"You have chosen to sacrifice a Celestial for the people of this planet. I will spare them, but your memories will show me if they are worthy to live. And I will return for judgment."
--Arishem, Eternals
Not even the highly Christianized DCEU has ever tackled the moral issues of defying a potential or actual deity despite its early Christological imagery and explicitly theological themes. Eternals offers a much more existentially rich approach to superhero entertainment than the popular mainstream conception of them. The theistic ramifications of the Celestials in general and Arishem the Judge in particular dance around the very heart of the concept of moral obligations. While there are seeming differences between Yahweh and Arishem as the MCU has presented him so far, one being that Arishem is not omniscient if he needs to access the Eternals' memories to judge humans, the Eternals desperately wondering how to handle the wishes of a pseudo-deity easily parallels how an ancient Israelite might have struggled to carry out Yahweh's command to kill the Canaanites, among other things.
One of the revelations in Eternals come about from the massive Arishem explaining to Sersi, the new leader of the Eternals, that they were not meant to protect humans for the sake of humanity, but for the sake of allowing enough humans to come into being to allow for the Celestial Tiamut to come out of the planet's core. Earth is like a giant egg for the physical form of a cosmic being that humans have no idea even exists. Of course, the "birth" of Tiamut in what the Eternals call the Emergence would be catastrophic for humanity and the actual planet itself. Both the Deviants and the Eternals tasked with protecting humans from these Deviants are, as Kro the Deviant puts it, "just tools of a god." The Eternals that eventually resist Arishem never seem to distinguish between a Celestial and a true deity/uncaused cause (whether Arishem is this being is left ambiguous), and thus their goal appears to them as if they are defying God himself.
Compare Arishem to Yahweh, even if Arishem is not truly God because he is not the uncaused cause of the MCU, and the deeply philosophical nature of the stakes in Eternals should be very easy to understand even for casual thinkers. If Arishem was supposed to literally be God, what would the practical point of or moral basis for not submitting to the ultimate being in existence, the only being which could have true moral authority, possibly be? There would not even anything logically possible about it being philosophically legitimate to oppose him in the first place, for the subjective preferences and consciences of humans and Eternals alike neither epistemologically prove that their moral stances are valid nor actually make something morally obligatory. It would not even be pragmatic or useful to resist a being with such greater power, even aside from the moral dimensions of this.
Moreover, compare the Celestial Tiamut's awakening which would have destroyed Earth to the awakening of Cthulhu or some other Lovecraftian entity, and the subtle, less terror-oriented cosmic horror of Eternals comes to light. Look past the non-Lovecraftian appearance of Tiamut's head and hand and reduce the intensity of the cosmic horror, and Eternals definitely raises some of the same existential issues that one would find in something like Call of Cthulhu. Tiamut has the much of the same narrative role that Cthulhu, Cthulhu's daughter Cthylla, or other similar beings do in traditional cosmic horror. His freedom means the end of humanity just as the awakening or arrival of Lovecraft's Old Ones might spell the end of humans, and the nature of his "species" thematically forces a metaphysical contrast with the nature of humanity.
Even the relationship between Cthulhu and the Outer God Azathoth, the being that accidentally created and sustains (according to most summaries) all other creatures and the cosmos itself while dreaming, is similar to the relationship between Tiamut and Arishem. Cthulhu is a lesser being than Azathoth, no matter how fearsome he is to humans. Azathoth would be the true uncaused cause of the Lovecraftian cosmic horror universe, God in the true sense of the word. If he wakes, every planet and person, including the exotic, cosmic beings desperately trying to keep him asleep, will cease to exist, and Cthulhu has been described as a sort of worshipper of Azathoth. Somewhat similarly, Tiamut is but a new Celestial whose birth is desired by the Prime Celestial Arishem, making Tiamut a sort of servant of a more god-like entity.
Other than perhaps a few initial Celestials like Arishem, who himself might or might have always existed, at least some Celestials have already been shown to have beginnings and ends to their conscious existences. These later Celestials like Tiamut are by necessity not gods at all unless they somehow always existed in another form before their own gestation-like period and Emergence. In fact, the Celestials themselves could have all of the same general epistemological limitations as humans, unable to prove that their memories or general sensory perceptions correspond to the external parts of reality. It is possible that they have these limitations but that the MCU has not addressed this yet. At the very least, Arishem's final words before the credits, unless he spoke misleadingly, mean he cannot perceive all things at once like Yahweh is said to. What one can see either way is that Celestials, with the possible exception of Arishem, begin to exist and die, so they cannot be true gods/goddesses in the ultimate sense of being an uncaused cause (yes, God could cease to exist, as unlikely as it is [1], but to be a deity a being must have never been created).
Arishem does not even need to literally be God in the MCU for the theological issues raised by the events and characters of Eternals to come across. Like few other movies ever have, this is a film that explores the concept of what it even means to think that one could have a basis for opposing God. If God did not exist, there would be only preferences instead of true moral obligations or objective value in human life. If God does exist (and there is an uncaused cause), whatever individual humans feel about its whims and demands are irrelevant. A deity without a moral nature cannot be legitimately criticized because there would be no such thing as morality and a deity with a moral nature is by default the only moral authority in existence, with moral obligations being tied to its very nature. Eternals does not get to bring up all of this, but its theological and cosmic horror are some of the best cinematic attempts to explore similar issues in a long time.
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