I thought this was interesting...Good job Tony Watkins

Secret history
A key bone of contention for Pullman is the issue of authority, which is of course why Pullman gives God the title of ‘The Authority’. There is a sense in which the Authority and the Magisterium are just manifestations of misused power. But given Pullman’s comments quoted above, it seems clear that he does have religion – rather than authority generally – in his sights. The Authority’s title distances him in the reader’s mind from the Christian God; it doesn’t feel like Pullman is talking about the same being. But in case we fail to make the connection, Balthamos spells it out:
The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, EI, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty – those were all names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves – the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are. (AS p.33)
How can ‘God’ be an angel? In Pullman’s underlying ‘creation myth’, matter became conscious of itself and generated Dust. Some of it ‘condensed’ into the first angel – a being of pure Dust. This new being was fully conscious, and when he began to see other angels condensing out of the Dust he realised what an opportunity he had. Since he came first, he could tell the subsequent angels that he was God and had created them. The angels loved and obeyed him, but the Sophia (Wisdom), the youngest and most beautiful angel, discovered the truth about the Authority who subsequently expelled her. There was an angelic rebellion, but the Authority defeated it and imprisoned the rebels in one of the many worlds. The Sophia told them about the Authority’s lies to human beings (and conscious beings in other worlds), and the rebels escaped to bring enlightenment, wisdom and full consciousness to the poor creatures under the Authority’s rule.
This myth draws heavily on second century Gnosticism, but also inverts it. Gnosticism is all about gnosis – knowledge, in particular secret, esoteric knowledge open only to a privileged few. For the early Gnostics, the secret knowledge about reality was that the world was not created by God, but by an evil Demiurge (a lesser or false god); the true God is unreachable and unknowable. The Gnostics believed that matter is essentially evil, but Sophia, one of the angelic beings, managed to put a spark of true spiritual nature (pneuma) into human beings. Pullman doesn’t believe this but sees it as a good story with ‘immense explanatory power: it offers to explain why we feel . . . exiled in this world, alienated from joy and meaningfulness and the true connection we feel we must have with the universe.’[5] Where Pullman turns this on its head is in the attitude towards the phsyical. Gnosticism sees it as evil; Pullman sees it as something to be enjoyed and celebrated.
Pullman’s myth also draws on Paradise Lost’s angelic war, Satan’s escape from his prison, and his tempting of Adam and Eve. By recasting God as the demiurge impostor, Pullman transforms him into the bad guy, and casts the rebels (including the Sophia) as the good guys. On this view, the Fall is a good thing (see chapters 10 and 11). This is an ideal scenario for Pullman: a materialist universe which has found its own wisdom fighting off the deceptions and impositions of a ‘god’ who is really nothing of the sort. Archbishop Rowan Williams points out that:
Someone [the demiurge or the Authority] is trying to pull the wool over your eyes . . . and wisdom is an unmasking . . . If you have a view of God which makes God internal to the universe, that's what happens.[6]
Williams is saying that if you see God merely as part of the physical universe, then you automatically see him as a deceiver. The historically orthodox Christian understanding of God and the universe only works if God is transcendent.