"So Regular God asks Blue God, 'What have you done with these gifts?' And Blue God says, 'I fell in love with a woman, I walked across the sun . . . I won the Vietnam War. But mostly, I just stopped giving a shit about humanity.' God sighs. 'Do I even need to ask how many people you've killed?' Blue God shrugs. 'A live body and a dead body have the same number of particles, so it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter how I answer your question, because you're sending me to hell.' 'How do you know that?' asks God. And Blue God sounds very, very sad when he softly says, 'Because I'm already there.'"
--Laurie Blake, Watchmen (season one, episode three)
"I once asked you, Jon, whether it was all worth it in the end. You avoided answering by saying, 'Nothing . . . ever ends.'"
--Adrian Veidt, Watchmen (season one, episode eight)
The HBO limited series Watchmen shows the aftermath of the comic's initial finale, set decades after a man named Ozymandias tries to unify the world by plotting an event made to look like an alien invasion and the superhuman Dr. Manhattan leaves Earth shortly after. The United States of this alternate history is shaped largely by a vicious series of fights between the white supremacist group called the Seventh Kavalry and America's torture-prone, mask-wearing police force, as these two forces of injustice war over the political landscape. This timeline has seen Vietnam become part of the US, the onset of weather anomalies like rain of small squids (a nod to how the Watchmen comic has Ozymandias stage an attack on New York with a giant squid-like creature), and police brutality get used against racists by hypocritical law enforcement members. The show portrays an America dominated by overt cruelty on almost all sides.
In the midst of this turmoil, Dr. Manhattan, the superhuman being that left Earth for Mars years before, is revealed to have been in humanity's midst for quite some time. Even at the height of his power, he does rather little to aid the humans around him. Superman, at least in his most traditional depictions, is the Messiah-like figure of grand power who is both willing and eager to aid humankind, but Dr. Manhattan has a nuanced mixture of indifference towards broadly using his powers in a benevolent sense and peaceful interest in certain humans. That is the key difference between these two titans of DC: one strives to be a genuine force for justice (or at least his moral preferences) and the other is content to mostly just observe.
It is Dr. Manhattan and the conversations he has with others through which Watchmen explores what are paradoxically both more foundational and very precise issues of metaphysics, perception, and morality. Dr. Manhattan appears to a woman named Angela and attempts to persuade her to go out with him the next night as he describes his superhuman experience of time. Out of love for a human woman, he even takes a risk by letting her place a memory-altering device in his skull when he does not know exactly what the impact of such an object on him would be, all after foreseeing a tragedy related to this relationship that will befall him. Unintentionally or not, this portrayal of Dr. Manhattan echoes certain characteristics Christian theology ascribes to Jesus, whom the Bible presents as a superhuman being with more knowledge than humans about the future even though he did not know all future events (as Matthew 24 makes clear)--and a love of humanity so strong he would face torturous death to save it.
Whether one is watching Zack Snyder's film adaption of the original Watchmen graphic novel--one that competently reflects the overt philosophical issues the source material puts in the spotlight, such as how Dr. Manhattan represents the God of whom people ask "Why wouldn't he stop destructive acts?"--or the HBO's Watchmen limited series, the comparison of Dr. Manhattan to a literal deity is a natural one to make. In the film, the dialogue is set up so as to make this comparison very explicit. In the HBO show, another thing is made clear. Most people only care about what Dr. Manhattan can do for them or for their erroneous or assumption-riddled ideological pursuits. So, too, are most people only interested in the concept of theism, as well as the actual uncaused cause, in a supportive or hostile way based upon personal desires that are elevated above philosophical truths.
All evidence points to this being how most people regard not just God or the idea of a deity, but truth itself as a whole. Each individual person can gaze into their own intentions, beliefs, and priorities with perfect clarity, and it is possible to achieve perfect ideological and behavioral consistency, but when it comes to other people, one can easily find hypocrisy, untruths, and philosophical apathy. It is when the typical non-rationalist benefits from a truth that they are suddenly concerned with being on the right side of reality for that one case. Of course, truths about issues like the existence of God and God's nature do not depend on preference and usefulness. Every aspect of reality shares this characteristic.
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