Have You Seen My God - Television Tropes & Idioms

-And if he comes back, take him to court. He walked out on us, he oughta pay.

— Prior Walter, Angels In America

Have you seen my God? About eternity years old, white hair, big beard, answers to Yahweh, Jehovah, and Allah. If found, contact the Vatican. Reward offered.

God may be good. God may be evil. We'd give you a more concrete answer, but... well, we can't find him. God (or some other deity) appears to have abandoned his station, and all the angels and the rest of the heavenly engine is in a tizzy. Did something happen to him? Or did he just decide that it all wasn't worth it anymore?

Generally, the absence of a deity serves one of four purposes:

One, it falls upon the heroes' shoulders to find out what happened to said deity and set things right.
Two, it may establish the setting as a Crapsack World when even the deity in charge of it gives up in disgust.
More rarely, it's just a way of welching on which religion is right.
And finally, it allows Angels to be full characters without having their Boss' luggage get in the way.
Any combination of the above is also possible.

In God's absence, the Council Of Angels may be running the show, but they aren't guaranteed to be doing a good job...

Sometimes it's revealed that God decided to do it this way to allow free will, as micromanaging the Israelites in the Old Testament didn't turn out so well. He'll show up from time to time as an advisor, but usually only after such events will the interactee realize (if at all) who it was.

Compare God Is Evil, Neglectful Precursors and Rage Against The Heavens. Contrast Devil But No God. In polytheistic settings, it's not impossible for there not to be a god because the God Of Evil killed him.

Examples

Anime and Manga

God spends most of Angel Sanctuary holed up in a tower away from the rest of the universe. Turns out to be evil, though.
Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg is actually about God forsaking the occupants of Noah's Ark after starting the Flood but never allowing the waters to recede.

Comic Books

Preacher. When God ends up creating something just as powerful as he is, he abandons ship, leaving Heaven to clean up the mess. When Jesse finds out about this, he decides to track down God and deliver the crunchiest of beatings.
Spawn has God disappearing for four years, and the archangels keeping it secret.
One arc of The Authority has God returning after an absence of billions of years. He's not too impressed to see his retirement home's been overrun by termites.
The Sandman: Morpheus is kept captive between the years 1916 and 1989. During that time the dream world runs wild.
In Mike Carey's Lucifer series, God admitted that He had set up all of history from Creation onward as training for His hand-picked replacements - Lucifer and Michael (ironically, Michael the Good Boy proved to be a disappointment to Him). When that didn't work, God abandoned the universe, which immediately began to disintegrate from lack of Divine Will maintaining its existence. The universe was saved by Michael's daughter Elaine taking over as the new Supreme Being.
- This troper thinks it was all a Xanatos Gambit to force Lucifer and Michael to change and question themselves to the point where they would prove to be good custodians over the universe. It should be noticed that Lucifer was just as annoyed about being labelled the good boy as Michael was the bad, and that they both started to change dramatically at that moment. Note that the second someone finally sat on the Throne of God they were teleported to God's pocket universe to bring their case for salvation or destruction. The only thing he didn't anticipate was Elaine stepping up in place of her father.
- Also, God stopped communicating with the angels for a million year after the initial creation. In the face of this silence, the angels struggled to determine God's will, with mixed results. Gabriel in particular became a Knight Templar seeking to instill stark justice on creation, in God's name.

Film

Dogma puts the responsibility on the shoulders of the main characters after God seemingly vanishes from Heaven. Then again, it's not exactly as if it's her fault in this case.
- Maybe.
  - "What the &%!* kind of deity gets kidnapped?!"
Two Of A Kind begins with God coming back from one of these absences, discovering everything has gone to pot while he was gone, and deciding it's time to wipe the slate clean and start over again.
Begotten opens with the grisly scene of God Killing Himself (that's the character name according to the end credits) via disembowelment. Mother Earth emerges from his body and uses his sperm to impregnate herself, giving birth to Son Of Earth - Flesh On Bone. Mother and Son encounter faceless dwarves who first worship them and then brutally murder them. Plants sprout from their interred bodies, implying that life goes on but presumably without gods.

Literature

In the Belgariad all the gods pick a people except Aldur (he gets a few disciples later on) because he loved the world itself too much to tie himself down. This leaves a whole bunch of people godless, and they do various stuff to fill the void. (Worshipping demons, that sort of thing) then one day one of the Godless finds out there's ANOTHER god that didn't pick a people, so he goes looking for him, and eventually embarrasses him enough so that he accepts him.
In Dune Messiah the Reverend Mother Gaius Hellen Mohiam asks Emperor Paul-Muad'dib Atreides if he believes in the God whose Word forms the basis of his right to rule. His answer comes out to "eh, maybe".
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth entry in the Hitchhikers' Guide series, has Arthur and Fenchurch traveling to a far-off planet to witness God's final message to his creation: "WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE", written in giant flaming letters.
The His Dark Materials trilogy has the entity that everyone thinks is God reduced practically to nonexistence after millennia of rule. Still, his followers fight on in his name, generally making a mess of things on Earth.
The gods of Krynn in the Dragonlance novels abandon the material plane after the knight templars start acting like they command the gods, rather than vice versa.
- Thus leading to the Seekers ("We seek the new gods"), and even after that, once the old gods come back and are reinstated, they disappear again and the entire War of Souls trilogy is about working out what to do next, and possibly finding a new god, the One God. Turns out the One God is one of the old gods. And then all the rest of the old gods come back. Again.
  - The second time is an inversion, as the world left the gods (via theft) rather than the other way around.
  - On an interesting note, this plane is a lot more understanding to atheists than most Dungeons And Dragons settings; because really, who can blame them?
In the Incarnations of Immortality series, God is physically present, but too busy admiring Himself to pay attention to anything else. This results in the other Incarnations impeaching Him, removing Him from office, and making a rather creative choice of a new God.
The Forgotten Realms War Of The Spider Queen novel series had Lolth apparently vanish. A crack team of freaks is sent to find out "What the hell, woman? ...ma'am. Your Awesomeness."
God's Debris has this as the origin of the central philosophy: God destroyed himself in the Big Bang, and all matter, energy, and probability is God's debris.
In Alan Campbell's The Deepgate Codex series, Ayen, mother and queen of the gods, has exiled all of the other gods from Heaven, and locked its gates against both gods and human souls. (The other gods claim she went insane, but then, we only have their side of the story, and most of them don't come across as the most trustworthy types.) One result of this is that, with Heaven closed, all human souls now go to Hell instead. (Apart from some that end up in even worse places.) This has unfortunate consequences when people figure out that it no longer matters whether they were good or evil in life...
Garth Nix's Keys To The Kingdom septology features a multiverse missing its deity, The Architect.
Temporary variant: at the beginning of Holly Lisle's novel Hell on High, God announces he's taking his first vacation in, well, ever. Two angels take advantage of his not being around to go AWOL to Earth, so they can try to convince a demon they knew before the Fall to repent and return. At the end of the book, God comes back and reveals he was giving them an opportunity to do just that.
The Inquisitor Madderdin series by Jacek Piekara is set in an alternative medieval Christianity where Christ didn't die for our sins, but instead stepped of the Cross to punish the evil with a massacre of Jerusalem ("And give us the strength not to forgive our sinners" is part of the Our Father prayer). Even though Angels clearly exist and prayer works, at least in some ways, God himself is reportedly missing and Angels have no idea how to even look for him. Well, some of them have a very strange idea which makes the main protagonist very uncomfortable...
Inverted in Small Gods by Terry Pratchett: the Great God Om has been reduced to an angry, powerless turtle because, of all his millions of "worshippers," only one person actually believes in him any more. Until Om finds Brutha, it's less "Have You Seen My God?" than "Have You Seen My Follower?"
- Something very similar to this trope happens in Reaper Man and Soul Music, in which Death goes missing, presumed...er...
- From Small Gods (from memory): "Oh. My god." "What?" "Um, have you seen my turtle?"

Live Action TV

This seems to be the case in Season 4 of Supernatural with the introduction of Castiel, who appears to be Dean Winchester's stalker guardian angel whose duty is to warn him of Sam's descent towards the dark side. Dean keeps asking about his boss, but Castiel won't give a definitive answer.
- It was just revealed that only four angels ever see God. Cas almost certainly isn't one of them. So if he's cagey, it's because he doesn't know. What is more it is clear now that God is not longer running the show, directly at least, in any way shape or form, with at least one Archangel trying to bring about Lucifer's rise (so they can beat him, not the same as Uriels defection) and pretending to be doing the opposite to avoid a loyalist rebellion. Why is he able to do this? 'God? God has left the building'

Music

Considering how wretched the world Tom Waits sings about is, it's no surprise that "God's Away on Business." Who are the ones that we kept in charge? Killers, thieves, and lawyers!

Tabletop Games

In the Old World of Darkness game Demon: the Fallen, the player characters are fallen angels who've clawed their way out of Hell only to find that God and all his angels are nowhere to be found. The obvious question of "well, where did they go?" is studiously left unanswered; it's up to every individual GM to answer it or not as he or she likes. The final OWoD sourcebook, detailing Armageddon itself, suggests some possible answers, but they're just suggestions.
In Nomine, a Tabletop RPG where the PCs are Angels and Demons has this; God isn't actually present in the first level of a classically structured Heaven, since he left His creation for the most part to its own devices shortly after the Fall. Lucifer's first overt act of rebellion was to murder God's voice, the Metatron, leaving no clear channel of communication to the big guy. Of course, every once in a while you get a "divine intervention" which might be the secret handiwork of God, or maybe one of the Archangels. It's stated that God is still around in a higher Heaven, but it's either extremely rare or completely unheard-of for a Player Character to go up the stairs, and they don't come back.
- There's also Archangel Yves, who on occasion acts as a direct conduit of communication from God, and whom it is hinted (in both text and illustration) may actually be God in disguise.
  - Although intending to let the War between Heaven & Hell play out largely without his direct interference, in the IN universe God has directly communicated with his angels at least twice since Lucifer's Rebellion - once, to order Dominic, Archangel of Judgement, to pardon Archangel Michael after the latter was found guilty of the sin of Pride, and once to order Uriel, Archangel of Purity, to stop the ethereal genocide he was in the progress of attempting and ascend to the Higher Heavens and report to God in person right now. (Note: Uriel hasn't been seen since that day. Anywhere.)
  - In addition to Yves' status as maybe-possibly the Voice of God, or God's secret avatar, Archangel Gabriel is also known to occasionally speak words of prophecy that are literally direct revelations from God. The rest of the time, Gabriel's... not exactly lucid.
- In the third edition of In Nomine Satanis / Magna Veritas, the French game on which In Nomine is based, God is on an hydrotherapeutic cure somewhere in France.
In the Tabletop Games KULT, the Demiurge disappeared, and Astaroth is looking for him, since only his counterpart can give a meaning to his existence.
In the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of Dungeons And Dragons, the Time Of Troubles was when all the gods were kicked out of their home planes and made to walk the world as (exceedingly powerful) mortals. Not just divine magic, but all magic went wonky (as the god of arcane magic was AFK with the rest). A few gods died. It was a whole thing.
- All gods save one, that is. One god kept his divine powers in order to keep the others out.
Gleefully played with in Warhammer 40000, where the god of the Imperium is on life-support, the Necron gods like to eat each other (and one is batshit insane), but the Eldar really take the cake. All but three of the old Eldar pantheon were killed before or during the Fall of the Eldar; the survivors are Cegorach, the Laughing God of the Harlequins, Khaine, the god of war, shattered into pieces (which sleep in each craftworld as Avatars of Khaine), and Isha, the mother goddess, imprisoned by the Chaos God Nurgle to test his plagues on. The Eldar are also attempting to create Ynnead, a new god of death, from the souls of dead Eldar stored in the Craftworlds' Infinity Circuits, the idea being that when the very last Eldar dies, Ynnead will be strong enough to rise and defeat Slaanesh. Hopefully.
To an extent, this trope is applicable to the Dungeons&Dragons setting "Infernum"- while the existence of angels is confirmed, and the most famous First Fallen do have names of fallen angels (Lucifer and Azazel being the primary), there's no evidence for whether or not God exists. Of course, the game revolves around fighting for survival in Hell, so traveling to Earth itself isn't covered, let alone Heaven, and the Fallen Angels that are player characters don't remember a thing before actually falling. What about the First Fallen, who didn't plunge through the memory-sapping Lethe Clouds? Oh, the demons ate them centuries ago- it's how the Infernum was founded.
While darklords in Ravenloft are closer to damned souls than gods, their continued presence and attention is what sustains the cohesiveness of the domains to which they are bound. Domains have faded into Mists because their darklords have died, and when Lord Soth ceased to notice his own surroundings, in favor of some obsessive navel-gazing via Magic Mirrors, his domain of Sithicus nearly broke into fragments.

Theater

The play (and miniseries) Angels In America. God abandons Heaven on the day of 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the angels are all convinced it's because humans are more interesting than they are. The angel of America tells Prior Walter to tell humanity to stop moving, in hopes that God will return to Heaven once humanity reaches a static state.
This is Older Than Feudalism: in Aristophanes' Peace, the gods have grown tired with the Greeks' constant warmongering and have moved away to the other end of Heaven, leaving War in charge.

Video Games

Jade Empire: The reason there are so many ghosts and spirits hanging around and harassing humans is because the goddess in charge of reincarnation has vanished. Once again, not exactly her fault.
In Okami, sun goddess Amaterasu was killed in battle while under the guise of a wolf 100 years before the start of the game, unbeknownst to the public. She gets better, granted, but it turns out that a century-long absence of Nippon's chief deity isn't exactly a good thing when her power relies on the belief of her followers.
The first half of Lunar 2: Eternal Blue is devoted to Lucia's search for the local goddess to discuss the urgent matter of a awakening Cosmic Horror. Then the woman claiming to be the goddess is unmasked as a fraud. The true goddess decided that mankind no longer needed her and chose to reincarnate as a mortal, and has been dead for centuries.
The Diablo series includes a Crapsack World in which the legions of hell take over Earth while the inhabitatants of heaven don't want to interfere. This also allows an angel, Tyrael, to play an important part in the games' affairs.
Zehir's goal in one of the last missions in Heroes Of Might And Magic V: Tribes of the East is to unite the Dwarves who are currently in the throes of a civil war. To do so, he needs to find their Dragon god Arkath. The irony of an atheistic wizard searching for a god is not lost on Zehir.

Webcomics

In Goats, Jon and Philip meet God, who inexplicably acts like a swishy pirate guy. Philip then suggests that he change himself into a pork chop. God does so, and Philip eats him. This may be a contributing factor to the state of the universe - it is destined to self-destruct pretty soon.
In Misfile God is entirely absent, according to Rumisiel he set up the Celestial Depository in response to Lucifer's attempted coup d'etat to avoid that ever happening again and then disappeared. He supposedly knows about Rumisiel's actions but hasn't felt moved to intervene. Yet at least.

Western Animation

The Transformers wind up finding their god/creator Primus midway through Transformers Cybertron after who-knows-how-long. How they missed the fact that their planet turns into a robot is also unknown.

Real Life

Truth In Television: Deism is the belief that God set the universe in motion and retired soon afterward.

Grandpa God

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