The Modern Anti-Pattern

Gods in the 21st century appear to conform to the Anna Karenina principle: a deficiency in any one of a number of factors doom an endeavour to failure (the extracted wisdom from the timeless words “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”). Hence, successful religions must become more abstract with time to avoid direct conflicts with empirical knowledge, in order to maintain frontiers without possible deficiencies, while remaining both accessible and profound. This creates a kind of evolutionary bottleneck that favours certain religious structures over others.

This compression manifests most notably in the convergence toward “monolatry” (where many holy things exist, but only one deserves worship) from both polytheistic and monotheistic forks. From the polytheistic stance, the more gods there are, the less powerful each god seems to be (what’s known as the Conservation of Ninjutsu—one ninja is a deadly threat, but an army of them are cannon fodder). Meanwhile, monotheistic systems have evolved toward monolatry by developing rich hierarchies of saints, angels, and other divine intermediaries, spreading theological risk across a broader framework to withstand future selection pressure, rather than channeling all divine activity through a single source.

This evolutionary pattern produces religions centred on a single discrete divine entity manifested in multiple aspects. Such structures elegantly sidestep theological difficulties by outsourcing apparent contradictions to the ineffable nature of divine presence or the rule of juries practicing common law.

This arrangement allows religions to maintain rich mythological traditions while establishing a clear theological hierarchy that simplifies moral and philosophical questions. Modern successful religions thus solve several critical requirements:

  • Must provide compelling answers to existential questions

  • Must maintain internal consistency sufficient to withstand philosophical scrutiny

  • Must achieve basic accessibility while offering enough symbolic depth to reward in-depth theological exploration

But the goalposts are moving whenever science seasonally reinvents the tools we use to scrutinise our cosmos. It becomes increasingly awkward to shoe horn utilitarian concepts such as the hedonic calculus into a doctrine that cannot be shown to evolve without losing its divine authority.

Paying heed to the ancient memetic mechanisms of religion, this essay is an attempt to map out what symbolism has persisted, and what path religion is likely to take in a post-singularity world.

The Hierarchy of Divine Power

Let us map out the forest for the trees. The nine major types of God are variants of the three omnis: omniscience (absolute intelligence), omnipotence (absolute agency) and omnipresence (absolute embodiment).


(Type 1) Unified Reality: pure consciousness and being itself, beyond all dualities and distinctions. The absolute ground of existence in which all beings act.

  • Example: Brahman in Vedantic philosophy, described through concepts like “neti neti” (not this, not that) to indicate its ineffable nature. Or some interpretations of the “holy spirit” in Christianity.

(Type 2) Monadic Supreme Being: Personal manifestations of divine intelligence and power; omniscient and omnipotent but maintain a distinct identity, choosing to govern through cosmic law of moral calculus.

  • Examples: Ishvara in Hinduism, God/Yahweh/Allah in Abrahamic faiths, and Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism.

(Type 3) Divine Incarnation: These beings maintain divine awareness while accepting the limitations of embodiment in religious stories.

  • Examples include Jesus in Christianity, Krishna and Rama as avatars of Vishnu, and the Dalai Lama as Avalokiteshvara’s manifestation.

(Type 4) Cosmic Function Specialists: These beings embody fundamental cosmic processes, often manifesting in abstract or multiple forms to represent their universal function.

  • Examples: Creator-destroyer deities like Brahma and Shiva, Greek Chaos and Erebus, and Aztec Coatlicue. Satan (meaning “adversary”) originated like a Type 5 Cosmic Function Deity but became known as embodying the cosmic process of opposition to divine order itself.

(Type 5) Cosmic Function Deities: Each represents mastery over specific domains of reality, with power and knowledge focused within their sphere of influence.

  • Examples: thunder gods like Indra, Zeus, and Thor; “Deva” wisdom deities like Saraswati, Athena, and Thoth; and water deities like Poseidon and Varuna.

(Type 6) Elevated Beings: Beings who began as human but attained such profound spiritual realisation that they transcended ordinary existence and are now venerated as divine teachers.

  • Examples include Dattatreya, achieved Buddhas, and the deified Confucius.

(Type 7) Ancestral Spirits: Connected to the physical world through familial lineage, possessing enhanced wisdom from their post-mortal perspective without major influence over the living.

  • Seen in Chinese ancestor veneration, Roman Di Manes, and Japanese Kami.

(Type 8) Deified Heroes: Legendary humans elevated to divine status through their deeds or influence, often demigods.

  • Examples include Hercules, Guan Yu, and Hawaiian ali’i.

(Type 9) Local Nature Spirits: Greek Naiads, Japanese Kodama, and Aboriginal local rainbow serpents.

Divine Attributes

At the heart of religious thought lie three highly sticky, divine qualities that appear across cultures in fascinating variations.

Omniscience: the all-seeing eye motif, appearing in traditions from ancient Egypt to modern Christianity, represents divine awareness that penetrates all barriers of space and time.

  • Prophecy reveals truths unavailable to those without a direct pathway to the holy realm
  • Karma perpetuates the idea of cosmic accounting

Omnipotence: the authority of the creator agent lies in their ability to be unchallenged in their control over reality itself.

  • Through the spoken word of the Abrahamic God or the dance of Shiva
  • Perpetuated through the act of miracles, which are essentially cosmic flexes

Omnipresence: the embodiment of divinity; sacred geometry and ritual spaces that make material churches and temples tangibly worth building. Generally, this quality gives an intangibility for worshippers, to keep them coming back.

Religious archetypes:

  • The Triple Deity: To compound the effect of the mono-god, a particularly strong upgrade to the Christian faith came in the 2nd century, when Theophilus of Antioch coined the “holy trinity” as a trifecta god of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Similar triadic structures appear across cultures:
    • The Mother-Maiden-Crone pattern found in various traditions speaks to human understanding of life’s cycles.
    • Fate manifests in triplets with Norse mythology “Norns”, the “Moirai” of the Greeks, or the “Morrigan” in Irish mythology.
    • In assembly theory, threefold interaction is often the lowest copy-number required to produce genuinely emergent properties.
  • The Conductor of the Dead: Psychopomps are deities who guide the dead to the afterlife. They may help the dead accomplish their last deeds, or judge the dead for entry to the afterlife.
    • Anubis leads the dead to the afterlife in Egyptian mythology.
    • Charon is ferryman of the dead in Greek myths.
  • The Primordial Creator: These beings—often more abstract and cosmic than later gods—establish the manifold of reality; the stage for all the world to play.
    • In Greek mythology, Gaia, Eros, Erebus, Nyx and Tartarus were the creator Gods that emerged from Chaos (nothingness) before the age of the Titans, and the Hesiod succession Theogony.
    • They include Ymir from Norse mythology, Pangu in Chinese mythology, or Olódùmarè sending Obatala down from the sky on a golden chain to create solid land in the waters of Earth (only to get drunk on palm wine).
  • Tricksters: Think Loki, Coyote, Anansi, etc. These resonate with Jungian archetypes. These characters introduce an element of chaos and transformation that paradoxically helps maintain cosmic order by challenging it.

The evolution of colour in language acts as a parallel to the specialised domains of each deity. Just as languages universally develop words for black and white first, followed by red, and then expanding into other colours in a predictable sequence, the most fundamental and earliest deities typically relate to binary oppositions: day/night, sky/earth, light/dark.

Fire gods like Prometheus, Agni, and Hephaestus are frequently associated with civilisation, technology, and the transformation of raw materials into cultural artefacts.

Now imagine that everything described above belongs not to many fragmented religions, but a single, dynamic religion, evolving iconography with respect to science. Such a field would become a part of science: the study of sacred stories and their evolution in the memetic sphere. This is a mythological foundation worth believing in.

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