It's been interesting to watch as science fiction gets pushed more and more into the realm of what would have been considered the Fantasy genre fifteen years ago. Much of this due to the fact that we can now envision being able to implement true nanotech and harness quantum physics in ways that only hyper-gifted physicists can conceive.
Edit (expansion): Flying, teleportation, revival from death, transmutation of solid matter, the list goes on... and would have seemed more like "magic" until recently.
Still, when you read the novels the concept of an all-pervasive intellect is stitched through more and more work. From Asimov's planet-spanning colony bacteria intellect in Nemesis to the noosphere of people like Dan Simmons and Stephenson's take on a total VR world. More and more it becomes easier to get a long glimpse of how an intelligence that spans time and space ("living" in the interstices in ways that we never imagined) could be created (by man) within the next 500 years.
Seeing that, why is the idea of God (ever able to defy scientific method) so hard to acknowledge? Do we have to make God in order for Him to be real?
A fun topic!
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