"Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence comes evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?" Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)
"Is man one of god's blunders, or is god one of man's?" Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
God is, shall we say, limited. It's neither necessary nor nice to say god is stupid, or mentally retarded, or inept, or disinterested, or weak, or lacking vision and creativity. "Limited" covers the lapses.
It's odd that god is never any smarter than man. If we believe the "scriptures," god's range starts way before soup and extends far beyond nuts, but god never addresses any more than what is familiar to men. Giving the maximum benefit of any possible doubt, let's say god admonished to "choose life." But why leave men struggling over conception, birth control, abortion? God didn't see contraceptive pills coming, or know that medical science would be capable of inducing abortions before the fetus can have had any sensation or awareness? This is a really big and painful debate, for god's sake. And why all the time and trouble to interpret the hopelessly esoteric, the inscrutable? The Talmud is far bigger than the "Old Testament." Rules that are vague or contradictory, admonitions not to work, leaving gulfs of room to decide to what extent the use of electric power is work, and whether it's respectful enough if the "Shabbos goy" turns on the light? God must surely have anticipated Benjamin Franklin, Volta, and Faraday. Didn't he create them, as he did Adam and Eve? Can he not see beyond his caprices and impulses?
And god gave himself a second chance with Jesus, and a third with Mohammed. "New" and newer testaments, in case there was something he forgot to mention or clarify. How can it be that god only told people what they needed to know at the time, but not what the rest of us would need to know in the future? We've stopped getting updates long after we've needed them. Look at the discord and combativeness that resulted from the ambiguities and inconsistencies.
If this was some sort of sport, like dog or cock fighting, I for one don't think it's amusing. But then again, it may simply be that I don't have god's sense of humor and fun.
And part of the bad result of these major lapses is that they cause a severe dumbing down of people. Out of their respect for and devotion to god, people surrender their own capacities for creative thinking, and they become rigid and "conservative." If god didn't think it, I won't think it, either, they say. People get disturbingly primitive this way. Or they stay disturbingly primitive.
Mark Twain quipped "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." This epigram works, because one generation will not be any smarter than the last. The range of facts known may change, but the brain power won't. The father will in fact become every bit as smart as his son was. This system apparently doesn't work when it comes to god. It would appear that if god is dumber than a 14 year old, he is as smart as a 21 year old, but he then gets to be a lot dumber than a 30 year old, or a 50 year old. We pass him by. His deal, assuming he exists and has a deal, is that he has all the answers. But he doesn't. He's stuck in the past, the primitive past, and we have to invent any position he would have to take to be relevant in the present, which certainly recalls Nietzsche's question. It can get old fast, unless man is willing to limit his own intellectual actualization. Chauncy Gardner's "I like to watch" in Being There was plenty cryptic and inspiring enough for Shirley Maclaine's character, but we have reason to imagine she would have figured out before long what was wrong with that picture. If she never would, shame on her.
The hardest row to hoe is that of the conservative, or orthodox, or fundamentalist adherent. There's so much to surrender, not just in what they do, but in what, and if, they think. They have to live in a mental world completely constructed by someone else. Richard Dawkins was wrong, and unbearably rude, to refer to the belief in god as a "delusion." It's not a personal and idiosyncratic distortion of thinking, at odds with what is tangible and acceptable to everyone else, and springing from some sort of chemical imbalance. It's more like a folie a plusieurs, an agreement among many to share a collection of quirks in reasoning, or abdication of reasoning. The fact, of course, is that the agreement is the point. "God" is just a talking point, a mascot, a currency to use. But it also becomes the tail that wags the dog, since believers, centuries and millennia removed from the handshake, have no idea what the agreement was for, what it was about, or how to appreciate it. All they have is some concept of "god," and they have to figure out with each other what to do with it.
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