Devil but No God

"Jonathan: "There's good and bad everywhere, don't you think?" Jack: "I'd say there's bad everywhere; good, I don't know about.""

- Midnight Run

Works of fantasy frequently contain a powerful evil spiritual being who's behind most or all of the evil in the world, a Satan-figure or chief God of Evil. This Devil is a very real being with followers, worshippers and real power, who takes an active hand in making trouble for the world. But in an odd twist, a lot of stories leave out the Devil's good counterpart; either there is no benevolent God, or he's only talked about and never actually does anything. This is particularly Egregious if the series makes a big deal of the Balance Between Good and Evil.

It's worth noting that the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) tend to forbid visual depictions of God, so this trope may exist out of respect to such traditions.

C. S. Lewis wrote a novella called The Screwtape Letters, detailing the correspondence between a mortal human's literal "personal demon" and that demon's supervisor. In a commentary about the story, Professor Lewis wrote that he wanted to include similar letters between the demon's opposite number, but claimed that it was far too difficult to get into an angel's mindset to do so. The existence of this trope may well be partially explained by similar limits experienced by other authors.

Another alternate explanation is that in most cases He knows the heroes don't actually need His help, so He doesn't give it. Another reason is that God might easily become the ultimate Invincible Hero or Deus Ex Machina (in fact, the very name Deus Ex Machina came from the habit of Greek and Roman plays to have one of the gods come down from the heavens to fix up the mess the others had created), so the writers need to get rid of him. Possibly justified if people are significantly harder to make bad than good.

Anime & Manga
"Hughes: So what will bring wrath down upon us is not God, but probably 'humans.'"
 * Berserk, which has the "God Hand", a group of five powerful demons as the closest thing to gods. The only other set of deities, the Four Elemental Kings, are said to be loving and protective of humanity, but only seen to help out if consciously summoned.
 * , who the Godhand answer to, seems to be the closest thing to a God in the Berserk universe, but it's only (so far) been seen in a semi-canon chapter that was cut for spoilering the plot. However, it's pretty much both God AND the devil.
 * Chrono Crusade. Is there really anyone above the humans and the devils, except perhaps a Council of Angels? Aion's entire life can be seen as a quest to find an answer to that.
 * That's the anime version. In the manga, the demons are, and Aion is fully aware of this (and subsequently believes that God and religion are just another cog in an "oppressive system") and the Apostles are stated to be "chosen by the Astraline", while God...well, not mentioned much. Either he's carefully manipulating things in the background, or just simply doesn't exist.
 * In Death Note, the only supernatural beings are the mostly malevolent Shinigami, and their world is a rather hellish place.
 * Although, the Shinigami are not truly malevolent, they're just doing what they're supposed to. In a sense, they as a whole, are sort of a cosmic life/death bureaucracy.
 * Yeah; or more like we just happen to be their natural prey, although the notebooks seem contrived, and their fall into ennui is just a thing that happened.
 * Possibly once upon a time they didn't have them, and had to buzz around getting humans to trade life for "eyes and wings and things," as Light puts it, or at least had some less sophisticated life-capture system, before the Shinigami King invented and distributed these marvelous new tools. Whereupon there was no purpose or tension in life and they slowly rotted into what they are today, rather like Light did after he offed his great adversary. Meaning the Death Notes corrupted them just as badly as they do humans, and not through any supernatural agency but by sloth and pride. It would fit the universe really well.
 * In Black Butler we have lawful evil devils, shinigamis are either lawful neutral or chaotic evil but there is no benevolent supernatural being. In the anime version the Big Bad is a fallen angel, which implies there is good angels, but they never show up and a devil saves the day.
 * Actually, also in the Anime, William T. Spears mentions God briefly in episode 18. That's still only the Anime, though.
 * Fullmetal Alchemist has a lot of talk about God, from Lior's Leto to the faces of Ishbala to King Bradley, Edward Elric, and Maes Hughes' very different atheisms to Father's affectations to...The Truth. But the first two gods are silent, Father is a monster, and the Truth--which claims, among other things, the title God, and which Father seems to be referring to when he wants to kill God--is a dick that makes 'equivalent exchange' as painful, meaningless, and ironic as possible and sniggers about it, and otherwise has no apparent interactions with humanity. Where in such a world is there God?


 * This line refers mostly to Scar, but it's given in a floating speech bubble above Bradley who is framed against the sunset.

Comicbooks

 * The voice of God has been heard in certain DC comics, usually talking to The Spectre, who works as its Agent of Vengeance. However it has never been actually seen, and only seems to interfere in VERY rare occasions, even when the The DCU is threatened with destruction.
 * A JLA miniseries starring Zauriel the Angel climaxed with the rogue angel Asmodel storming the palace of God only to find it empty. Zauriel lectures Asmodel on the naivete of expecting God to be some mere corporeal form: God is everywhere and swiftly sends Asmodel to Hell.
 * By contrast to this, various devils often show up in the DC Universe, most notably Neuron, whose shtick is making Deal With The Devil type bargains with unwitting mortals. Demons seem to pop up far more often in the series then their heavenly counterparts, even though some (like Etrigan) aren't all bad. Lucifer even had his own ongoing title under the Vertigo imprint.
 * In Marvel Comics, Satan was a recurring character in the Son of Satan series. God, Jesus or the Angels never appeared or interfered. Later, it was RetConned that Satan was being impersonated by demons such as Mephisto, and that the true Devil had NEVER appeared in a Marvel story . In Ghost Rider, angels and even Heaven have shown up.
 * Well, Blaze had a guy helping him against Satan who was at some points implied to be JC. (Religious figure, not Deus Ex protagonist.)
 * A good Marvel comics example is when an old flame allows Bruce Banner to see all his inner personalities (each a different Hulk), one of whom takes the form of a monstrous reptilian devil. Devil Hulk tells Bruce "There's a little bit of God and the Devil in everyone", but the comics have yet to get around to that God part. We do get to see that an incarnation of the Beast lives in Bruce's head as well.
 * It's pretty clear that Bruce himself is the God part.
 * Depends on the writer. Sometimes Bruce is shown to be petty and violent (not often but sometimes) and Green Hulk, while lacking control, is shown to be more caring (best example is in the Planet Hulk What If, where Hulk lands on the Illuminati's target planet).
 * Another Hulk story offers an aversion: When Old Greenskin (who at the time had Bruce Banner's intellect) acted as best man at Rick Jones' wedding, and Mephisto crashed the party, claiming to have a lien on the bride's soul. He offered the Hulk a deal: His soul for hers. Banner thought it over, looked up at the sky, and sucker-punched the demon so completely that he flew right through the fire-circle wards he'd set up to keep the other superbeings in attendence from interfering. Sputtering, Mephisto screamed that what the Hulk had done was impossible (No mortal, however powerful, should be able to land a blow on a conceptual being without permission). Banner replied, (not an exact quote): "Weren't you listening to what the preacher said? We are gathered here in the sight of God! What, did you, of all beings, think that those were just words?"
 * Has thus far been the case in Hellboy, where demons seem quite active while God remains unseen. Mignola has commented on the absence of God/Heaven in the series is because revealing too much about the divine order of the universe sort of takes away the mystery in a series. He has promised we'll see glimpses of Heaven and people who have gotten close to it, but that we would see a great deal more of Hell and its inner workings.
 * The character King Peacock in Alan Moore 's Top Ten, at one point, is described as being a devil worshipper, as he is a member of the Yazidi sect. He describes it as God creating the universe and then taking off, leaving Melek Taus (the devil) in charge.
 * It should be noted that both God and Melek Taus are benevolent according to the Yazidi, though.
 * Bone sort of seems to have The Lord of the  as an example of the trope because he is a formless being who appears to have a lot of powers and influence on the real world, and he actually killed the closest thing they had to a God. Sort of. Rose implies that the God figure was responsible for her own death, not the Satan figure. Either way, she's dead for the majority of the story.
 * It is also briefly implied that the two beings are actually two aspects of the same being, who is both creator and destroyer, good and evil.

Film

 * Even present in Ghostbusters and its related media; while there's plenty of evil gods and lesser deities (like Gozer) running around, there's no indication of any good gods opposing them, so the Busters have to make do with science.
 * Well, Marduk appeared in one episode of the cartoon, and was a depicted as a fairly benevolent "god of the city". He still needed the Ghostbusters' help to defeat his ancient enemy Tiamat, though.
 * Also, in the original film there are hints by some characters that Gozer is the harbinger of the Biblical Apocalypse, and not just its own brand of doom.
 * Mike Nelson pointed this out in his book Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese in the review of Event Horizon.
 * In Hellborn: Asylum of the Damned, there is a Devil that plays an active part in damning the lives and souls of human beings, even the good ones. However, as stated by one of the characters in the film itself, "God dosen't take a look around here."
 * While the book of The Lord of the Rings averts this trope (see below), this is pretty much the impression of someone who only watched the movies and never read any of the book or backstory. Its possible to watch the movies without ever learning that Gandalf is a maia (or even what a maia is), or the existence of the Valar or Eru, or know about the downfall or Numenor. Something subtly influences everyone's fate and sends Gandalf back from the dead, but it is sufficiently abstract and distant when compared to Sauron as to qualify for this trope.
 * Then again, Sauron is a being who has somehow seized control of armies of orcs and a mighty wizard before even getting an eye. By the end of the movie the most he has is a symbolic mouth, and that's only in the EE.
 * However, Sauron isn't the Devil either. He's just Morgoth' most trusted lieutenant.
 * In other words, he's a devil but not the devil (or you could say he's the de facto devil, since the genuine article's currently a Sealed Evil in a Can).
 * A Mystery Science Theater 3000 blogger pointed this out in his review of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 film The Touch of Satan.
 * The Exorcist film series. The power of God/Christ does seem to be more powerful than the power of the Devil but God seems absent for the most part.
 * In The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the Devil is the Doctor's Friendly Enemy, but God is nowhere to be found (unless the Wild Mass Guessing about Percy is accurate).
 * In Fallen, there is a demon essentially free to take over people's bodies and use them to commit murder. Apparently, the forces of Heaven are not concerned enough to show up and do something about it.

Literature
"Gandalf: Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and you also were meant to have it- and that is an encouraging thought."
 * Redwall, the picture provider, has several bad guys mention "Hellgates", and one of them drops the name of Vulpuz, some sort of evil deity. The good guys have an afterlife called Dark Forest, and earlier in the series at least the appearance of having actual religion, although it is never discussed. (This is pretty odd for a series whose title location is an abbey, populated by what was clearly, in the beginning, a monastic order. The not-quite-religion fades as the series continues.)
 * There is also the fact that in the original "Redwall" book, the giant adder is named Asmodeus, which one in-universe character identifies as "the name of the devil himself". In real world mythology, Asmodeus is depicted as various kinds of demon king, depending on which version one reads, but is certainly a very high ranking lord of Hell. The same book also has Cluny casually killing someone and saying "Tell the devil Cluny sent you".
 * In The Wheel of Time, the Dark One has hordes of evil creatures, Darkfriend spies infiltrating every level of society, and the Forsaken, and has been trying to destroy all of creation since the beginning of time. The Creator never makes any sort of appearance (not even as a voice cameo in the first book); in a late book, Rand gives a mini-rant about how the Creator created their world and then went on to create countless more without care of whether individual worlds died out. In His place are a variety of automatic error-correcting routines built into the Pattern, like creating/reincarnating ta'veren.
 * The Wheel of Time did it, so of course The Sword of Truth copied it, only worse. The Keeper of the Underworld wants to break free of the Underworld and enter the world of life, and has plenty of evil wizards and sorceresses willing to help him with his goal. But the Creator is said to be nothing more than a "personification of" the natural force of creation--at one point, the author goes out of his way to explain that some people think of the Creator as an omniscient and omnipotent person much like the Judeo-Christian God, and point out how foolish such a belief is--and the people who believe in a real, personified Creator are either misguided and potentially dangerous WellIntentionedExtremists or evil communist crusaders intent on destroying all liberty and enforcing their dangerous, hateful religion by the sword.
 * It also smells of of Retcon, as Terry Goodkind basically abandoned the whole idea after two books. The final verdict seems to be that both the Creator and the Keeper of the Underworld are essentially mindless, but very real, aspects of nature (representing life and death, respectively), and people who treat either as a deity are doing something silly.
 * Notably subverted in The Dragonlance Chronicles. As Queen Takhisis's armies of darkness cover the land, conquering all before them, it seems as though Paladine, the god of good, is nowhere to be found, until it's revealed in the third book that
 * While its finally outright stated in the last book, it was rather heavily hinted at since shortly after his first appearance.
 * Also, it should be noted that when the Heroes notice early in the story that the constellations representing the Queen of Darkness and the Valiant Warrior have vanished from the sky, Raistlin interprets this to mean that "The Dark Queen is here, on Krynn! And the Valiant Warrior has returned as well to fight her." So from the beginning, the heroes have some reason to hope that they are not alone.
 * The Runelords falls victim to this one as well. The heroes eventually learn that their ultimate opponent isn't Raj Ahten, the Darkling Glory that was summoned by Raj Ahten's flameweavers, or even the Reaver queen, but the One True Master of Evil, queen of the Loci. She's actually introduced as a character in the second series, and we begin to see why she's worthy of the title. Glories and Bright Ones are talked about, but scarcely ever actually seen on-stage, and there's no indication as of yet that they have a leader or that there's any good-guy counterpart to Shadoath, the One True Master.
 * Fallion is implied to be the reincarnation of Shadoath's good-guy counterpart: as the Torchbearer, he has the power to undo her breaking of the True World. Given Shadoath's Start of Darkness, and the stated nature of the True World, the Bright Ones are less God/Satan than heroic-scale exaggerations of human nature like you might see in ancient mythology. Because Shadoath is a Bright One and Fallion isn't (yet), her corrupt deeds are frequently much greater in scope and consequence than Fallion's heroic deeds.
 * This happens in Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. Eventually, it becomes a plot point.
 * And in the seventh book,
 * While the Creator exists, is good, and wants to help in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, he exists outside of the universe of the Land and cannot interfere directly without causing the end of the world. Lord Foul, on the other hand is trapped inside the same universe which is not a good thing for anyone sharing the place with him.
 * However, Covenant's initial appearance in The Land appears to have been the Creator's doing, as part of a huge Xanatos Gambit to circumvent the whole causing the end of the world thing, that hinged on using free will as a means to achieve something greater than could be achieved through either direct intervention or use of a tool of some sort. Just how well this has worked is somewhat up in the air, but the Gambit does appear to still be playing itself out.
 * In H.P. Lovecraft's works and the resulting Cthulhu Mythos, there is neither a God or the Devil (altough Nyarlatothep does fulfill the Devil's role in some ways), just ancient godlike beings who don't give a damn about mankind and will kill us all when they return. The closest thing to good deities (the Elder Gods), have no more love for humans than the others; they just want to keep the Great Old Ones imprisoned (and since that is a good thing for mankind, they can be considered "good" from our perspective).
 * Notably, the Elder Gods were an addition by August Derleth, who was an avid admirer of Lovecraft, as well as a devout Christian, and couldn't, or didn't want to understand Lovecraft's intentions to depict the universe as a hostile and uncaring place where humanity has absolutely no special position, and instead made Earth the central battleground for cosmic incarnations of good and evil. Latter contributors to the Mythos often kept the Elder Gods, but made them less "good" than "uncaring but opposed to more dangerous things".
 * Also, while Nyarlathotep gets continuously interpreted as the Devil by various humans, the implications that aren't dependent on the Unreliable Narrator seem to portray him as a Shiva-like destructive, but impartial deity.
 * Athough he does often appear to enjoy himself immensely when seen in in human form...
 * That's something of a case of Flanderization by later writers. In Lovecraft's own stories he has two appearances in human form, and one in near-human. In first of those he isn't yet really a deity, but simply a human scientist who has become essentially an Anthropomorphic Personification of the immutable cosmic laws (it's a Mind Screw), and is simply driven rather than malevolent or cruel, as far as the reader can tell. He receives human sacrifices in person as the Black Man, but he never speaks in that story and gives no impression of sadism for its own sake - it's just a function that he is performing. His depiction as a creatively cruel monster trickster is mostly based on his appearance in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where he once again is performing a role as the protector of the Great Ones - though while clearly holding them in contempt. But even as he torments Carter with false hope, he seems to deem him a Worthy Opponent, facing him directly instead of just letting his masters squash him like a bug, as had happened to everyone else who tried to see Earth's gods.
 * While the Otherness in F. Paul Wilson's Adversary novels is a reasonable stand-in for the Devil (with a side order of Lovecraftian abomination), the opposing force that works against the Otherness is fundamentally indifferent to human welfare, and is definitely not God.
 * Narnia is arguably an inversion. Aslan is a big character, but every villain until the end of the last book is mortal. Tash might be Satan but he is not depicted as The Man Behind the Man.
 * Probably still counts, but Aslan isn't God, and The Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea is a mentioned but unseen character.
 * Aslan is Jesus aka God the Son, and the Emperor Beyond The Sea is God the Father. Only the Son is meant to have the properties that would actually make Him depictable.
 * Another example from Lewis would be Perelandra: Satan (or one of his Rouge Angles) acts directly through his possessed tool the Un-man while the forces of good are represented only by the protagonist, Ransom. Somewhat subverted in that Ransom gets the equivalent of a pep-talk from God before
 * The Paradis books justify this--God lost to Satan, who turned everything into a Crapsack World and sends all the dead to Hell. Yes, this is a rather dark series, why did you ask?
 * In another series from Tanith Lee, Tales from the Flat Earth, who seems to love Crapsack World tropes in general, this trope turns up frequently. While the series definitely has Gods, they're pretty much Neglectful Precursors who created the universe, got bored with it, and now do pretty much nothing but stand around contemplating their own greatness. They've intervened in the world approximately three times, all of which were to deliver smack-downs on anyone who dared to challenge them: the first is when they flooded the earth because people were acquiring too much magical power (mentioned in the second book), the second when a mad king tried to build a tower to heaven and storm it, and the third when they send robot-angels to destroy a new emerging religion. Actually, the entire series is made of this trope, since the primary protagonists of the series are chief demons/personifications of dark forces named the "Lords of Darkness," particularly Azhrarn, the Lord of Evil, who has a Blue and Orange Morality, and is probably as old as the Gods themselves. Much of the series is devoted to showing how he manipulates humanity for his own pleasure, but is still (arguably) a friendlier force to humanity than the Gods. In the first book, after inadvertently beginning a chain of events leading to the Apocalypse, he enters Heaven to ask the Gods to do something, which they point-blank refuse, after which he proceeds to save the world in an interesting subversion of the trope.
 * K. J. Parker's The Scavenger Trilogy is set in a world where the god Poldarn may be very real and active. Poldarn is the very spirit of death, failure, destruction and folly. When Poldarn creates, you won't like what he makes. There is no sign of a more hopeful god.
 * Averted in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion (or possibly subverted). While Morgoth (and later Sauron) are generally the most powerful forces directly affecting Middle-Earth at a given time, God does exist and will act directly if pushed far enough (see "The Downfall of Numenor"). Gandalf also implies that He is subtly influencing world events all the time.


 * Gandalf also says in the book, as explanation for Bilbo's astonishing Contrived Coincidence in happening to come across the ring in the way that he did: "There was more than one power at work. I can put it no more plainly than that Bilbo was meant to find that ring, and not by its maker."
 * Gandalf himself is proof of the creator, since he's more or less an Angel. And God gives him a new, stronger body when the Balrog kills the one he's wearing at the moment.
 * That is something the Valar probably did themselves. When Saruman was killed, his spirit looked west (towards the home of the Valar) and was dissipated by a blast of wind, the element of Manwe. The Elves (and indeed Frodo, at one point) also pray to the Valar, not to Eru.
 * Possibly true in The Saga of the Noble Dead. So far, the only active divinities are il'Samar, which is evil, and the Fay, which are amoral, but the most recent book has introduced a group of dwarven priests who are good and have magical powers no one else does, clearly drawn from something. As the series goes on, presumably this will be elaborated on further.
 * Subverted in Mistborn. Ruin is the only actual deity acting in the setting (and actually refers to himself as God on occasion) and it gradually becomes apparent that Ruin's counterpart Preservation is dead..
 * The Stormlight Archive has
 * The Hollows series by Kim Harrison is downright painful in this regard. It contains A) demons (who are explained to be powerful beings from another world) and B) vampires who are often explicitly dead humans without souls. Neither of these creatures can enter hallowed ground. Some characters, particularly demons, practice black magic which leaves a mark of "imbalance" on their aura (unless they fob it off on someone else). Yet who the ground is holy to, with whom one would settle the imbalance, and what one does with a soul is never explained.
 * The Fall of Chronopolis by Barrington J. Bayley. The adversary Hulmu is real and threatening, but the religion of the nameless The Church, insofar as it makes any sense, seems to be a weird version of pantheism.
 * This is a Corrupt Church with a purpose. The preservation of the entire space-time continuum is a pretty rock bottom obligation, and the demons and devil worshippers it was designed to fight are real.
 * In another twist, the Christian temporal refugees fighting the Chronotic Empire make an actual Deal with the Devil .... although of course they don't see it that way.
 * The Icemark Chronicles by Stuart Hill has a being called 'Cronus'.
 * In Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane novels the protagonist is a Christian Puritan who comes across various kinds of supernatural phenomena in his travels, both good and evil, but never anything that would confirm the existence of his God, and this causes him a great deal of internal turmoil. The recent movie adaptation however has its plot revolve entirely around a conflict between Heaven and Hell by earthly proxies.
 * The Felix Castor novels have several demons lurking on the periphery ever since the recent return of the restless dead, but there's no mention made of angels or God's representatives. Exorcists are nondenominational (and sometimes atheists), and the local Church Militant branch relies mostly on their own exorcists and bunches of loup-garous. Of course, the vast amount of demons may make more sense with.
 * In Fred Saberhagen's Empire Of The East trilogy, The Empire has hordes of demons at its command, but Ardneh was not at that point powerful enough to face any but the weakest of them in direct combat. When Chup calls out to the "Powers of the West" to help him against the demon Zapranoth, all Ardneh can give him is guidance, not any actual power. Of course, once Ardneh got the, all bets were off.
 * In Saberhagen's Books of Swords, set in the same world but centuries later, the situation is a little different. The gods we see the most of, Vulcan and Mars, are pretty malevolent, and none of the gods seems outright good, but, as Dame Yoldi points out, the creators of Townsaver cannot be all bad. Of course, is genuinely good.
 * The Dresden Files, interestingly enough given the series's Fantasy Kitchen Sink approach to the supernatural community. In the first couple of books, Harry did loosely acknowledge God, but much more attention was paid to demons, fairies (the literal sort), gods, and dark wizards. Harry does mention a few times that Faith has Power, though it isn't "magic" in the same way that he does it. Eventually, as the magic system became more fleshed out, God starts getting more mention as the most-worshiped (and thus most powerful in-universe) supernatural fellow, though even some of the Knights of the Cross, communing with corporeal Angels and wielding swords with the Nails of the Cross in them against the manifest forces of darkness, aren't entirely sure that they are God-fearing guys. This trope is almost completely gone in the series, and has been rapidly disappearing since Harry started duking it out with Fallen Angels, at which point Angels started to intervene on his behalf. Having had conversations with Uriel and now wielding Angelically-fueled magic on occasion, it would be pretty impressive to not acknowledge His existence. Harry has even once relied on literal Deus Ex Machina for one of his plans. Guess who shows up?

Live-Action TV

 * Supernatural has an interesting history with this:

Throughout the first three seasons Demons and other forces of evil were running rampant across the world without any opposing force of good to stop them aside from human Hunters. The Devil gets a mention, but as a religious deity which the Demons believe in, not as an actual character. There are also a number of Pagan gods and demigods, but they all seem to be either evil or purely self-interested.

In terms of the Demons' good counterparts, in season 4 the writers decided to take a different direction and Angels first appear, despite Dean's disbelief. They are technically on the side of good, but vary in how much they care about helping people versus pursing their own goals and interests. There are plenty of good angels, but they are bound by a strict hierarchy where disobedience is the highest crime. In 4.02 it's explained that the Devil/Lucifer the Archangel will once again roam the earth unless the Apocalypse can be averted. His backstory is also fleshed out: After he was expelled from Heaven for refusing to bow down to man, he created the first demon and is responsible for most of the larger storyline across all 5 seasons. In the season 4 finale, the 66 seals keeping Lucifer trapped are broken, and he returns to Earth as the season 5 Big Bad.

As for God himself, he has only ever been seen by four Archangels. In the season 4 finale, Zachariah claimed God had 'left the building', and that the angels were giving the orders. In season 5 however God has been implied to have intervened in the storyline, transporting Sam and Dean out of harms way and bringing the angel Castiel back to life. Subsequent attempts to find him reveal that he is completely apathetic about the war between Heaven and Hell. Then in the season 5 finale it's very strongly implied that
 * In Charmed, the Devil ("the Source", short for "Source of All Evil") appears in several successive versions, but the show is maddeningly vague about who or what is in charge of "up there". The "White lighters" answer to "the Elders", but who do THEY answer to? Blank-out.
 * The Elders seem to be the highest authority for the side of good, considering they were the ones who released the power of the Gods onto the mortals. Even so, they never actually do anything, except make things even more difficult for the main characters.
 * The status of God in the Buffy Verse is very suspect. The series has "The Powers That Be", supposedly forces that fight for good, but the show is vague on what exactly they are. They also seem to do little to help the heroes, sending visions that let them know when people are in trouble and have been implied to have directly helped them a few times, but they're often nowhere to be seen when the shit really hits the fan, and the few beings said to work for them are often uninterested and unsympathetic to the heroes' plights. On the evil side, the series has the Senior Partners, ascended demons who work through the interdimensional law firm Wolfram & Hart, who are shown to be VERY active in spreading evil and contributing to mankind's eventual downfall. The show's background has the Earth previously ruled by demonic gods millenia ago and Buffy's last season saw the heroes fighting the personification of evil, neither of which seem to have a good equivalent. In addition, at one point in the series a vampire in the series asks Buffy if God exists, and she responds "Nothing solid".
 * This is all countered to an extent by the fact that Buffy was resurrected from a place of perfection and peace, that she is pretty sure was heaven. But whether the existence of an afterlife implies the existence of a god is another debate.
 * Also, for all the demons in the series, there's not one angel.
 * Though not all the demons are bad - there was Whistler, who, though referred to as a demon, was 'sent down' from somewhere, and is definitely a force for good. Skip, Cordelia's demon guide, worked for the Powers before allying himself with Jasmine.
 * Still, the current evidence suggests that the most powerful terrestrial force for good in the Buffyverse is the Slayer. This is almost certainly true after the events of the Buffy finale.
 * It's worth noticing that at least some Graeco-Roman and Egyptian deities exist in some form in the Buffyverse, with appeal to Hecate, Janus and Osiris resulting in, variously, transformation into a rat, everybody transforming into their costumes, and resurrection. Of course, these may just be sufficiently advanced demons.
 * The Big Bad of Lexx's final two seasons is the immortal sadist Prince of Fire, and while the planet Fire does have a heavenly counterpart called Water, Water has no counterpart to Prince. By season 4, Fire and Water are gone, but Prince has reincarnated on Earth, where once again there are no real forces of good to stand in his way.
 * Possibly Reaper. The Devil is a main character and several demons have appeared, but neither God nor explicit angels have.
 * Well, the demons are all fallen angels, one demon managed to get his old gig back, and God was mentioned as the ultimate winner by the Devil in the first episode. Still, a good deal less good than evil.
 * In the Season 2 finale of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah Connor mentions that she doesn't know if there's a God or not, but she knows there is an evil omnipresent entity that wants the world to burn (referring to SKYNET). The episode also reveals that much of the show's Myth Arc involves an attempt to build a machine "God" to oppose SKYNET.
 * With all the false gods in Stargate SG-1, there is no Sufficiently Advanced Alien masquerading as the God of Abrahamic religions -- whereas the Goa'uld Sokar is said to have been the inspiration for the Devil in various cultures.
 * The ascended beings are sorta stand-ins for angelic beings: clad in white, all-knowing and infuriatingly self-satisfied. Occasionally one of them will get around their own Obstructive Code of Conduct to pull off a genuine miracle, like when, or when   in The Ark of Truth.
 * Babylon 5: The Shadows are almost a Shout-Out to the devil, but they don't really have a good counterpart.
 * The Vorlons are the good equivalent as Kosh appears as the epitome of each race's archangel when he left his suit at that one time. The thing is Vorlons and Shadows try to play the Good/Evil axis, but are really templers of the Order/Chaos axis.
 * In Season Four, it's revealed that Even Lorien, the oldest and most powerful being in the galaxy, refers to the universe itself as the creator of life.
 * On Lost both Jacob and MIB have been said to be the Devil, but neither has been said to be a god.
 * Though Jacob is described by Mark Pellegrino as a Jesus analog.
 * In Ashes to Ashes, the forces of evil are alive and well,, but even though.
 * There is a God. He just intervene much cos he's too busy.
 * In the Power Rangers Universe, there seem to be an awful lot of monstrous evil elder beings that exist to cause pain and destruction. But the heroic elder beings tend to be light on the ground. This doesn't seem to worry the Rangers most years, who usually save the day without needing divine intervention, but during season 10, the Rangers would have died on multiple occasions had a god (Animus, the diety of the wild zords) not directly intervened to save them.
 * Al Bundy meets Lucifer, but cannot disturb God: He's watching "Knott's Landing".

Music

 * Tom Waits' "Heartattack and Vine" gives an inversion: "There ain't no Devil, there's just God when he's drunk."
 * And Robin Williams follows up: "If God drinks, he could get stoned. Look at a duck-billed platypus-- I think you think he might."

Religion

 * Thoroughly averted in The Bible, where Satan gets far less screen time than God.
 * This trope is actually inverted in most of the Old Testament. Satan appears only in the First Book of Chronicles, Job, and Psalm 109.

Tabletop Games

 * * Mortasheen, as it usually does, does this in a weird way. There are no gods (unless you count The Ultimates), mainly because the creator, who said it himself is an "agnostic science nut". However, there are the equivalents to demons The Devilbirds, birds charged in the egg with negative psychic energy to cause and feed off of negative emotions. But, there are no angel equivalents. There were once when Mortasheen was still called Necromon, but the creator couldn't come up with any re-designs for them that he liked, so he scrapped them.
 * Warhammer 40000 takes this to an extreme. The Chaos Gods are the sentient manifestations of the negative emotions of the galaxy (as well as the positive ones warped into the most extreme and twisted manner possible), but there is a distinct lack of any positive alternatives. Even the surviving gods of the non-chaos factions tend to be genocidal jerkasses, and the worst gods are the C'Tan, who are trying to exterminate every living thing in the universe then eat their souls afterward. Based on information from The Other Wiki, there may be two surviving non-totally evil gods... one is implied to be a C'tan (and therefore is one of the omnicidal gods out to eat souls  ), and the other is being tortured by Nurgle (who is, incidentally, one of the more likeable deities).
 * It has been hinted that the Eldar are slowly bringing about the birth of a new god which may be able to destroy Chaos (although it has been suggested that the birth of this god would require the death of every last Eldar). As for humanity, every positive emotion which could lead to the creation of a benevolent Warp entity is focused squarely on the Emperor, whose dying physical body is hooked up to an enormous life support machine. It's implied that if the Emperor were ever allowed to die, he would ascend to true godhood and be able to fight Chaos directly. Unfortunately, the loss of the Emperor from the physical world would be an unsustainable disaster for the Imperium.
 * In Dungeons and Dragons, the World Of Greyhawk has Tharizdun, ultimate dark god, Sealed Evil in a Can since he's an Omnicidal Maniac Cosmic Horror. There is no counterbalancing ultimate good god.
 * Tharizdun may be the most utterly evil of Greyhawk's god, but he is far from the strongest- in the first three editions of the game, he was ranked as an intermediate deity, and his imprisonment barred him from affecting the world more than a weak demigod.
 * In Gary Gygax's Gord novels, Tharizdun once freed is a nigh-omnipotent being who can easily force all the demon princes, archfiends, and other rulers of the Lower Planes to serve him.
 * The most powerful of the evil gods, Nerull the Reaper, does have a good counterpart in Pelor the Sun God. Also, the demons of the Abyss (Demogorgon, Orcus, etc...) are directly opposed by some guardinal dukes from Elysium.
 * It's worth noting that early in the company's history, TSR did publish statistics for God, Jesus and Archangels, but later removed them from publication after heavy criticism. They have tons of other gods though, both evil and good.
 * Most of the core D&D settings were actually extremely focused on the issue of balancing out the various alignments. Greyhawk, Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms all played heavily around the idea of Good/Neutral/Evil deities and other-planar beings. However, it was Planescape that really took the cake, as it had the concept that real estate on the alignment-based Outer Planes could be moved around based on the nature of the residents. This served to explain why gods were often too busy to meddle more in affairs on the Prime Material Plane. It also explained cosmic conflicts like the Blood War, which was really all the fiends fighting each other to absorb each other's planes and thus create a single "Hell". More often than not, the powers of Good just egged them on because it kept the fiends occupied.
 * Interestingly enough, celestial "monsters" (such as Devas, Planetars and Solars) were often vastly more powerful than most of their fiendish counterparts (Demons, Daemons, Devils, etc.). A single Planetar or a Solar could flatten multiple Pit Fiends or Balors. However, they were also less numerous, so it was generally assumed to balance out.
 * The World of Darkness series did this twice over, as is to be expected:
 * In the Old World of Darkness, there was Demon: The Fallen, where the titular fallen angels had finally escaped from millennia in the Pit, only to find that God and all Her angels had vanished during their imprisonment. Then again, so had Lucifer...
 * In the New World of Darkness, there are demons that can be summoned and bound and which can make deals with mortals, and the books are very clear that where they come from is Hell. But there's no clear evidence of any benevolent deity in the driver's seat -- the Lancea Sanctum only claims they got their Blood Magic from angels, the gods in the Oneiros are just reflections of mortal belief, and the qashmallim are far from benevolent, fluffy-winged cherubs.

Video Games
"Berial: "A human, posing as God? How ridiculous!""
 * Doom has this trope. It seems the only force of Good in the Doom-verse is our Berserker Packin' man-and-a-half, the Space Marine/Taggert, and his trusty shotgun (and chainsaw), taking on the forces of Hell. There's not even a holy weapon around, unless you count the Soul-Cube used by the Martians against the Hellions.
 * Grandia II's big twist is that.
 * And then subverted or possibly played double-straight when
 * This seems to be the case in the Devil May Cry series, featuring the Legions of Hell and their leader Mundus, but nothing supporting the existence of God. Simularily, angels have been mentioned in passing a few times, but the series has yet to explore their existence in depth.
 * Berial makes a subtle implication of God existing, when he talks about Sanctus and the Savior in disgust.


 * Most of the religion in the Devil May Cry series revolves around worshiping demons, with Dante's father being a good demon messiah. Also, there are demons that appear to be angels. It seems as if in this universe, that instead of demons being fallen angels - angels are demons who fell up.
 * In a speech near the end of 4, Nero makes an explicit reference to God, although it's anyone's guess if it's God God, or the Powers That Be.
 * The Castlevania series arguably falls into this. Dracula is described as the being opposite to God; God does not make an appearance. Demons are commonplace, but while several angels appear in the story, all have fallen to the side of evil. (Significantly, this includes the angel of death.) While several main characters are religious, all explanations of their abilities have been traced back, canonically or otherwise, to poltergeists, dhampirs or alchemy. Even then, the one visible sign of divine intervention in the series may have been retconned! On the brighter side, the church has yet to be portrayed as corrupt.]]
 * The Order was separate from the Church of our Holy Lord.
 * God isn't directly brought up, but there are a lot of crosses everywhere. A crucifix, with a carving of Jesus included, makes an appearance as Richter's item crash when he's equipped with the cross/boomerang.
 * not to mention that in several games, the Vampire Killer and several "light" weapons give off a distinctly cross-shaped flash of light upon impact with an enemy.
 * Justified in Aria of Sorrow, where most religious discussion is with the main character's Miko friend, who naturally discusses things in Shinto terms, not Christian.
 * Final Fantasy Tactics is very heavy on religious warfare and involves a Dark Messiah using Demonic Possession to come back from the dead. Um, isn't God a little worried about this?
 * That's because God joins your team in the form of TG Cid.
 * There's also that little detail that if you look at the extended backstory brought on by FFXII, the Ivalice gods are monstrous jerks of the highest caliber (really, the Greek gods would be proud) and the Lucavi actually come across as sympathetic. It's more a case of bad God, good Devil here. Also, Altima/Ultima is not a Lucavi - she's a head Angel who used to be under the Gods' direct service, but more or less told them to go to hell after realizing just how badly they treated the Lucavi and took up their cause.
 * Inverted in The Simpsons Game, where we don't see the Devil but play DanceDanceRevolution against God.
 * Diablo and Diablo II. Deckard Cain mentions Hell is always bent on destruction (with Diablo as the Big Bad) but Heaven seems unfathomable (although there are angels).
 * The High Heavens and Burning Hells wage an eternal battle of good vs evil, and while there are no perfectly symmetrical counterparts to the Prime Evils, the Angiris Council is good enough. The forces of good (very strong ones, at that) are definitely present in the Diablo universe, they're just not shown that much because they prefer not to directly meddle in human affairs,
 * Played with in Dragon Quest VII. The final battle between God and the Demon Lord ended with both MIA, but most of the world was still sealed away by evil, so that only a single island remains intact when the game begins. As you progress, the question of whether or not the Demon Lord won is repeatedly raised. Oh, sure, it looks like God planned for this by setting up a ritual to reawaken him...  Then post game   Even more telling is that
 * Prevalent in The Elder Scrolls series, with the supposed conflict between (the adherents of) The Nine Divines and the Daedra Lords. The Daedra Lords, while not universally evil (some are, in fact, quite decent people, and all tend to hold up their end of a bargain), tend to be amoral, unpredictable, sadistic and, on occasion, prone to attempting world conquest. They are universally reviled as 'evil', and their worshipers are considered misguided at best, and dangerous lunatics at worst. They are, however, very much present in the world. They speak directly to their worshipers, sometimes even appearing in a physical form, and are perfectly willing to offer immediate, tangible rewards for those that choose to do their work. The Nine, on the other hand, do very little, apart from their altars supposedly granting blessings and healing diseases, which any semi-competent spellcaster could pull that off. The main time the Divines intervene is during the Knights Of The Nine, when You are the only one to directly benefit from divine interventions in game, apart from a major intervention in a spoiler below.
 * This is mentioned by the Oblivion NPC Else God Hater, a "The gods don't do a damn thing. Do they even exist? How could anyone tell? Daedra Lords, sure. They exist. They do things. Bad things, mostly, but things you can see. The gods? They don't do a damn thing. So why do we build big chapels and sit around and mumble, and ask them to save us from this and that? It's stupid. And chapels and priests and folks groveling on their knees, they're stupid, too."
 * The court mage in Oblivion's Cheydinhal castle asks if you worship the Nine Divines, asking rhetorically if they've ever helped or harmed the PC. She states that were the hero to worship a daedra lord, they would get results. Bad ones, but measurable results. She then states that she considers worshiping gods a waste of time, though the daedra cult of Azura are a nice, reasonable bunch.
 * While not in Oblivion, in the previous game, Morrowind, you did in fact meet what is implied to be avatars of the Nine Divine (Stendarr & Mara in sidequests, Talos during the Main Quest), who reward the hero/heroine according to the action they take.
 * There are also Vivec, Sotha Sil, and Almalexia, the Tribunal, who are a trio of supposedly good Physical Gods. Then again, they're not natural gods, and two of them die.
 * In Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion you see the
 * Oblivion and Morrowind drop huge metaphysical bombshells on this subject. As it turns out
 * In Morrowind, it was stated that the Daedra are eternal and can never be destroyed. The Aedra (the nicer gods) on the other hand are terribly powerful and ageless but can perish and indeed some of their number have been slain in the past. It therefore makes sense that they would seldom intervene in worldly affairs, as it risks their existence whereas the Daedra can happily engage in whatever plots they wish knowing that any defeat will only be temporary. This seems a little more likely than the point of view espoused in Oblivion, but its hard to tell either way from in-universe sources.
 * Also in Morrowind, the theory is floated that Tamriel isn't just Lorkhan's realm: it's Lorkhan's substance, his own body. He died making it, and now he is one with the land everyone lives on. This might explain why his still-beating heart is stuck under a mountain. So, there's a Devil but No God because God Is Dead. On the upside, God died so that we might live.
 * There was a God in Tears to Tiara. But not anymore, and the only people who ever met the guy have no idea where he's been for the rest of existence.
 * In Dwarf Fortress, the various gods civilizations worship have no effect on the world beyond temples being built in the honor and very rarely, holy wars in their name. Demons are actively involved in the world, taking over human and goblin civilizations by posing as the aforementioned dead gods and beating their way to the top, respectively..
 * A strong Dwarven fortress is quite capable of demonstrating the mortality of these Demons. Gods they very clearly ain't.
 * In the current version, gods have a slightly bigger presence in the world.
 * YMMV in Dragon Age: Origins: While it's unsure if the Maker exists, there is no Devil or god of evil, only personifications of character traits. A rage demon the PC fights with the help of a templar laughs at the templar's declarations of faith, taunting him that the god he worships and the heaven he hopes for simply don't exist, but that there are demons. He then attacks the party. (There is never any solid indication that the god the templars worship really exists. Their church was started by a prophet who was said to have divine powers, but there is a competing theory that she was simply an incredibly powerful mage.)
 * It has likewise been speculated that the Maker could be an unusually powerful benign Fade spirit (they exist, but since they don't try to possess people by force, they are rarely seen, unlike demons) - or a Pride Demon.
 * Regardless of whether or not God (the Maker) exists, the religion's particular belief is that the Maker turned his back on humanity, first for daring to try to reach his city deep within the Fade (which turned the Golden City into the Black City, unleashed the Archdemons and the Darkspawn, and caused the collapse of the powerful Tevinter Empire), and then for subsequently murdering his bride (the prophet Andraste, who had quite literally just convinced the Maker that people were worth saving when she was burned at the stake). Suffice to say, if there is a God, humans really went out of their way to piss him off. The church believes that spreading the Chant and defeating the Archdemons will allow humans to redeem themselves in the Maker's eyes.
 * It's also worth noting that the dwarves and the elves don't necessarily believe in the Chantry's teachings, preferring to believe in particularly noteworthy ancestors (Paragons) and the old gods (mostly of nature), for dwarves and elves respectively. There's no evidence for the old gods, but the Paragons really did exist.
 * According to Justice in the Awakening expansion pack even the spirits don't know if the Maker exists. As for the Devil there are no clear analogues except maybe the four demons that, according to the in-game codex, taught Humanity Blood Magic. On the other hand you can fight several of them in the games as optional bosses, so it's unlikely that they are somekind of Devil.
 * The creators themselves have said that it is intentionally ambiguous and they don't plan to give a clear answer.
 * Inverted in the Pokémon series games and anime where there is a counterpart for God called Arceus, but there is no counterpart for the Devil. Played straight in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Explorers games however, where Arceus is nowhere to be seen, and that only one Pokémon, is the true evil one.
 * In Mace: The Dark Age, God and characters from Heaven are conspicuously absent, even though multiple demons are featured.
 * Fear Effect: The games make it clear that there is a Chinese version of hell and a Chinese version of the Devil called The King Of Hell. However, there seems to be no heaven or God - unless the island where the Eight Immortals (who don't seem to do much of anything) live at counts.
 * Averted in the Warcraft universe which does feature benevolent gods, including some who directly help the player at times. Interestingly, the game's most widespread "good" religion, The Light, is arguably more like Buddhism in that it has nothing to do with worship or deities and more to do with philosophy and introspection.
 * Blaz Blue: There is no 'benevolent God', the closest thing you can call 'God' is a supercomputer more interested in keeping the whole world inside a depressing time loop. And there's the Devil figure known as the spirit Terumi Yuuki, Complete Monster Troll extraordinary who

Webcomics

 * Demons obviously exist in the world of Zebra Girl, but there is noticeably no sign of God or any sort of angelic power. As is evidenced when Sandra (herself transformed into a demon) has a nervous breakdown and begins screaming into the sky, begging God for answers, before coming to the cold realization, "I'm just talking to myself here, aren't I?"
 * Satan has appeared a few times in Sluggy Freelance, but God has never been seen outside of a dream Kiki had (where he peed on her head). Averted during the "That Which Redeems" arc, however, where there is a Goddess of Good to balance out the Demon King. She's just been stuck in a freezer for a millenia or two.
 * In College Roomies from Hell, Satan certainly exists, being a major recurring antagonist. However, the only clear evidence that God exists is a few "miraculous" events and and Satan's own word; at least at one point, Margaret, the character Satan's most antagonized, was openly skeptical.

Western Animation

 * Futurama has a robot version of this. The robots make many references to Robot Hell (the Robot Devil is even a recurring character), whereas Robot Heaven only gets one sentence, and afterward is never mentioned again.
 * Robot Jesus is also mentioned. Jewish Robots believe that He existed and that He was a very well-made robot, but He wasn't their Messiah.
 * However, Bender interacted with a semi-corporeal space entity, which is strongly implied to be God - or, as Bender guesses and God seems to confirm, the result of God colliding with a space probe to become a kind of cyborg God. Its cameo in Bender's Big Score seems to suggest that some of its powers can be accessed without its awareness or consent by technological means, perhaps through its "space probe" half.
 * It should also be noted that this very entity directly TOLD Bender that it thinks that the best way to help people is to help them in a way that ensures they don't notice it. And given the strange prevalence of ContrivedCoincidences working out in the heroes' favor...
 * The Second Coming of Christ apparently happened in 2443, although its only lasting effect seem to have been the destruction of most of the world's video tapes and that people now prefix the name Jesus with the word "Zombie".
 * Trigon in Teen Titans is built up as the series' parallel to Satan in almost every way, but there doesn't seem to be a contrasting "God" figure at all.
 * Transformers Generation 1, cartoon continuity. While both the cartoon and the comics had devil-figure Unicron, God-figure Primus was a comics-only figure until Beast Wars ten years later.
 * Transformers Animated as well. Character designer (and fellow fan) Derrick Wyatt has stated many times that Primus is not in the Animated universe, but Unicron might exist, albeit simply as a mechanical Eldritch Abomination rather than an actual god.
 * Jimmy Two-Shoes: Miseryville is practically Hell (in the original pitch, it was Hell, no question), with Lucius obviously a stand-in for Satan. Yet we never hear anything for the opposing side. In the original pitch, Jimmy was there on accident, which begs the question as to why God (if He exists) hasn't done anything.
 * God makes only a few appearances in South Park while Satan certainly has far more. In fact, everyone who isn't Mormon goes to hell.
 * This was changed in "Best Friends Forever" where the angels admitted that they needed to have non-mormons in heaven due to a general shortage of people to fight the devil.
 * Of course, God and Satan are on rather good speaking terms, and, despite all the fire and brimstone, hell is actually a pretty civil place. God and heaven aren't at all absent, they're just not as interesting.

Real Life

 * In Touching the Void, Joe Simpson falls a hundred or so feet into a deep, dark ice cave (with an already badly broken leg), separating him from his climbing partner. Simpson makes an explicit point that even when all seemed lost, he remained an atheist and did not consider asking God for help. Later, though, he speculates about a powerful "malign presence" that seems to be "teasing" him and might kill him off.