God and the Monsters on TV

I spend more time than the average person analyzing the philosophy of superhero movies, and in recent years there’s been a plethora of material to work with. In this post I don’t want to talk about a specific movie; I instead want to talk about a confusion that seems to attend superhero movies in general: what, exactly, is “God”?

We’ve seen it in Guardians of the Galaxy. We’ve seen it in Doctor Strange. We’ve seen it in Star Trek (multiple times) and Man of Steel. Yet another being shows up to challenge our limited conceptions of divinity. He can create life at will, or he can consume planets into a big trippy-looking haze, or he can… shoot lightning, or he can… fly… really fast…

Really? This is our standard for divine power? Kinda low, isn’t it? The writers seem to think that anyone who believes in God must be willing to accept anyone with significantly more power than an average human being as a deity.

Why? Because belief in God is, obviously, based on cultural convention, wishful thinking, ignorant awe, or overactive imagination rather than logic and evidence. Obviously, the people who believe in God are those who know the least about him, because if they knew the whole story, as told by science, they wouldn’t believe in him anymore.

I find this amusing because exactly the opposite is true.

The gods atheists come up with are invariably silly when given that title. Everything and its mother is a god, nothing makes sense, and everything is reduced to overactive CGI when they run out of ideas. It is the people who believe in God who think the matter important enough to put some thought into, who insist on high standards and careful critical thought. It is the theists who draw hard lines between what they believe in and what they do not believe in.

I’ll cut the rant short, because I think there’s something productive to be realized here. A cinematic universe is actually the perfect analogy to help us understand exactly how powerful a monotheistic God is. Picture the Marvel cinematic universe. Would God be as powerful as Ego? As powerful as Dormammu? As powerful as Thanos with his infinity gauntlet?

No. God isn’t any of them. God is Marvel Studios.

If Marvel Studios wanted to wipe Dormammu out of existence, it wouldn’t be a struggle. His so-called infinite power would be gone in an instant. And so would everyone else, no matter what sci-fi gadget or magical marvel they produced to combat it. They wouldn’t even see it coming unless Marvel wanted them to. Compared to Marvel Studios, Thanos isn’t even a bug. A bug could at least bite you.

And if Thanos existed in real life, with a real infinity gauntlet, he would be exactly that powerless compared to God. Because that is our universe’s relationship to God. There is an infinite, categorical gap between the created and the creator. He exists at a higher level of reality, what Plato called the ontus on – the “really real.”

So please, let’s stop suggesting that these shows somehow challenge the traditional conception of God. Mystic relics and interdimensional energy do not make the universe bigger than theists are comfortable with. In fact, when we look more closely, we find that all these things are not new ideas at all, just pseudo-scientific expansions that still fit into a materialistic framework.

The universe of these films is, in fact, very small, and it conforms suspiciously well to modern conceptions of what things ought to be like. No matter how many physical dimensions or CGI swirls are added, everything remains understandable and controllable by pseudo-scientific methods. Nothing is transcendent; nothing is untouchable. Nothing is divine. Despite its self-proclaimed infinite scope, their universe rings hollow.

In the end, then, all this pontificating about threats to our conception of God is nothing but smoke and mirrors, answerable by a VeggieTales song:

“God is bigger than the boogieman.

He’s bigger than Godzilla or the monsters on TV.

Oh, God is bigger than the boogieman,

and he’s watching out for you and me!”