I'm going to challenge your premise "but it is not possible to have the world both destroyed and not-destroyed at the same time". By assuming some sort of "multiverse", having both outcomes may be possible. I don't know if you are familiar with open source projects, but I think there is an interesting parallel to draw here: In an open source project, developers tend to work together in building software. However, disagreements may arise and in such cases, the software may be forked. In a nutshell, this means that there will be two new projects based on the former and developers will continue to work on their preferred one. In your question, the reality is the open source project and the gods are the developers. So, whenever the gods oppose each other and disagree on something, they all get what they want because reality *is splitted* with different outcomes. Now, why the gods may not want that? Because they *want to work together* for some reason. Maybe they have grown fond of each other and became friends. Or they think it is wiser to have someone else to help out. Being a lone god may be dull or boring and there will be a positive incentive to attempt to reach a consensus and *avoid forking reality*. This sort of mechanism may allow for interesting plots, such as gods sending "pull requests" and "merging" realities back together. In the gods' perspective, it's kind of playing a sandbox online game: you can either play it "online" with others and sometimes voluntarily abdicate your wishes, or you can play it "offline" and have absolute control over everything. Playing offline may give you some insights about the game and be fun in the beginning, but playing with other people can be more interesting as it adds an element of uncertainty and can be more challenging. In the god's meta-universe, being a solo god of a universe may be frowned upon and gods that engage in this for "too long" (whatever that means for a god) can be seen as egotistical or narcissistic.