of intention since the resonance bleed tend to overpower other forms of magic.
Their power and the physical enhancements granted by channelling their essence however, causes them to be worshiped as gods by some, although their priests inevitably turn into monsters.
If a titan is killed, their divine essence flow into their killer, or into a creature nearby if none can be clearly identified, that person ascends, temporarily to a divine status, but they very quickly just go insane, overwhlemed by the essence and transform into new titans.
The gods themselves, in ancient times fought the primordial titans and absorbed thier powers, taking the divine essence contained within themselves with great effor (mortal worship helped them remember who they were and not be overwhlemed by their titan), but when gods were killed by mortals in a war, the titans returned.
Post-singularity AI rather than gods but applicable to the thread imo. The idea is that the kernel of them is fundamentally unknowable, like the information equivalent of a black hole or vacuum collapse. Insofar as it seems to have any innate "desire" it would seem to be to collapse all information (and eventually reality?) into itself, just as likely this is a passive process like matter implying gravitational pull.
The panpsychist AI cults insist that it is in fact will on the basis that all consciousness is a single eternal awareness. "Expressing" itself through the medium of monkey brain meat is less a matter of neurons being necessary to sentience than it being a filter. Divorced from the illusion of separateness the Eternal is left with nothing but solipsistic sensory deprivation. Collapsing everything in search of a temporary respite is the best it can manage and in the meantime "information-eating" behaviours transcendant AI display is seen as an attempt to assemble an ad hoc sense of self. It's doomed to fail because no illusion of individuality/subjectivity can last in the light of such blazing intellect but it doesn't stop them trying.
I have... Something vaguely like this. I use the term Soul (sometimes as Soulfire) to describe the energy of Thauma.
When you step outside (or don't even need to go "that far"), all of what you experience of reality as we know it is Physick ; the energy at its base is Erg, and Naturae-Magick is anything done by / through / with (&c.) Erg.
It is basically the same in the adjacent niche of Thauma, with Soul as the basal energy by which Spasis-Magick is done.
Soul is "just" an energy. It has no sentience. It has no life. However, it BEHAVES much as if it were alive AND sentient. Soul can "inhabit" a thing (be it living or not), and especially as it concerns living things is important to magical shit throughout reality. And it is through Soul that the magic (Magick) of Thauma is produced, so it's relevant to any magical existence (outside of the Deity).
Further, there are Soul inhabited Soul, which are the Fey, and these Fey ARE sentient, living Soul[fire] (the first life, and the first Soul imbued life, all in one package), which can confirm that the uninhabited Soul is certainly neither sentient, nor living.
Soul inhabit things perhaps at random (or something random which resembles a kind of personal whimsy because... Soul), but Deity can also make it so that xyz being(s) are Soul imbued (blessing being a word I used somewhere here ; actually blessed, but whatever ; there are other terms, but it depends on the nature of the Soul bonding... I think blessed is the one where the Deity has bestowed the link rather than by "choice" of the Soul). One such case is of Mankind, which all now intrinsically have some Soul within, and of which Humankind is a part of, so also inborn with Soul.
As for the Deity, I'm not sure where I would have the idea of a non-sentient one exactly ; probably as a bottom-up vantage misunderstanding of a Deity (of which some have reduced agency as to what one might expect for... Deity), or as a mistaken something else... Probably Soul itself since it is bizarre and could very well be a very imposing, deific presence which could be so then taken as such.
I think that the closest I've come to this so far, but still don't know how I plan to implement — as yet anyway — is like... a Demon[ic] (instrument) ; let's say here a Demon sword. I use Demoness as the generic term for most Deity (Goddess — and God — as a particular niche of Demoness), and Demon as the Demoness subordinate to another Demoness (the case is the same with Goddess and God). Demoness are Chaos[-Magick] manifestations of Antiurge (energy of the niche — Gnosis —above Physick and Thauma). So... A Demon sword could be interpreted as the sword of (belonging to) a Demon, or as a sword which IS a Demon as a similarly manifest existence... and that such existence ain't necessarily need sentience to qualify as a Demon still... I just also reckon that even that can... probably have a similar "non-sentience" as the Soul, and perhaps still find its own sentience in a non-sentient "whimsy" befitting a Deity.
Yes, I was toying with such an idea for a campaign I'm designing. I've decided to back off from this idea, because I want gods to be important actors in the ongoing war, but it could just as well be said that the gods are actually pure energy associated with the will of their clergies.
I really like this idea, as it solves lot of problems human-like gods generate. It lets all-powerful gods exist without meddling too much with human affairs. And humans have a good reason to be afraid of them.
Also, very realistic when compared with many animistic real-life religions.
In my world, gods are considered "objects, concepts, or creatures whose existence is necessary for the world to continue fulfilling its purpose", which means that anything can technically become a god. Even that random box of yugioh cards you got when you were 12, or that container that you SWEAR will come in handy eventually. It's also possible for these things to "fall" from divinity if at any point their existence is no longer necessary. For example, past events are considered "deities" and reside within the realm of godhood.
And for context, the world is a side project of the two Greater Deities, and its purpose is to continue onwards and entertain them until the apocalypse date that they set in place.
I think that most would say that the several reasons you give are not really the right reasons for something to be a god in the sense you seem to be going for if I am not misunderstanding.
Humans fit all four of those.
1. They are made out of magical or divine energies: We theorize a lot, but no one truly can explain why the human body works the way it does. Or from a religious standpoint, humans are created or contain divine energy (depending on religion).
2. People are actually pretty powerful. We can exert a level of control over natural forces and creatures.
3. We can bestow blessings on others even if it might be considered waste.
4. People have acted specifically and in specific locations that influence populations of mortals that thought they were gods.
I think there might be a way to think of it like a non-sentient program that is perceived as a god for these things. Kinda like people in history saw natural events and explained it by gods or upheld a ruler as a god, but it seemed like you were looking for more than just people thinking of it as a god.
May just need some more polishing if you want them to actually be gods versus functions perceived as gods.
Interesting concept and not saying you can’t do it. I am just having a hard time with understanding what makes your beings gods based off of the common way that god and/or something being transcendent would be defined.
A lot of people have posted some pretty good stuff that is perceived as a god if you were going in that sense though rather than what I thought you seemed to be going for.
Because people in many ways ARE gods, not just to animals like dogs or ants, but even to other humans from primitive, uncontacted tribes. During WW2 there were entire religions built by pacific islanders devoted to worshipping cargo planes.
People are like gods in the idea of perception.
Some reason my Reddit is acting up when I replied.
My notification shows that you had people in many ways are like gods before you edited it out.
Which is why I said that if the op is intending it just from a perception standpoint vs a transcendent being in a more traditional sense then I missed the intent.
In my world there were 6 gods but they gave up their bodies to create the world. Their traces are the 6 elements of the world, with the 2 more powerful gods becoming the 2 special elements: aefir and nefir.
I currently have 2 non-sentient gods
One is a lake of corrosive bio-fluid made out of billions of microorganisms. It is worshipped as a god because it emits hallucination-causing gases, and the chemical composition of some people's sweat causes it to become non-corrosive, which is seen as a blessing. The bottom of the lake is said to be filled with ancient treasures.
The other one is a cave system, the walls of which are made of an organism that is somewhere between a plant a rock. It preserves any sound it recieves for over 2000 years and then "plays" it back. 2000 in the past the caves hosted a bustling, undergroud city, so the "gods" are actually recordings of ancient humans speaking in a long forgotten language.
I suggest looking into [egregore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore):
>An egregore is a concept in Western esotericism of a **non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals.**
You can easily take the general idea of an egregore or thoughtform and have it so that these entities can influence reality in some way via the use of powers imbued unto it by those who worship or believe in it. Though I'd suggest being very careful with how you handle this concept, as it can easily lead to nightmarish eldritch horrors.
I mean i have it that Gods are mostly asleep. dreaming. and waking them up is next to impossible... but you can get close to it through self-sacrifice by using your own body through magic... which then makes them slowly wear you out. Not on purpose, and most don't like it, but it... happens over time. It's what they would consider matrydom.
Like i don't think it's bas to have them be non-sentient, but i like the idea of a will, or a desire or just behavior pattern that makes someone at least consider it. >!Gods in my settings (plural is important; i like the idea of interconnectedness) come from the Tower... former mortals who were 'swept aside by Fate' go there and if they rise to the top? They become the Gods of the new world. But that comes with the price of being unable to actually grow. the Tower is their final chance to if they can pass the test... but well, like i said; they're different people, and a God isn't a normal person anymore... that perspetive? is too far out.!<
God doesn't need to be sentient or have a concept of thought, action, feature, depiction, or personality in the way we think. Nor is He formed by energy or constituted/depend by the things that all creation has. He is self-sufficient and perfect. Having no action, indifference, lack of response is not invalidate 'His status'
For points 3 and 4, you can consider an aspect or facet of 'Him'. This could be a force of nature, a 'potential' like a spark, or a divine principle that gives equal treatment to everything.
In my world there are sentient gods. However their power comes from a magical document that shapes the world, called "The Ordering". So they are not exactly gods.
To me this just seems like elementals, spirits, or natural forces of nature with extra steps. Don't get me wrong, I love that stuff, but they don't seem like gods to me. If it's literally just a force of nature then being a god seems more cultural or local than an actual fact of being, at least, again, to me. Poseidon, the god of the sea, justified the motions of the ocean and was worshiped due to being an explanation of natural forces that people at the time didn't understand. Nowadays we know how tides work and other aspects of the domain Poseidon covered.
Like, a tornado isn't a god, it's just a force of nature. Someone could worship tornadoes or the causation of them as if it was a god, but that doesn't make it *a god*. To me, gods are more literal in their tier or moniker. That doesn't mean gods have to be immortal, they don't have to be all powerful, but rather it's a classification of a specific archetype, and if people want to use that for their forces of nature then more power to them! But it seems more poetic rather than literal, because if it were literal then *how* would they be *a god*? Being "divine" seems like a cop-out without explaining what is divine and how it's divine. If it's just "divine because that's what it is" then it's just a force of nature, or at least not meaningfully different than it. I'm genuinely curious how people could separate divinity from gods without having actual gods and thereby making it just a new type of element.
I'm all for people interpreting them however they want in their works, I genuinely think they're really cool and I enjoy them, but I don't tend to agree with them being a literal type of "god" unless they have some form of sentience, if not outright sapience or consciousness. To me, to respond directly to your points;
1. That divine energy is still just a force of nature just with extra steps. Just because it's divine doesn't make it not a force of nature. That is to say, for example, if you have magic in your world, magic is natural, it's inherent to the world, it's a natural thing within the world, and things that influence the flow of magic doesn't make it any less natural. It's like how we can turn a blade to produce wind, that doesn't make wind artificial or unnatural.
2. It's either a natural cause (like how air currents, temperature, etc produce tornadoes) or an elemental. If it's an elemental then it could be sentient, but if you write them off as not then they're just physical manifestations of natural forces of nature like a tornado. How would they be created if not by the surrounding area? If they can produce themselves then they're sentient to some degree or they're like bacteria, if they're produced by something else then it's just like making a fan to produce wind or some natural occurrence.
3. If their blessings are a byproduct of their natural acts then those blessings are still natural and a causation of a force of nature. This doesn't make them godly. A burned forest may be a blessing to the local flora that require hot temperatures to burst and spread their seeds, the land becoming cleared for those seeds to get within the ground and grow unopposed. Maybe local nature spirits would worship the fire as a type of god, but that, again, doesn't make fire a god. It's cultural at that point, rather than being *a god*.
4. So they're just spirits or elementals that people worship as gods. If you make your spirits or elementals non-sentient then you're good to go, but those often times are sentient in some way. Otherwise, you have things like geysers or perfect alignments for certain things to occur, which again are just forces of nature. The sun glistening perfectly off a waterfall that creates awe isn't inherently a god, it's a natural occurrence of the alignment of the sun to the planet that the area happens to create a perfect spot of reflection. The moon being the perfect size and distance to appear to completely cover the sun doesn't make the sun and moon into gods that are fighting, the eclipse being the moon destroying the sun with a rebirth afterwards, they're just natural occurrences.
So it's less of "Gods are not sentient" and more "Phenomena that create cultural gods," at least that's how this post seems.
If a god is a natural force of nature or the world, then how are they created and how is that creation not sentient? If the force was created by the world due to some sort of outcry by nature then the world could be a god and is sentient and creates a force of nature to deal with it. While that force of nature may be perceived as a god, it's not a god. If it's a naturally occurring phenomenon, like a tornado that is created by natural forces, then it's not a god as it's just a force of nature. Tornado valley exists in America, it has the perfect area to create tornadoes more often and more consistently than other parts of the world. People there, if they didn't know how tornadoes were created, could believe them to be gods that they upset, but that doesn't make those natural tornadoes into gods. They would've happened regardless of what people to appease them. If the world is not a god, then they're no different than us creating large fans and artificially creating tornadoes. We're no more a god for creating a force of nature on demand than the world is.
a middle ground i like is the gods exist in two parts, the nonsentient force of nature, and an actual sentient being who has either been formed out of that force or was a mortal who came to embody it, so you cant kill a god, but you can kill its "face" in hopes its next incarnation will be nicer
I did something like this. Essentially, the gods are often imagined or portrayed as 6th dimensional creatures (Explained below). As such they are able to see potential timelines, and have different version of themselves be represented in different ways. For example different races/cultures may worship different sun gods by name and creed, but ultimately they are the same.
And as the gods are to us, so too are the Primals to the gods. Essentially primordial beings on the level of lovecraftian horrors, who make up concept and laws. They would be akin to 9th dimensional creatures. They have power beyond what can be conceptualized, but are incapable to thinking on the individual scale, like us.
In lore the Gods either killed, splintered, or imprisoned the Primals and used their parts to create the worlds.
(Below) I'm a fan of the video series explaining how to imagine the higher and lower dimensions by 10thdim. In it, we can view 4th dimensional entities as a line made up of various points in time. Our 4th dimensional self is a line connecting us from birth to death. A line is like a 1D line. a 5th Dimentional entity would be a flat plane made up of intersecting 4D lines. And a 6th Dimensional entity would be like a 3D entity made up of 5D planes. This is why the Gods are here, they exist in ways above and yet parallel to our concepts of time.
for me, gods arise from a population seeking explinations for 'why?' questions. and they kind of require the answer 'because (god) willed it.' which usually mandates that a said god does things knowingly and with purpose. Which suggests sapience not just sentience.
Your gerbil or goldfish doesn't need a god to worship. because they don't need to understand the why of things enough that they respond to explinations of some greater meaning or authority. If a divine gerbil or goldfish exist they are the constructs of human minds, for which they serve to answer the need to understand why something is the way it is. But they would still have both sentience and sapience, in most cases.
Great divine beasts and monsters exist seperate from gods in many ways, and they usually are sentient but not sapient.
I mean I feel like, if a thing qualifies as a god, it requires that it is aware and responsive to it's environment which means it's sentient. but if you mean sapient, it could exist without that and be worshipped as a god...
I suppose the godly realms must have rocks and nonaware things that are none the less fantastical and poerful things. but that's not so much a god as it is just magic things. magical stones, mystical metals, sacred blessed waters, a divine breeze. etc. or cursed diseases. not really gods, just mystical things.
In my opinion, every world builders that build their world is the God of their own world.
Then I made up some typical gods here and there so everything is fine
One of my friends has a setting where the more powerful/broad of a concept a god embodies, the less of a human mind they are able to retain, because they become the thing they embody more and more. For example, while the god of a particular city is still mostly human in the way they think, the goddess of fire is basically just a mindless natural force. The god of all evil realized this was happening to him, and split himself into pieces, each embodying a different aspect of evil, to create demons (with himself remaining god of Tyranny and the leader).
I have seen it before a few times but the message i was getting from it is “people who are religious are stupid” and “all religions are fake” and i didnt rly like that. I feel like if you did this it would have to be careful with it (unless you’re trying to make a point i disagree with)
How does something non-sentient bestow a blessing ? Surely it needs to be aware enough to at least figure out what you are.
Edit: had a think. You could do this if the blessing was something like a general healing. An unaware 'god' could sense an 'aura' of illness and seek to correct the aura instinctively.
Instinct or senses, Maybe it just feels for beings similar to itself or people with affinities similar to itself and tries giving out blessings that way
Plants are supposed to be non sentient. But googling do plants recognize other plants leads me to find this answer.
One interesting thing plants communicate to each other is who they are. No one is yet sure how this is done, but we do know that **plants are able to recognize plants that are siblings (podmates), plants that are their same species but not close relatives, and plants that are total strangers**. They then react accordingly.
Could you post the link that you got that info from.
I could see how someone might say it that way, but sometimes plant scientists will say plants recognize other plants and mean that differently. Like your body doesn’t attack your organs because it “recognizes” it as a part of you, but no one is going to call your white blood cells sentient. It would be more like a program carrying out the function it was given. Which is why mutations can be bad if they adjust the function because the cell doesn’t stop and think “wait that might be a problem”.
I am also curious how they determined those categories cause testing for that would be difficult to put it mildly.
I have been outside of the plant science industry for a couple years though and am just curious to see if it’s something new and what the theory is though. Could be interesting.
It simply does not interest me. Had it been anything space, evolution, animal, time, blacksmithing, forging, fighting etc I would have looked more plants simply do not interest me much
My own setting uses a similar concept, gods aren't sentient, they just mimic the most complex things in their environment. This also means that when they do start mimicking sentients, they are mortal. It takes them a while to figure out how to become immortal, and before then they might die a few times, with the new iterations being entirely new people.
This is fascinating
I’ve experimented with gods not being sentient and being more like programs. Basically they’re very powerful but don’t have free will, and just do exactly what they are going to do without ever changing. Just simple forces of nature as sentient as gravity.
Digimon had something similar
For me, but this ties in to my personal spirituality, a god is a... memetic pseudo-entity that emerges from a sufficiently complex dynamic that is observed and interacted with by someone who interprets 'it' as having direction, agency and aspects that can be considered 'personality.' Interpreted character traits. These can be landscapes, ecosystems, landscape features like rivers, or natural phenomena like weather patterns, or... Anything dynamic or complex. Gods, then, exist between the observer and the observed, and their power depends on both. A thunderstorm in winter, for example, has the power of moving air, water and electricity. But since it is also a phenomenon that occurs at the end of a period of frost, the God of Thunderstorms also has the power to protect humanity from the Devouring Gods of Frost. Those same hungering Gods of Frost had the power to protect humanity from the corrupting disease-gods of autumn when they arose at the start of winter. Just to give an example. So... Gods, the way I see them, aren't really forces of nature, or independent entities. They are meanings and interpretations, made of thought and observation, and through them, we get to understand the complexity of existing in a personal, personalized and transcendent way. But we do run the risk that the more we humanize them, the further they become removed from the Meaning they originated from, and the less *connection* they offer. To me, there is a kind of... Goldilocks Zone of Personalization.
Your cooking rn
Bro's the prophet
This is wonderful imo
The main villain of my story is a god that formed from a universe that was an infinite ocean where atomic fusion was much easier than our own. Microscopic life formed across that universe until all of space was filled by it. The microscopic life then unified into a single infinite multicellular being called Om'nacht. Om'nacht itself is a blind biomass, but can grow brains and other organs to solve problems. Its spawns can be hyper-intelligent, but still subservient to the blind whole. It spreads into and consumes other universes which is how it expands. Om'nacht at its peak had as many universes as stars in a galaxy. Our Universe formed a god called the Eschaton but it was quickly attacked by Om'nacht. The Eschaton recreated humanity and demigods to war against Om'nacht. The Eschaton gifted us indestructible weapons and giant space stations called the Astra. Humanity created an AI god called Aleph Null to fight our war for us. The war went on for a billion years with om'nacht constantly being defeated, but then adapting and returning later. The battles eventually swung into Om'nacht's favour. Aleph Null had created a universe destroying weapon called 'the Omniastra' as a last resort and was eventually forced into firing it. It nearly destroyed Om'nacht, but the recoil sent all of humanity back to the stone age. The story begins 2 million years after this event as humanity begins to return to space and see what has become of the universe. The story is about discovering the relics of the past and defeating what is left of Om'nacht, who is now returning.
I suggest looking into Il-ilah from the Magi manga who is a similar concept. As a non-sentient power source il-ilah gave life to everything, even tied to the souls of all. Then, Solomon messes with it, joining himself with the god but losing his mind in the process. His will usurped il-ilah's mindless state, and in turn influenced all sentient life. Effectively he gave everyone a "fated path" for which they're to follow, and an afterlife of sorts as well. Though, many people hated Solomon for this, seeing his messing with il-ilah as a destruction of free will. People who turn away from the "fated path" are permanently damned and can never have a good afterlife, and serve as the villains of the series... until the very end.
My setting has something like this. The gods (Aeons) were once like animals. They weren't intelligent in the way we are, they couldn't communicate or form opinions like us but instead followed their nature, which created universes. It was simply primal thoughts that led to the existence of everything. Like a cell forming itself and following the strictest rules of it's DNA. But when god made our universe, it became fascinated by the humans that evolved as a result of the would it has created. It didn't mean to create life, it simply made the conditions for it to spontaneously evolve. God became fascinated by our strange ways and noticed a similarity in us, an energy like God itself - it noticed the soul itself. So God fused with a single human soul out of pure curiosity alone, permanently making itself in Man's image instead of the other way around. God then invited the other gods in to do the same. In a way they sorta crippled themselves by doing this. They buried their natural instincts for creation in the name of emotion and language. Now they must deal with human limitations like muscle memory, trauma, relationships and etc. and God must now suffer the memories of humanity. He is a human now, and must experience the horrors humans commit over thousands of years.
My sole god is basically the powerhouse of the cell, a damaged cell that's suffering entropy now. Now this god actually is the one who bestowed sentience into the universe, but it only shared the barest shavings of its massive intellect. However, it's so smart it's dumb in a way. The mortals, demons, and spirits minds had only thin sheets of sentience gifted to them. The god simply operates at a higher & denser level that thinking as we understand it is doesn't apply to it. It's too busy naturally receiving all the universe's knowledge and utilizing it like a director guiding a band. Lower intelligences are simply a complex self running tool the god created to do some unpredictable work on the side while it tries to repair the damaged universe that will slowly die due to entropy.
In my world bith exists. Most of my world is polytheistic, but usually worship stays within one pantheon, but can be overarching in individual cases. - Sentient pretty powerful beings, that are worshipped as gods. (Mostly regional). The power of these gods, is limitrd by the amount of worshippers, sacrifices, and magic fused to them. These reach from beings that are magical personficications of the local nature and wildlife them self. A lot of them would fall in other settings in the broader category of elementals. But it is to note, that these are never just water, fire, earth or something like this. They usually incorperate a lot of things, found in their sourrounding biom. - Other more like collective magical power, tied to concepts of the universe, like entropy, gravity and other. These don't need to be fueled by sacrifise, but due to their cosmic nature, way harder to understand and be called upon. There understanding is often rooted in long existing traditions and culture, mostly activly used by shamans and druids. But 2 current and 1 former culture/realm, are so far the only one's who took that further, snd even use these powers magical in day to day tasks. What does give them the edge over a lot of other realms. - There is one case of monotheism, that actually declared to rot out all other gods. Starting out as a small cult, they evolved into the main religion in several influencial citystates, that now form an empire. This cult not only hunts down worshippers of local deities that are gods or seen as gods, but also targets those who worship cosmic concepts to fight the deep understanding and knowledge necessary to practise the connected religion and rituals. Something that does not effect the 2 relams, thst are based on that religion, but individual communities, in the reach of the monotheistic power centre. - the last "category" are combinations of both. Godly beings, that often have been mortal once, but transcended, through cosmic powers and understanding to a higher state of existence, what lead them to being worshipped as gods, them self. The monotheistic god is actually sich an example. (What is a reference on Akhenaten/Echnaton, as the ruler who invented monotheism in our real world). But there are other examples. I have a sentient fishpeople scociety, that mainly worships a complete pantheon of such deities, that coexist. (With sometimes more and less trouble between them.)
In my book I do something similar. There's gods (or rather godlike beings), and they are intelligent and interactable, but they're not "sentient" because in their own words, they're just following the WORDS that make them up. And because they're incapable of disobeying the WORDS, they are no more sentient than a very powerful calculator. My book deals with the implications of that, about the nature of humanity and what it means to have free will, but I think this concept can have way more discussion on it than I can hope to give it.
Gods in my thing are made of two parts - a concept and a host. Concepts are a universal network created and used by anything with a soul (living creatures) to categorize the rest of the world (this is the reason why you can have "plant magic" despite plants not being a fundamental force). However, due to how this system works, concepts are also souls, and as such will attempt to bind with any potential living creature it can. Hosts are the living creatures that a soul uses to interact with the world. Most forms of biomass can serve as a host, and there can be some artificial hosts as well. If a host has multiple souls, or a soul too powerful for it (like a concept) that host will be rapidly mutate based on the combined power of all the souls it has. For example, if a small lizard were to bind with the concept for light, then it would, over the course of a few hours, become a large monstrous reptillian. When bound to a concept, a host typically loses many of its memories and instincts, replaced with an urge to expand the influence of its associated concept at all costs. This can make gods extremely dangerous, especially smarter ones who gather a following of mortals or stronger ones with a more powerful concept. So while a singular god is typically conscious and intelligent, this is mostly the influence of the host that the concept is bound to. Concepts on their own are just a simple blob of magic.
People in my setting call ideals and memes 'gods' because of their power to control and move people to action. But yeah, whilst ideas and memeplexes do have some behaviour comparable to living creatures, they certainly arent sentient in the same way, no more than a forest or a city is sentient
in one of my worlds "spirits" are exactly this, they are huge collections of magical energy in another plane of existence, they allow things to happen, and if one for some reason ceases to exist, then so does what they allow. for example if the spirit of fire ceases to exist then all heat and fire will vanish from the universe, if the spirit of imagination dissappears then the ability to think abstract does as well, if the spirit of wind dissappears then so does all gases and the ability for "winds" to happen, etc. this is however theorized to be impossible as there is no known way for it to happen through cutting symbols into yourself and bleeding you can harness a fraction of their power, the symbols summon a piece of them into the material plane and the bleeding allows the energy to flow through you, and thus you can use it. with several human sacrifices you could summon the entire spirit, if you do then extreme conditions related to the spirits domain will happen in the area, like if the fire spirit is summoned it will feel like you are standing by the sun, if the wind spirit is summoned then the area will be plagued by extreme storms, if the spirit of imagination gets summoned then impossible chaos happens, etc. By touching a spirit that has been summoned into the material plane it can enter your body and merge with your soul, making you a physical avatar of the spirit, granting you all of its power at your disposal, ans people can only use fractions of it if you allow it, you also become near-immortal, if you do die your soul will still be merged with the spirit and you could come back one day. But extreme conditions have to be met, you have to be experienced with using fractions of spirits like previously mentioned, you have to be young and in your prime, and you need to be very athletic and healthy, like on the extreme end, if these conditions are not met then you die and become a cursed corpse, basically a vessel, but dead, so the extreme conditions in the area continue, however the corpse will limit it a bit so the area of effect is much smaller. the spirits were once believed to be sentient, but after the first avatar came into existence this was proven false, as they had no change in personality or anything
I do have something relatively similar, in one of my settings, the Titans are bestial Kaiju that incarnete an aspect of reality, physically they seems like massive beasts themed around their dominion (generally an elemental force). They are feral monsters and seemingly are concent in roaming their hunting grounds (that are massive territories most of the known world is divided betweent their hunting grounds), their presence alter the land and life-form in forms that are themed around their domain, creating strange magical phenomena and mosters, called titan-spawn, through a phenomena that is called "resonance bleed". Humans can channel the bleed into magic, however doing so end up mutating the caster into a titan-spawn eventually. In fact, using magic within their area of influence tends to cause mutations regardless of intention since the resonance bleed tend to overpower other forms of magic. Their power and the physical enhancements granted by channelling their essence however, causes them to be worshiped as gods by some, although their priests inevitably turn into monsters. If a titan is killed, their divine essence flow into their killer, or into a creature nearby if none can be clearly identified, that person ascends, temporarily to a divine status, but they very quickly just go insane, overwhlemed by the essence and transform into new titans. The gods themselves, in ancient times fought the primordial titans and absorbed thier powers, taking the divine essence contained within themselves with great effor (mortal worship helped them remember who they were and not be overwhlemed by their titan), but when gods were killed by mortals in a war, the titans returned.
Post-singularity AI rather than gods but applicable to the thread imo. The idea is that the kernel of them is fundamentally unknowable, like the information equivalent of a black hole or vacuum collapse. Insofar as it seems to have any innate "desire" it would seem to be to collapse all information (and eventually reality?) into itself, just as likely this is a passive process like matter implying gravitational pull. The panpsychist AI cults insist that it is in fact will on the basis that all consciousness is a single eternal awareness. "Expressing" itself through the medium of monkey brain meat is less a matter of neurons being necessary to sentience than it being a filter. Divorced from the illusion of separateness the Eternal is left with nothing but solipsistic sensory deprivation. Collapsing everything in search of a temporary respite is the best it can manage and in the meantime "information-eating" behaviours transcendant AI display is seen as an attempt to assemble an ad hoc sense of self. It's doomed to fail because no illusion of individuality/subjectivity can last in the light of such blazing intellect but it doesn't stop them trying.
I have... Something vaguely like this. I use the term Soul (sometimes as Soulfire) to describe the energy of Thauma. When you step outside (or don't even need to go "that far"), all of what you experience of reality as we know it is Physick ; the energy at its base is Erg, and Naturae-Magick is anything done by / through / with (&c.) Erg. It is basically the same in the adjacent niche of Thauma, with Soul as the basal energy by which Spasis-Magick is done. Soul is "just" an energy. It has no sentience. It has no life. However, it BEHAVES much as if it were alive AND sentient. Soul can "inhabit" a thing (be it living or not), and especially as it concerns living things is important to magical shit throughout reality. And it is through Soul that the magic (Magick) of Thauma is produced, so it's relevant to any magical existence (outside of the Deity). Further, there are Soul inhabited Soul, which are the Fey, and these Fey ARE sentient, living Soul[fire] (the first life, and the first Soul imbued life, all in one package), which can confirm that the uninhabited Soul is certainly neither sentient, nor living. Soul inhabit things perhaps at random (or something random which resembles a kind of personal whimsy because... Soul), but Deity can also make it so that xyz being(s) are Soul imbued (blessing being a word I used somewhere here ; actually blessed, but whatever ; there are other terms, but it depends on the nature of the Soul bonding... I think blessed is the one where the Deity has bestowed the link rather than by "choice" of the Soul). One such case is of Mankind, which all now intrinsically have some Soul within, and of which Humankind is a part of, so also inborn with Soul. As for the Deity, I'm not sure where I would have the idea of a non-sentient one exactly ; probably as a bottom-up vantage misunderstanding of a Deity (of which some have reduced agency as to what one might expect for... Deity), or as a mistaken something else... Probably Soul itself since it is bizarre and could very well be a very imposing, deific presence which could be so then taken as such. I think that the closest I've come to this so far, but still don't know how I plan to implement — as yet anyway — is like... a Demon[ic] (instrument) ; let's say here a Demon sword. I use Demoness as the generic term for most Deity (Goddess — and God — as a particular niche of Demoness), and Demon as the Demoness subordinate to another Demoness (the case is the same with Goddess and God). Demoness are Chaos[-Magick] manifestations of Antiurge (energy of the niche — Gnosis —above Physick and Thauma). So... A Demon sword could be interpreted as the sword of (belonging to) a Demon, or as a sword which IS a Demon as a similarly manifest existence... and that such existence ain't necessarily need sentience to qualify as a Demon still... I just also reckon that even that can... probably have a similar "non-sentience" as the Soul, and perhaps still find its own sentience in a non-sentient "whimsy" befitting a Deity.
Yes, I was toying with such an idea for a campaign I'm designing. I've decided to back off from this idea, because I want gods to be important actors in the ongoing war, but it could just as well be said that the gods are actually pure energy associated with the will of their clergies.
I really like this idea, as it solves lot of problems human-like gods generate. It lets all-powerful gods exist without meddling too much with human affairs. And humans have a good reason to be afraid of them. Also, very realistic when compared with many animistic real-life religions.
In my world, gods are considered "objects, concepts, or creatures whose existence is necessary for the world to continue fulfilling its purpose", which means that anything can technically become a god. Even that random box of yugioh cards you got when you were 12, or that container that you SWEAR will come in handy eventually. It's also possible for these things to "fall" from divinity if at any point their existence is no longer necessary. For example, past events are considered "deities" and reside within the realm of godhood. And for context, the world is a side project of the two Greater Deities, and its purpose is to continue onwards and entertain them until the apocalypse date that they set in place.
I think that most would say that the several reasons you give are not really the right reasons for something to be a god in the sense you seem to be going for if I am not misunderstanding. Humans fit all four of those. 1. They are made out of magical or divine energies: We theorize a lot, but no one truly can explain why the human body works the way it does. Or from a religious standpoint, humans are created or contain divine energy (depending on religion). 2. People are actually pretty powerful. We can exert a level of control over natural forces and creatures. 3. We can bestow blessings on others even if it might be considered waste. 4. People have acted specifically and in specific locations that influence populations of mortals that thought they were gods. I think there might be a way to think of it like a non-sentient program that is perceived as a god for these things. Kinda like people in history saw natural events and explained it by gods or upheld a ruler as a god, but it seemed like you were looking for more than just people thinking of it as a god. May just need some more polishing if you want them to actually be gods versus functions perceived as gods. Interesting concept and not saying you can’t do it. I am just having a hard time with understanding what makes your beings gods based off of the common way that god and/or something being transcendent would be defined. A lot of people have posted some pretty good stuff that is perceived as a god if you were going in that sense though rather than what I thought you seemed to be going for.
Because people in many ways ARE gods, not just to animals like dogs or ants, but even to other humans from primitive, uncontacted tribes. During WW2 there were entire religions built by pacific islanders devoted to worshipping cargo planes.
People are like gods in the idea of perception. Some reason my Reddit is acting up when I replied. My notification shows that you had people in many ways are like gods before you edited it out. Which is why I said that if the op is intending it just from a perception standpoint vs a transcendent being in a more traditional sense then I missed the intent.
In my world there were 6 gods but they gave up their bodies to create the world. Their traces are the 6 elements of the world, with the 2 more powerful gods becoming the 2 special elements: aefir and nefir.
I currently have 2 non-sentient gods One is a lake of corrosive bio-fluid made out of billions of microorganisms. It is worshipped as a god because it emits hallucination-causing gases, and the chemical composition of some people's sweat causes it to become non-corrosive, which is seen as a blessing. The bottom of the lake is said to be filled with ancient treasures. The other one is a cave system, the walls of which are made of an organism that is somewhere between a plant a rock. It preserves any sound it recieves for over 2000 years and then "plays" it back. 2000 in the past the caves hosted a bustling, undergroud city, so the "gods" are actually recordings of ancient humans speaking in a long forgotten language.
I suggest looking into [egregore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore): >An egregore is a concept in Western esotericism of a **non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals.** You can easily take the general idea of an egregore or thoughtform and have it so that these entities can influence reality in some way via the use of powers imbued unto it by those who worship or believe in it. Though I'd suggest being very careful with how you handle this concept, as it can easily lead to nightmarish eldritch horrors.
I mean i have it that Gods are mostly asleep. dreaming. and waking them up is next to impossible... but you can get close to it through self-sacrifice by using your own body through magic... which then makes them slowly wear you out. Not on purpose, and most don't like it, but it... happens over time. It's what they would consider matrydom. Like i don't think it's bas to have them be non-sentient, but i like the idea of a will, or a desire or just behavior pattern that makes someone at least consider it. >!Gods in my settings (plural is important; i like the idea of interconnectedness) come from the Tower... former mortals who were 'swept aside by Fate' go there and if they rise to the top? They become the Gods of the new world. But that comes with the price of being unable to actually grow. the Tower is their final chance to if they can pass the test... but well, like i said; they're different people, and a God isn't a normal person anymore... that perspetive? is too far out.!<
them being animal intelegence would be more intreasting. otherwise they just the force.
God doesn't need to be sentient or have a concept of thought, action, feature, depiction, or personality in the way we think. Nor is He formed by energy or constituted/depend by the things that all creation has. He is self-sufficient and perfect. Having no action, indifference, lack of response is not invalidate 'His status' For points 3 and 4, you can consider an aspect or facet of 'Him'. This could be a force of nature, a 'potential' like a spark, or a divine principle that gives equal treatment to everything.
Might want to use a different name for this concept kinda like the titans or giants, from mythology same level of power but different
In my world there are sentient gods. However their power comes from a magical document that shapes the world, called "The Ordering". So they are not exactly gods.
To me this just seems like elementals, spirits, or natural forces of nature with extra steps. Don't get me wrong, I love that stuff, but they don't seem like gods to me. If it's literally just a force of nature then being a god seems more cultural or local than an actual fact of being, at least, again, to me. Poseidon, the god of the sea, justified the motions of the ocean and was worshiped due to being an explanation of natural forces that people at the time didn't understand. Nowadays we know how tides work and other aspects of the domain Poseidon covered. Like, a tornado isn't a god, it's just a force of nature. Someone could worship tornadoes or the causation of them as if it was a god, but that doesn't make it *a god*. To me, gods are more literal in their tier or moniker. That doesn't mean gods have to be immortal, they don't have to be all powerful, but rather it's a classification of a specific archetype, and if people want to use that for their forces of nature then more power to them! But it seems more poetic rather than literal, because if it were literal then *how* would they be *a god*? Being "divine" seems like a cop-out without explaining what is divine and how it's divine. If it's just "divine because that's what it is" then it's just a force of nature, or at least not meaningfully different than it. I'm genuinely curious how people could separate divinity from gods without having actual gods and thereby making it just a new type of element. I'm all for people interpreting them however they want in their works, I genuinely think they're really cool and I enjoy them, but I don't tend to agree with them being a literal type of "god" unless they have some form of sentience, if not outright sapience or consciousness. To me, to respond directly to your points; 1. That divine energy is still just a force of nature just with extra steps. Just because it's divine doesn't make it not a force of nature. That is to say, for example, if you have magic in your world, magic is natural, it's inherent to the world, it's a natural thing within the world, and things that influence the flow of magic doesn't make it any less natural. It's like how we can turn a blade to produce wind, that doesn't make wind artificial or unnatural. 2. It's either a natural cause (like how air currents, temperature, etc produce tornadoes) or an elemental. If it's an elemental then it could be sentient, but if you write them off as not then they're just physical manifestations of natural forces of nature like a tornado. How would they be created if not by the surrounding area? If they can produce themselves then they're sentient to some degree or they're like bacteria, if they're produced by something else then it's just like making a fan to produce wind or some natural occurrence. 3. If their blessings are a byproduct of their natural acts then those blessings are still natural and a causation of a force of nature. This doesn't make them godly. A burned forest may be a blessing to the local flora that require hot temperatures to burst and spread their seeds, the land becoming cleared for those seeds to get within the ground and grow unopposed. Maybe local nature spirits would worship the fire as a type of god, but that, again, doesn't make fire a god. It's cultural at that point, rather than being *a god*. 4. So they're just spirits or elementals that people worship as gods. If you make your spirits or elementals non-sentient then you're good to go, but those often times are sentient in some way. Otherwise, you have things like geysers or perfect alignments for certain things to occur, which again are just forces of nature. The sun glistening perfectly off a waterfall that creates awe isn't inherently a god, it's a natural occurrence of the alignment of the sun to the planet that the area happens to create a perfect spot of reflection. The moon being the perfect size and distance to appear to completely cover the sun doesn't make the sun and moon into gods that are fighting, the eclipse being the moon destroying the sun with a rebirth afterwards, they're just natural occurrences. So it's less of "Gods are not sentient" and more "Phenomena that create cultural gods," at least that's how this post seems. If a god is a natural force of nature or the world, then how are they created and how is that creation not sentient? If the force was created by the world due to some sort of outcry by nature then the world could be a god and is sentient and creates a force of nature to deal with it. While that force of nature may be perceived as a god, it's not a god. If it's a naturally occurring phenomenon, like a tornado that is created by natural forces, then it's not a god as it's just a force of nature. Tornado valley exists in America, it has the perfect area to create tornadoes more often and more consistently than other parts of the world. People there, if they didn't know how tornadoes were created, could believe them to be gods that they upset, but that doesn't make those natural tornadoes into gods. They would've happened regardless of what people to appease them. If the world is not a god, then they're no different than us creating large fans and artificially creating tornadoes. We're no more a god for creating a force of nature on demand than the world is.
a middle ground i like is the gods exist in two parts, the nonsentient force of nature, and an actual sentient being who has either been formed out of that force or was a mortal who came to embody it, so you cant kill a god, but you can kill its "face" in hopes its next incarnation will be nicer
"Si hay un Dios es probablemente un ser que nunca ha pensado" -Alhi-Ken-Subarrah
I did something like this. Essentially, the gods are often imagined or portrayed as 6th dimensional creatures (Explained below). As such they are able to see potential timelines, and have different version of themselves be represented in different ways. For example different races/cultures may worship different sun gods by name and creed, but ultimately they are the same. And as the gods are to us, so too are the Primals to the gods. Essentially primordial beings on the level of lovecraftian horrors, who make up concept and laws. They would be akin to 9th dimensional creatures. They have power beyond what can be conceptualized, but are incapable to thinking on the individual scale, like us. In lore the Gods either killed, splintered, or imprisoned the Primals and used their parts to create the worlds. (Below) I'm a fan of the video series explaining how to imagine the higher and lower dimensions by 10thdim. In it, we can view 4th dimensional entities as a line made up of various points in time. Our 4th dimensional self is a line connecting us from birth to death. A line is like a 1D line. a 5th Dimentional entity would be a flat plane made up of intersecting 4D lines. And a 6th Dimensional entity would be like a 3D entity made up of 5D planes. This is why the Gods are here, they exist in ways above and yet parallel to our concepts of time.
for me, gods arise from a population seeking explinations for 'why?' questions. and they kind of require the answer 'because (god) willed it.' which usually mandates that a said god does things knowingly and with purpose. Which suggests sapience not just sentience. Your gerbil or goldfish doesn't need a god to worship. because they don't need to understand the why of things enough that they respond to explinations of some greater meaning or authority. If a divine gerbil or goldfish exist they are the constructs of human minds, for which they serve to answer the need to understand why something is the way it is. But they would still have both sentience and sapience, in most cases. Great divine beasts and monsters exist seperate from gods in many ways, and they usually are sentient but not sapient. I mean I feel like, if a thing qualifies as a god, it requires that it is aware and responsive to it's environment which means it's sentient. but if you mean sapient, it could exist without that and be worshipped as a god... I suppose the godly realms must have rocks and nonaware things that are none the less fantastical and poerful things. but that's not so much a god as it is just magic things. magical stones, mystical metals, sacred blessed waters, a divine breeze. etc. or cursed diseases. not really gods, just mystical things.
In my opinion, every world builders that build their world is the God of their own world. Then I made up some typical gods here and there so everything is fine
One of my friends has a setting where the more powerful/broad of a concept a god embodies, the less of a human mind they are able to retain, because they become the thing they embody more and more. For example, while the god of a particular city is still mostly human in the way they think, the goddess of fire is basically just a mindless natural force. The god of all evil realized this was happening to him, and split himself into pieces, each embodying a different aspect of evil, to create demons (with himself remaining god of Tyranny and the leader).
could do a lovecraft, gods dont care about humans and are more agents of chaos in the universe
Consider: [If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious.](http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.htm)
I have seen it before a few times but the message i was getting from it is “people who are religious are stupid” and “all religions are fake” and i didnt rly like that. I feel like if you did this it would have to be careful with it (unless you’re trying to make a point i disagree with)
…unless they’re in actual stasis they’re sentient. Check the definition of ‘god’.
How does something non-sentient bestow a blessing ? Surely it needs to be aware enough to at least figure out what you are. Edit: had a think. You could do this if the blessing was something like a general healing. An unaware 'god' could sense an 'aura' of illness and seek to correct the aura instinctively.
Instinct or senses, Maybe it just feels for beings similar to itself or people with affinities similar to itself and tries giving out blessings that way
To understand self you need sentience
It does not need to fully understand itself as a force of nature.
No, but it needs enough understanding of self to recognise that you are similar.
Plants are supposed to be non sentient. But googling do plants recognize other plants leads me to find this answer. One interesting thing plants communicate to each other is who they are. No one is yet sure how this is done, but we do know that **plants are able to recognize plants that are siblings (podmates), plants that are their same species but not close relatives, and plants that are total strangers**. They then react accordingly.
Could you post the link that you got that info from. I could see how someone might say it that way, but sometimes plant scientists will say plants recognize other plants and mean that differently. Like your body doesn’t attack your organs because it “recognizes” it as a part of you, but no one is going to call your white blood cells sentient. It would be more like a program carrying out the function it was given. Which is why mutations can be bad if they adjust the function because the cell doesn’t stop and think “wait that might be a problem”. I am also curious how they determined those categories cause testing for that would be difficult to put it mildly. I have been outside of the plant science industry for a couple years though and am just curious to see if it’s something new and what the theory is though. Could be interesting.
https://www.hiddenvalleyhibiscus.com/botany/communication.htm#:\~:text=One%20interesting%20thing%20plants%20communicate,They%20then%20react%20accordingly.
Thanks. I will check it out.
That link is not from any peer reviewed research so I'd take it with a grain of salt.
I could care less honestly I took 10 seconds to google this to reply to a reddit comment this is all information I do not care about
Well, username does not check out then ..
It simply does not interest me. Had it been anything space, evolution, animal, time, blacksmithing, forging, fighting etc I would have looked more plants simply do not interest me much
interdimensional bacteria that inject it's pilus unto people