THE ALL: A Metaphysical Model of Religious Diversity and Cosmological Administration

Religious traditions present persistent contradictions: monotheism versus polytheism, ultimate Creator versus intermediary fashioners, revelation versus limitation. This paper proposes a single metaphysical principle that renders many of these contradictions coherent rather than mutually exclusive. The principle is both ontological and epistemological: if the ALL is the totality of existence, then only the ALL can possess complete knowledge of the ALL. Any entity that is a proper part of the ALL necessarily operates with a partial perspective. Consequently, power, intelligence, antiquity, and spiritual status do not entail omniscience. From this follows a distinction between the ultimate Source and created intelligences that may possess genuine agency and extraordinary capacity while remaining finite. Ancient descriptions of gods, angels, and divine assemblies (illustrated by the Sumerian Anuna) are treated as culturally mediated records of such intermediate agents. Religious history is reinterpreted as a fragmented human record of multi-level encounters with reality, not merely as competing human projections of a single ineffable Real. The model differs from standard religious pluralism, including John Hick’s, by locating incompleteness not only in human cultural filters but potentially in the intermediate intelligences themselves. It generates specific comparative questions and remains open to revision. It is advanced as a working metaphysical model, not as historical demonstration.