History Main / GodIsInept

* Azathoth from various Creator/HPLovecraft stories is known as the "Blind Idiot God". He's so powerful that he can destroy the universe with a single thought. Luckily for us, he's incredibly stupid and has very few, if any, thoughts.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIII'': Etro certainly meant well. She loved humanity, the one and only thing she had ever been able to create, ([[DrivenToSuicide by tearing her own body apart]]), gave them all their souls and ruled as a [[DontFearTheReaper benevolent]] {{Shinigami}} styled goddess over Valhalla, the realm of the dead... However, she was also seemingly unable to realize the limits of her own abilities, appreciate the risks she was taking or see the consequences of her actions. Eventually this leads to her accidentally breaking reality and when she [[SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong tries to fix it again]], [[DeconstructedTrope the effort ultimately kills her]]. According to WordOfGod, Etro was a quite "foolish" goddess, but it's unclear if that meant she was intellectually impaired or just didn't have much in the way of common sense.
* ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsV'': [[spoiler: [[Anime/TheBraveExpressMightGaine Black Noir]] is as powerful and manipulative as it was in the original series, but consistently failed to succeed at any of its plans. [[Anime/SpaceBattleshipYamato2199 Sanada]] theorizes that this is because of a cause-and-effect-based psychological reaction that having a god or god-like being would invoke.]]

* Happens, sort of, in ''ComicBook/ChaosWar''. [[spoiler:Hercules sacrifices his omnipotence to recreate the Universe, destroyed by Chaos King. [[StatusQuoIsGod Everything goes back to exactly how it was before]], including all villains and various monsters. Hercules claims that he was [[OmniscientMoralityLicense "Guided by wisdom beyond human understanding"]] but considering he accidentally brought Ares's son Knykos back to life, it's rather clearly this trope]].
* In ''ComicBook/SecondComing'', it is revealed that Jesus's message from the events of the New Testament have become nearly unrecognizable to due to the two-thousand years of here-say and political tampering, barely recognizing it when he finds a copy of it.

* In ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'', the Emperor of Mankind was ''sort of'' benevolent by the standards of the setting (admittedly, by the standards of any other setting he was a genocidal, warmongering fascist, which should give you some idea of what the Grim Darkness of the Far Future is like), but a mixture of failure to understand humans and flaws in his grand plan led to his effective death and ten thousand years of slow decay for his empire.

** A point is made that God is NotSoOmniscientAfterAll and this has caused a lot of problems for humans. When Adam and Eve eat the [[ForbiddenFruit forbidden fruit]], Eve asks how they were supposed to know that it was wrong to do it when they couldn't know what "wrong" even was before they are the fruit, only for God to deflect.

* The film ''Film/TimeBandits'' deals heavily with the concept that The Supreme Being (God) made errors in his designs, both with individual items (which are listed occasionally) and with the universe in general. God was also assisted in his creation (which, for some reason, he was "forced" to complete in only seven days) by some greedy, inept dwarves rather than a council of angels. The dwarves then steal God's map that shows where all of the "holes" are in the fabric of the universe, and instead of using the map to ''fix'' the holes, decide to get rich by stealing stuff. Evil (Arthur G. Evil) rants about how God wasted his time creating garbage like all those species of slugs, instead of starting with lasers and other high tech. God (in the film) is also incapable of answering those questions people expect God to be able to answer, such as, "why does there have to be evil?" (His answer: "... I think it has something to do with free will?"[[note]]Which is, in a nutshell, the answer given by some of the greatest theologians and philosophers in history: without free will, there can be no such thing as morality, but free will also necessitate the ability to choose to do evil (however, this still does not explain natural evils such as cancer, etc. ). Many fans of ''Time Bandits'' argue that this movie actually subverts this trope: God is made to look absent-minded and inept, but one could certainly argue that [[ObfuscatingStupidity this is all a ruse]], and that everything that happens in the movie proceeds according to His [[JustAsPlanned design]]. After all, by leaving holes in spacetime at the Creation, and then giving the map of those holes to the bandits, then provoking them into running away, and then chasing them into the protagonist's bedroom, He arranges the destruction of [[BigBad Evil]].[[/note]]

* Played for laughs in ''Radio/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'', when the eponymous Guide is described as "more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters ''Where God Went Wrong'', ''Some More Of God's Greatest Mistakes'', and ''Who Is This God Person Anyway?''." However, it's worth noting that the very same episode goes on to strongly imply that Colluphid is a bit of a hack: The central argument upon which they based their follow-up work ''Well, That About Wraps It Up For God'', which became the trope namer for PuffOfLogic, is dismissed as "a load of dingo's kidneys" by anyone with half a brain in-universe.

[[folder:Web Comics]]

* Originally in UsefulNotes/{{Gnosticism}} (that's where the word "Demiurge" came from: Dēmiourgos -- "public worker"). Many doctrines of it say something like "our world is made by someone pretty low in the Divine Ranks, not very skilled at this" -- explaining any problems of the world we know as consequences of a work botched from the start.\\\
The Demiurge is also described as a childlike entity that merely ''thinks'' it's actually God, having created the universe as a sandbox in which to play, before eventually coming to believe its own propaganda.

* In ''LightNovel/TheDeathMageWhoDoesntWantAFourthTime'' the fundamental conflict in the world of Lambda is that after a massive war, two gods disagreed how to rebuild. BigGood Vida's idea was to create a lot of new races to speed up the process and stabilize the population, seemingly believing that people are people no matter what they look like. While she was attacked and sealed away after starting her project, the races she managed to create seem really badly designed for their job: Vampires are asexual while ghouls are so cripplingly infertile they cannot even reproduce outside of cursed ground, which people don't want spreading. Empusa, arachne, harpies, lamia and scylla, meanwhile, are all female and therefore cannot reproduce on their own. ''And'' her children have almost universally low fertility such as a single child per decade. How are these species supposed to repopulate the world, exactly? Not helping things is that her personality is rather flaky and she easily gets flustered.

* Variation in an episode of ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''. Q claims to be God, but Picard doesn't buy it:

* Daryl Van Horne (Creator/JackNicholson)'s rant in ''Film/TheWitchesOfEastwick'' (but note he's supposed to be {{Satan}}).

* The god in the first of Creator/JohnBrunner's ''Literature/TheTravellerInBlack'' stories is basically a big powerful child.

* "Better Off Dead" by Music/BadReligion is told from the perspective of God, and basically consists of him apologizing for screwing up the world so bad.
** [[SubvertedTrope Although]] it comes more as a BackhandedApology, implying that the creation is fine and humans just complain too much.

** The Golden Apple is one notable Greek story, wherein Eris (a most certainly not inept god) manages to start the Trojan War by getting three other goddesses (Athena, Aphrodite and Hera) into a fight over who gets to keep the golden apple, which bears the inscription "For the fairest". Yes. The biggest war in Greek Mythology was started over pure vanity (and attempts to bribe the judge).
** The most inept Greek god may be Epimetheus ("afterthought"), literally the deity or AnthropomorphicPersonification of realizing too late that you screwed up. One myth (or possibly allegory) recorded by Plato explains the creation of humans and animals like this: Zeus (who didn't think this through either?) assigns Epimetheus and his much more intelligent brother Prometheus ("forethought") to create animals and humans. Prometheus gets the more important job (humans) and takes his time making sure the basic design is sound. By the time he's ready to give humans some of the gifts which Zeus had made available, he finds that Epimetheus has already used up every last one of them on a bazillion [[ArtisticLicenseBiology shoddily-thrown-together]] animals. There's nothing left for humans, leaving us [[ScienceMarchesOn no useful adaptations at all]]. Prometheus then has to steal fire just for humans to survive. And Zeus punishes ''him'' instead of his brother! You'd think that the [[ForgotAboutHisPowers god of forethought]] would have foreseen that...

** And of course, PandorasBox. Depending on the version, it was left unlocked out in the open by Epithemeus (again) where any idiot could open it and unleash various calamities (part of Zeus' gifts, which he hadn't found a use for) on the world, or brought as Pandora's dowry, who opened it and spilled out all the ''blessings'' save hope.

** The Abrahamic God appears to be closer to this at times in Literature/TheBible, especially in early writings. After all, the Garden of Eden had been around for all of about five minutes before Adam and Eve screwed it up. You'd have thought that maybe God could have fenced off the original ForbiddenFruit, or taken at least the most basic precaution to ensure that his newest creation [[FridgeLogic (who didn't know the difference between right and wrong)]] wouldn't take the one action that would ruin everything. Or perhaps just not put it there to being with.
** There's a well-known passage in Judges (Judges 1:19) where God was unable to help Judah triumph over 'the inhabitants of the valley' because they had 'chariots of iron'.

* The {{God}} of Oglaf (see page image) is consistently portrayed as an incompetent bungler who didn't even create the universe, he found it and then claimed he'd made it.