Random crazy thought:
What if it's aliens.
What if humanity was uplifted by aliens ('god' created man in his own image). What's the alien's insurance policy though? What if we get too smart and kill them? Or kill ourselves? Or the galaxy? How could they guarantee that that wouldn't happen?
What if the baddies are here on purpose as well, and the test of whether we are a civilization that deserves to join all the other sentient life in the universe is whether or not we can cast them out.
It's a great insurance policy - failure case is a life-bearing planet and maybe 100k (cosmically brief) years of development is lost.
You can only succeed if you realize, internalize, and truly understand that only by working together can progress be made.
This makes more sense to me than God.