Gods

The modern sf version of this motif has strange, enormous alien artefacts (see Big Dumb Objects; Macrostructures) made – often in space – by a now-forgotten race of alien Builders or Forerunners for their own godlike purposes, but seeming to us like incomprehensible sacred relics.
Although sf analogues to the One God are comparatively rare in Genre SF, even in its early days, quite a few works of earlier borderline sf consider the nature of the Christian God. Marie Corelli apparently considered religious experience to be electric in nature, and in A Romance of Two Worlds (1886; rev 1887) postulated a God who manifests himself electrically. In A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), David Lindsay created analogues of the more conventional Christian and Jewish images of God, only to dismiss them in every case as false and cheap in a universe where only pain and personal striving are meaningful. (Analogues of Christ are very much more common in sf than those of God the Father, and are chiefly discussed under Messiahs.)
God-stories in sf are nearly always rationalized, seldom mystical. Many stories are based on the notion that a highly advanced society might seem godlike to a more primitive one, and in many tales of Colonization of Other Worlds the narrative turns on the difficulties and responsibilities of being seen in this light; an example is Trudno byt' bogom (1964; trans as Hard to be a God 1973) by the brothers Strugatski. Conversely, other stories present humans as confronted by some form of galactic intelligence which is so high in the order of life as to seem godlike. A very early work by Clifford D Simak, The Creator (March/April 1935 Marvel Tales; 1946 chap), features a world-creating Alien; the same author's A Choice of Gods (1972) proposes a godlike galactic principle. Eric Frank Russell's "Hobbyist" (September 1947 Astounding) envisages a god who created life in the Galaxy for mere aesthetic pleasure. https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/gods_and_demons