Qarel,
With what you say I am being drawn into a direction that I find extremely interesting but I am not quite equipped as yet to deal with it adequately on the same level as you are obviously dealing with it. So bear with me if I am a bit inexperienced in regards to formal theologies and ontologies and their semantics. I miss the tools of your trade but I can see what you are making, as if you are a craftsman making a piece of furniture that has an unspecified function(beautiful but unfathomable).
I like the proposition of Big C not being used as an hypothesis (A reduction to qualities/features)but rather as a query(Could Big C be?). However, with the use of the name "Big C" I am forced to think in terms of a construction: An entity that is not simply an inhabitant of the universe but it's essence.
In this direction of thinking the reported experiences of people having talked about Big C do not add any dimension to the query: in what people say they have experienced there is no information to separate their possible imaginations(or fibs) from actual information about Big C. If, for example a friend of mine tells me that he talked to George Bush there is no certain way that I can determine if he actually did so or that he only imagined it. External facts can help to make his claim believable but as long as George Bush does not confirm the claim I will never know for sure and it might even be so that the George Bush my friend talked to was not the George I had in mind, or that the George Bush my friend met was a fake. In the end it is questionable if the George Bush we were talking about actually exist. I think that the search for Big C or the worship of Big C is a bit like that.
An other way I look at it is very much in line with the Carl Sagan view(possibly the Carl Sagan view has shaped my stance on this to some measure) that we can easily consider intelligent beings that are eons ahead of us intellectually and technically(like the Caretakers of the Universe in the book "Contact"). No matter how advanced other beings might be they would simply be inhabitants of the Universe like we are. Although such beings could certainly appear God-like in a practical sense, like the gods as in Chariots of the Gods, these God-like creatures may in term be a simple as, metaphorically speaking, a microbe on a human nose hair.
In this light any story about someone having talked to Big C would give rise to speculation that in the event that they actually are reporting facts that they are simply reporting the facts relating to meeting some Small Creature(Small C) instead of Big C. How would anyone ever be able to even notice any difference between a Big C and a Small C if we have neither a workable conception of Big C Evil Option or Big C Benevolent Option?
If I recall correctly, even Adam and Eve, that were presumably closer to God than any creature ever was, metaphorically speaking of course, where not able to ascertain if their God was Big C or simply a Small C among many.
As I develop new angles I hear the thunder of the silence grow stronger.
Conrad
