In the beginning … God walked in the Garden of Eden like an ordinary supernatural Joe. He dropped by Abraham’s for a cup of coffee and a chat. He didn’t know what was up in Sodom and Gomorrah and had to send out angelic scouts for reconnaissance: “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me” (Gen. 18:20–21).
But, like Stalin gradually collecting titles, God has now become omniscient and omnipotent. He’s gone from needing six days to shape a world from Play-Doh and sprinkle tiny stars in the dome of heaven to creating 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars.
That’s 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg of universe.
And yet, oddly, his biblical demonstrations of power faded with time. From creating the universe, he’s weakened such that appearing in a grilled cheese sandwich is about as much as he can pull off today. He has the fiery reputation of the Wizard of Oz but is now just the man behind the curtain.
Even God’s punishments became wimpier. A global flood, with millions dead is pretty badass. Personally smiting Sodom and Gomorrah is impressive, though that’s a big step down in magnitude.
And it’s downhill from there—God simply orders the destruction of Canaanite cities, and to punish Israel and Judah, he allows Assyria and then Babylon to invade. As Jesus, he doesn’t kick much more butt than cursing a fig tree, and today he simply stands by to let bad things happen.
Maybe God’s power diminishes as the universe’s dark energy increases?
Photo credit: Why There is no God
Galileo Unchained 
Also, left unsaid is that your graph uses a logarithmic scale.
Good point!
Wow, excellent analysis.
your arguments are clever and witty, and made for some entertaining humor, but lack the necessary weight in logic to hold down the paper they are written on. you’re also forgetting a lot of other kick-butt things that God did along the way. the earth opened up and swallowed korah and his family alive into another dimension (hell)… pretty cool. sending people in bodily form to a place normally reserved for ghosts. then there’s the whole, splitting the red sea thing, and gobbling up pharaohs army. defying gravity. even man can launch a nuke and destroy a city like sodom… but defy gravity? that’s pretty good. then there’s the whole, controlling the entire fate of humanity, every single individual that ever lived… proved through use of prophetic messages over centuries, and yet at the same time never once having violated a single person’s free will. that’s pretty impressive. it’s like emperor palpatine from star wars… yet that was more like a mind control thing, and God doesn’t control minds. then not only did God decide to come as a human being and take our form… .which is pretty awesome that he can do that… the fact that he DECIDED to do it is equally impressive. think of it like this… would you give up your life as a human to live the life and experience what its like to be an ant? no, i don’t think that you would. and even if you did, would you then decide to volunteer your life for those other worthless insects? but wait! it gets better. after they all gang up on you and kill you, you still come back to life!
but lets get back to the logic part. God already created a whole universe… and you’re in it. you claim God’s power is diminished. how the hell would you know that God is not still at it? there could be 40 billion completely unique universes out there since God made this one. if there are, they are probably better. you know, new and improved. and i don’t think he’s going to ask your permission, or inform you before he makes them. you haven’t even mastered this one yet.
then there’s the flood. you’re forgetting the subject here is man… not God or his power. the PROBLEM that God was fixing was MAN not the world. duh. would you burn down your house to kill a mouse? well that’s what God did. he made sure none squeaked out under the door. and then made it all over again.
then there’s the going to sodom to check things out. angel reconnaissance you called it. lets do a thought experiment … if you can handle it. lets go backward in time… to eternity past. after an infinity of time of being God… and doing God-like things… making universes, destroying them, all kinds of cool stuff. do you think it’s possible that perhaps God is pretty confident in his ability to BE God? have you ever been sitting by the sidewalk, with nothing better to do and there were ants walking around? so, your more devious side got the better of you and you started squishing them. and right when you were about to get another one, you decided not to. not because there was anything special about that particular one, or because you had a streak of benevolence. at that moment in time you were the deciding factor in the life of that ant, and you chose to spare it just because you could. you had absolute power and you could do anything you wanted to that ant, and you chose not to destroy it. or perhaps squishing ants just became boring to you. whatever the reason. it doesn’t matter. God doesn’t need one. He can do whatever he wants to. God’s position has always been to give as much power to man to decide our own fate as possible, until we screw it up sooo bad that only He can fix it. God’s power doesn’t decline as time progresses, his restraint has multiplied.
After creating the universe, killing a guy and his family is small potatoes.
What was the defying gravity thing?
An interesting story. Is it anything more? I’ve seen no evidence.
Come to the new blog. I’ve rebutted the 3 most famous “prophecies.” See what you think.
Nope–you wouldn’t want God to interfere with the murderer’s free will. Of course, God doesn’t care about the victim’s free will getting trampled on, but at least the murderer’s left to do his work. Cool!
Cause they’re both fiction?
Right–so Jesus didn’t actually sacrifice anything. Not very impressive.
I don’t. But the burden of proof is yours, not mine.
“Whaaa … ? These people are all bad! It’s like someone made them imperfect! Oh … wait a minute. I made them imperfect. Oh well–it still pisses me off. I’ll just drown them all slowly.”
Yeah–what was that all about? God had to go do some recon? He didn’t already know?
It’s almost like God’s properties have changed over time. I should write a blog post about that.
It’s a shame God doesn’t feel that more often instead of destroying the planet and ordering the genocide of the Canaanites.
also, i’d like to point out that you appear to spend a lot of time reading and memorizing large portions of the bible to be able to recall them so easily in your attempts to bash it. that seems quite odd. i don’t believe in evolution. i think it’s a bunch of nonsense. although i’m familiar with the basics, i don’t go out and familiarize myself with every new nuance of the evolving (haha) non-hypothesis. (since you have to be able to test to make a hypothesis, evolution doesn’t qualify, let alone as a theory….scientifically speaking of course)
to me you seem like someone who at one time liked the idea of God, toyed around with christianity, and then for some reason rejected it because for some reason it didn’t make sense to you. so your problem isn’t so much the idea of God in general, but you don’t like the bible. but because the bible claims to be the word of God, if you make fun of the bible you have to make fun of God too. your tagline says “for those who have no use for faith”… .again…seems very odd that a faithless heathen would know so much about the bible.
so wrap your mind around this: you have no use for faith. God creates a belief system about himself that requires total faith…so that man’s free will and self determination can never be questioned. but you would argue against his textbook on the grounds that it doesn’t make sense? it seems to me you are the one that isn’t making any sense. but you’re sorta wasting your time trying to disprove something that can’t be disproved…and also to convince people that the bible is wrong when it takes more faith to believe God doesn’t exist than to believe that He does. philosophy and science are polar opposites. i can use science to PROVE that all men are NOT created equal, ALL DAY LONG. yet we have laws that declare we are, and demand that people treat each other with equality.
Isn’t it odd that you, a layman, think that you’re able to judge science and separate the wheat from the chaff?
I bet those biologists and gnashing their teeth looking at you, PhD-less, and thinking of all that time they wasted getting smart when you can just judge stuff all by yourself.
Again, keep in mind that the burden of proof is yours.
Do you just accept every supernatural claim that you come across? How do you decide?
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