When you write that “the logical fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience,” and (I think) suggest instead the possibility of a “consciousness seeking knowledge,” I think of Hegel’s Dialectic.

Marx took Thesis -> Antithesis -> Synthesis -> Thesis (and back around again) to be the process by which we get to “the end of history,” which, for him of course, was Communism.

My (perhaps crude) understanding has always been that Hegel was arguing that “history is God’s progress to self-consciousness,” which I used to translate for students as “We are God’s ant farm. [According to Hegel, I said]: When God figures out what God needs to figure out, the experiment that is the world, is over.”

Thanks for reading (and writing)!