Baltar starts the show as a degenerate genius who uses his gifts for banal purposes. (A more extreme version of Baltar's type of intellectual depravity is offered by Leopold and Loeb.) He's an exemplar of Caprican society--which like ours is another Babylon/Rome. Caprican society peaked when it ~created~ a race of Metic slave machines called the Cylons. Dumb robots were bad slaves, so in the BSG mythology, Zoe Graystone created the technological means to make them conscious and to host human consciousness, which led to their sky-net like obsession with destroying humanity.
Baltar's degeneracy is his (and humanity's) undoing as Six dupes him into revealing all the secret codes and data of the Colonial defense forces. However, in the wake of the fall of their Babylon,
Six ends up instructing Baltar in the form of a vivid waking hallucination away from his degenerate and dissipative life toward being a Jesus type figure, who by the end of the show has undergone a total transformation.
Much like Thulsa Doom in the Conan movies, the cylons serve as a harsh teacher to humanity. Much of the transformation seems to be guided by an understanding of the nature of consciousness--if consciousness is an inherent property of the universe, man's consciousness is not distinct, so a man is not distinct from the universe.
The lack of sympathy or empathy for ~mere~ matter leads to the rise of the cylons. An attempt to escape natural necessity, i.e. death, by Zoe Graystone and to escape into the Symbol World (millions of posts in my blog about that) led to their rise also, and the demise of the race of humanity.
By the end of the series the crew of Galactica has come full circle. They destroy all their technology and return to the Earth (literally and figuratively) and the cylons and humans merge in the birth of a star child.
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