“I had a friend who me about this guy he knew that was once on the New York subway when he had this conversation with this very sketchy looking homeless guy.  The homeless guy went right up to him and said he was God.  But that God meant something different than the way we would perceive it.  So the guy’s intrigued, and while he’s being told all of this, talking to the homeless guy, he keeps asking him questions to see if he’s making it all up, but the homeless guy knows what he’s talking about.  He even knows some like really advanced scientific theories, and is very coherent and intelligent-sounding.

    The homeless guy basically said that there are stages to life on a planet.  The first stage is evolution, developing technology, and it ends with the discovery of nuclear power.  After that, most civilizations destroy themselves.  Some go beyond and colonize space, then the next step is all the individuals in the civilization form back together to form one consciousness, which is then what God is.  So the homeless guy on the subway is really the collective consciousness of a civilization.  So any species can eventually become what we could call a God, though most don’t.  And he claims that after that, the God can gain the ability to create other worlds, but the homeless guy didn’t create this one, he’s just visiting it.”

There are many stories about literally meeting God floating around in world cultures, though usually the stories are tied to a religion, like the stories of people meeting Jesus in person.  This story takes the usual religious and philosophical aspects of those stories and turns them into something that would fit better in hard science fiction literature, though keeps some of the more basic tenants of monotheistic religion intact.  It’s a blending of more science and technology-minded ideas and religious ideas, where God is a single consciousness made up of many individuals, created by far advanced technology.  This informant, himself non-religious, did indeed, at least partially, find the story believable, possibly due to the addition of semi-realistic, speculative science-based attributes to the God of the story.

    The story attempts to prove its credibility by using the “friend of a friend” tactic, and tries to brush off any questions the listeners might have by claiming that the Homeless Man/God answered every question posed to him.