God's Incompetence

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.  And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.  So the Lord said, "I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created - people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them." (Genesis 6:5-7, New Oxford Annotated Bible)

These  words introduce the story of Noah, which according to traditional interpretations, places the blame for the sorry state of human existence on humans.  We are willful, we subvert God's purposes, we are selfish, we are disobedient, we are fearful, we are greedy, and we are violent.  And all this misbehavior is a function of gifts, the God given power to make decisions and the God given freedom to do as we please.  And what did we do with our power and freedom?  In theological terms, we failed to honor our creator.  However, in the above passage, God deemed his own efforts to create creatures, who would steadfastly and bravely return his love, as a complete failure.  God blamed himself.

Strangely enough, it never occurred to God that the creatures might use free will to protect and serve themselves, to love their own kind and find pleasure in each others' company.  It never occurred to God that humans might band together in different groups and seek to dominate one another.  It never occurred to God that humans might be fearful and use their groups to fight each other.  The great designer, the prime mover, the source of all the finely turned laws of the universe, miscalculated the place of human emotions in the grand scheme of things.  And even with the advantage of foresight, God seemed to have been surprised at the results.

All of this is curious given the current day touting by conservative Christians that the perfection of creation is evidence that evolution could not possible be true.  They say we are fearfully and wonderfully made, far more complicated than a watch or a computer.  But at least, watches and computers do what they are designed to do and many are quite elegant.

Now back to the above passage, the Genesis story has it that there was one exception, one righteous man, namely Noah, with whom God was pleased.  So God decided to wipe out all the failures and begin afresh with his one success.  But again, God miscalculated because he assumed that the offspring of this one good man would be spiritual clones.  Well, the rest is history, humans went astray again.  But the Bible always blames humans for the mess;  not the creator.  And the biblical apocalypses inform us that God intends to correct his second huge mistake by destorying the universe and replacing it with two eternal locales, namely heaven and hell.

And what does not get highlighted is that the sufferers in hell will outnumber the saints in paradise.  And when we step back and assess the plan from start to finish, the design God put together, it doesn't seem to be a very good one.  In order to create a group of people who of their own free will would love God, he had to create a vast number, perhaps as much as 97% of the human race or more, whose destinies necessitate being tortured for eternity.  Couldn't this all powerful, all knowing God create creatures with dispositions to love with any more efficiency?

And theologicans consider this to be an expression of God's love for the world?  And conservatives consider this to be finely tuned divine design?  If this were a human plan, it would be judged as incompetent; a three percent success rate is unacceptable in any industry.  Genesis tells us that God was sorry that he made us.  Well, if the Bible's narrative, traditionally interpreted, is the truth, then I also share that sentiment.  We, that is the human race, would be better off never having been created.