“We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes” (Gene Rodenberry)
"You see, the religious people -- most of them -- really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition." (Carl Sagan) [Sol Hadden, "Contact"]
"The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H.Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history."(Robert Heinlein)
It would seem that Science writers have some difficulty with the standard definition of god. Is this because they see the Universe from a more cosmic perspective and/or is it an issue of imaginative creativity?
Humans are purported to be reasoning beings and this is what sets us apart from the rest of nature as we currently understand it. Yet we are adjured by almost all religions to forego rationalism and live by faith and or rote obedience, generally based on unknowable or at best shadowy revelation. One is never to question the work of God.
Yet, Thomas Jefferson once wrote; "Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." It seems logical that as reasoning beings we ought to be able to use that unique asset to understand the world and its creator; unless we were not meant to be this way. The story of the Tree of Knowledge, is an allegorical explanation that there is a fly in the ointment of creation . . . somehow creation has run amok.
An artist (as one example of a creative being) in the act of creation executes a conceived plan to create a work. The finished product is a totality that is completely his, and he/she during the intimacy of its creation knows it's every brush stroke or pencil smudge and why it is there and what it was meant it to be and convey. Is this is not true of the handiwork of God, the supreme creator?
How can our imagining of God as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc., possibly be true, at least for us in our experience of linear time? (Which presumably God transcends having created time in the first place) If God exists, then either he started something that he is totally univolved in or he lacks the powers we ascribe to him, or is it that he enjoys the chaos?
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