The worlds of manmade gods

<rant>

In fiction, I keep running across the trope of gods created, or at least sustained, by human belief. The creation of these gods often alters reality, including the past. The most recent source is the comic Digger by Ursula Vernon; a few past sources I remember include the comics Gunnerkrigg Court and True Villains and the Discworld book series. This trope significantly violates my suspension of disbelief.

Inevitably, when some character asks, "How does that work?", he is told, "Don't think about it; just accept it." Gunnerkrigg Court lampshades the circular causality: Human belief creates Coyote, who created humans, and Annie is supposed to consider it a divine mystery and not object to it.

As the authors themselves probably admit, circular causality does not work. As the authors apparently refuse to admit, the nature of causality matters. If effects may have no causes--if reality can rewrite itself--if truth is, in fact, relative--then rationalism, possibly accompanied by rationality and definitely by science, goes out the window.

So at best you have a story set in nonsense. Terry Pratchett has proved that you can have a lot of fun with such a story. But he then makes claims of truth, often about morality, from within the story. If you have discarded the internal consistency of your fictional universe, then your universe does not reflect reality, and its morals have no necessary application to reality. How can you imagine that you can draw conclusions from it?

The point of fiction is to teach about reality by reflecting it. If your story's morals cannot even claim objectivity, what good is your story?

Theology is hard. Cultural atheists are not used to it, whereas Christian philosophers have been working on it for millennia. If you want to make a new system, maybe start by learning some of the ways the established one has avoided blowing its own brains out so you don't have to make the same mistakes. At the very least, please do not call Christianity irrational while proposing some theology with significantly more basic problems.