Hive account@msg768, thanks for your thoughtful post. I would tend to agree with much of what you're saying.

A question, though... you said, "Criminals tend to hide their crimes and tend not to leave any evidence behind, so they may not get caught. In the same way, we would expect an evil god to not want to get caught."

I wonder if this is a difficult argument... Don't criminals hide their crimes out of fear of having to pay for them? Maybe an evil god would have no need to fear anything. But an even deeper question is, could a god even be evil or good? Would it be closer to say that a god who creates all of existence also would by definition define good and evil, so the god itself could only be neutral. What do you think?