It seems unreasonable to think that anybody, except perhaps Thomas Monson, and there are people who consider themselves Mormons who’d even disagree with that, I expect.

Why not? Religion is a favorite topic on Omninerd, many of the regulars have an interest in it, though from widely differing perspectives. This particular topic is a religious one, too, specifically inviting discussion of differing views on the nature of the divine.

Because that would violate the “all” part of the terms “all-powerful” and “all-knowing”. Someone who’s “all-knowing” would, implicitly, know everything, not merely “everything that one being could possibly know”, or some such qualified description. That’s why most theologians take it for granted that anything that’s not logically impossible (like a married bachelor, or making pi equal 3) is within the scope of divine power. Some even go further and declare that changing the laws of logic is itself within the power of the divine, though I think that rapidly becomes incoherent.

A being that’s within space-time, subject to its laws, is simply a powerful alien—it’s the sort of scenario that the Stargate movies and TV series’ posited. There’s no grounds to worship such a being, other than fear.

“We don’t know everything, therefore, we know nothing.” Nonsense.

We do know some things quite certainly, things which put severe limitations on what’s possible even for your “advance alien” deity. The limitations imposed by the speed of light on causality, for example. It’s not possible to know about anything outside one’s own past light cone or affect anything outside one’s future light cone. The limitations imposed by quantum uncertainty imply that chaotic systems, like weather patterns (so, hurricanes and earthquakes) are outside the knowledge of this being.

A disingenuous response. He claimed that worshiping an advanced alien is similar in kind to worshiping a cow or another human. If you can’t agree that his cow is more advanced than a human, you don’t part ways with him worshiping his cow and you worshiping your god, you part ways each worshiping different cows.

One can make a case that a supernatural deity, like that claimed by mainstream Christians, is legitimately deserving of worship—if such a being existed, and was truly the ground for morality and such, as they claim, then there’s room to argue it. For a merely preternatural deity, like yours, there’s no such justification. Bill Gates’ wealth makes him vastly more powerful than I, his philanthropic efforts make him worthy of admiration (even if his corporate legacy is evil), but there’s no reason I should worship him.

Steve Jobs is another very powerful man. At least to Apple fanatics, he’s a major source of good things—he’s the creator of their “iLives”, as it were. One might argue that your deification of this hypothetical advanced alien is of the same quality as their deification of Jobs, differing only in the degree of power held by the object of worship—not a difference of substance.

That’s all well and good, but everything we’ve seen of physical law suggests there’s really no need for this “god’s” participation. It all works just fine on its own.

This incessant effort to insert “god” into cosmology seems to me to put the cart before the horse. All of the supposed information theists of any stripe have about the gods comes from ancient legends. There’s no more reason to think the Bible (or the Book of Mormon) true than the Homeric Hymns, the Vedas, the Book of the Dead, or any other collection of ancient myths.

What we’ve learned of history, archaeology, geology, biology, physics, and even computer science means that all of that stuff is suspect, and really needs to be held in abeyance until we’ve got better evidence. Trying to interpret every new scientific discovery in the light of those old myths is foolish.