"To me God does not yet exist; but there is a creative force
constantly struggling to evolve an executive organ of godlike
knowledge and power: that is, to achieve omnipotence and
omniscience; and every man and woman born is a fresh attempt to
achieve this object.
"The current theory that God already exists in perfection involves
the belief that God deliberately created something lower than
Himself when He might just as easily have created something
equally perfect. That is a horrible belief: it could only have arisen
among people whose notion of greatness is to be surrounded by
inferior beings -- like a Russian nobleman -- and to enjoy the
sense of superiority to them.
"To my mind, unless we conceive God as engaged in a continual
struggle to surpass Himself -- as striving at every birth to make a
better man than before, we are conceiving nothing better than an
omnipotent snob.
"Also we are compelled by the theory of God's already achieved
perfection to make Him a devil as well as a god, because of the
existence of evil. The god of love, if omnipotent and omniscient,
must be the god of cancer and epilepsy as well.
"Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe
that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe
that God has made many mistakes in His attempts to make a
perfect being. But if you believe, as I do... that the croup bacillus
was an early attempt to create a higher being than anything
achieved before that time, and that the only way to remedy the
mistake was to create a still higher being, part of whose work
must be the destruction of that bacillus, the existence of evil
ceases to present any problem; and we come to understand that we
are here to help God, to do His work, to remedy His old errors, to
strive towards Godhead ourselves.
"I put this very roughly and hastily; but you will have no trouble in
making out my meaning. It is all in Man and Superman; but
expressed in another way -- not in the way that an uneducated
man can understand. You said that my manner in that book was
not serious enough -- that I made people laugh in my most earnest
moments. But why should I not? Why should humour and laughter
be excommunicated? Suppose the world were only one of God's
jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead
of a bad one?"
George Bernard Shaw (in a letter to Leo Tolstoy, circa 1919)
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The way the progression goes, according to most contemporary theory, is first, one has polytheism (many gods on more or less an equal footing - this is actually a consequence of animism, where each and every material thing is accepted as possessing its own animating spirit, like the referent human body), then comes henotheism, where one of the gods becomes the King God of the pantheon, the same as a chief comes to rule a tribe (as in Jupiter, Zeus or Odin), then finally one evolves to monotheism, where the King God absorbs all the others, first as aspects of itself, then the aspect idea disappears and only the one God remains (Yahweh/Jehovah, God, Allah).