Most of the world’s religions have some concept of gods or a God, with some notable exceptions such as Buddhism, the world's fourth-largest religion.

Theologians claim to have discerned the essential attributes of a monotheistic God, such as omniscience (perfect foreknowledge), omnipotence (unlimited power), omnipresence (present everywhere), omnibenevolence (perfect goodness and all-loving), and a necessary and eternal existence.

Information philosophy offers a simple test of the “revealed truth” of these attributes, specifically the visions by inspired thinkers that have no empirical evidence. Although these visions are in the realm of “pure ideas,” we can say that if every world religion agreed completely on their descriptions and perceived attributes of God, it would increase their believability. As it is, the comparative study of religions, with the incredible diversity of their claims, renders the idea of God as implausible as Santa Claus. I

Indeed, the stories and images of St.Nicholas, his sleigh and reindeers, his elves working in a North Pole workshop, his travel down chimneys, are perhaps more consistent across world societies than many descriptions of their gods.

At the present time, arguments like these will carry little weight with the believers in a religion, most of whom have little exchange of knowledge with those of other faiths. This can be expected to change with the reach of the Internet via smartphones to most of the world’s population.

In Theism, God is the creator and sustainer of the universe.

Deism is the belief in a single creative act at the beginning of time followed by a mechanical clockwork universe tending to itself ever since. God is the universe creator, but not its sustainer. The universe is now assumed to be running itself following deterministic laws of motion.

Open theism denies that God’s foreknowledge has already determined the future. Monotheism is the belief in the existence of one God or in the oneness of God. In pantheism, God is the universe itself. Polytheists hold that there are many gods. For atheists, no gods exist.

God is sometimes conceived as an immaterial being (without a body), which information philosophy accepts, since God is quintessentially an idea, pure information. Some religions think an avatar of God has come to earth in the past. Some religions see God as a personal being, answering human supplications and prayers. A God intervening in human affairs is thought to be the source of all moral norms. Logical “proofs” of God’s existence are based on various of these assumed attributes.

Creationism is the belief that the universe, the Earth, the stars, and all life were created by a supernatural being or God, rather than through natural processes, like cosmic evolution, stellar evolution, and biological evolution (natural selection).

“Intelligent Design" is a replacement term created by author George Gilder's Discovery Institute to get around the Supreme Court ruling against the teaching of Creationism in public schools.

Teleology is the ancient notion that the “essence” or "idea" or "form" of something was there before the thing itself came into existence. Since all known information structures, first cosmological and then biological, were “emergent,” at least some of their peculiar specific information did not pre-exist them.

In particular, there was no purpose in the universe before life, despite thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who described an "Omega Point" in the future at which all evolution was directed, and despite panpsychism, which claims that mind was a primordial property of all matter.

Existentialist philosophers, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jean Paul Sartre, were correct in their atheism, but their idea that “God is dead” was absurd.

Now a metaphysicist might argue that the laws of nature, how things behave, might pre-exist, or come into existence simultaneously with, the first matter and energy. But laws themselves contain nothing specific about the future arrangements of matter and energy that create new information structures.

Omniscience entails impotence. Omnipotence entails some ignorance. Prayer is useless. The discovery by Albert Einstein of ontological quantum chance poses an even greater threat to the omniscience of God and the idea of foreknowledge. The great mathematicians who invented probability always regarded chance as atheistic. Their use of statistics was simply to make estimates of outcomes of many independent events when detailed knowledge of those events was not possible because of human ignorance. Ontological chance means that even God cannot know some things. For example, in quantum physics, if knowledge exists of which slot a particle will go through in a two-slit experiment, the outcome of the experiment would be different. The characteristic interference caused by the wave function passing through both slits disappears.

The physical product of the cosmic creation process is all the negative entropy in the universe. While thermodynamics calls it “negative,” information philosophy sees it as the ultimate positive and deserving of a better name. So we suggest calling it the Ergo, which etymologically suggests a fundamental kind of energy (“erg” zero), e.g., the “Gibbs free energy,” G₀. Ergo is energy that is available to do work because it has low entropy.

We also co-opt the technical term “ergodic” from statistical mechanics as a replacement for anti-entropic, and because it contains the highly suggestive “Ergod." We thus anthropomorphize (or theomorphize) the process that creates all the energy with low entropy.

The concept of Ergo has a number of beneficial consequences. Most all human cultures look for the source of their existence in something “higher” than their mundane existence. This intuition of a cosmic force, a providence that deserves reverence, is validated in part by the discovery of what we provocatively call “Ergod,” as the ultimate source of goodness and life.

An Ergod has the power to resist the terrible and universal Second Law of Thermodynamics. The second law predicts only increase of chaos and entropy (disorder). Without violating that inviolable Second Law overall, the Ergod reduces the entropy locally. Out of chaos it creates pockets of "cosmos" - order and information-rich structures.

All human life, and any possible extraterrestrial life, lives in one of these pockets. Note that the opposition of Ergod and Entropy, of Ergodic processes and Entropic processes, coincides with the ancient Zarathustrian image of a battle between the forces of light (Ahura Mazda) and darkness (Angra Manyu), of good and evil, of heaven and hell. Many religions have variations on this dualist theme, and the three major Western religions all share the same Biblical source, probably incorporated into Judaism during the Babylonian exile. The Ergod is “present” and we can say enthusiastically is “in us.” The Ergod’s work is to create new information, so when we create and share information we are doing the Ergod’s work.