History Main / GodIsInept

God may later claim that it was just a {{Xanatos Roulette}} justified by their {{Omniscient Morality License}}, and that {{Obfuscating Stupidity}} is all part of their master plan... but unless the ending explodes in a hail of Chekov's gunfire, especially if accompanied by a prearranged divine {{Ass Pull}} of divine might, that explanation just never seems very convincing, somehow. As a rule of thumb, if a person can, in retrospect, work out how the plan was set up in advance, and some previously arranged coincidences unravel into karmically appropriate boons before the end, it was probably a divine {{Xanatos Gambit}}. Otherwise, it's probably just bumbling.

Compare GodIsFlawed.

** Well, the belief is that had the Fall not happened, humans would not age or die and God would have looked after us directly instead of adopting his VetinariGambit of [[HumansAreBastards letting us spend millennia screwing ourselves over]] until we figure out that we need him. [[AlternateCharacterInterpretation Thinking about it that way,]] [[MagnificentBastard human frailty was possibly designed so that we would need God for daily living.]]

** Human anatomy - normal human anatomy - has so many howling design errors that it is completely silly. Nevermind birth defects and so forth, the deviations from the normal. The standard genetically encoded human body plan is stupid, with parts of the body being arranged in howlingly inefficient ways, making us more vulnerable, both to deadly risks and to various unpleasantness and discomfort. Nevermind all the X-Men stuff that Tyson wants, the ability to detect carbon monooxide and ionixing radiation, and to see in a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum. If parts of human anatomy were just re-arranged slightly, switched around, placed differently, human lives would be safer and much more comfortable. All it would take would be some very minor changses.

-->''I still hold firm that the vast majority of humans are idiots, but to know that there's something larger and beyond us, potentially run by even bigger idiots, that's amazing!''
-->--'''Amanda''', ''WapsiSquare'', "[[http://wapsisquare.com/comic/bigger-idiots/ Bigger Idiots]]"

* Arguably, the YoungWizards series presents an example; the [[{{Satan}} Lone Power]] managed to implement the physical processes that would lead to the eventual heat-death of the universe, and by the time any of the other Powers That Be noticed, it was too late to reverse the damage without scrapping creation and starting over, which they didn't have the resources for. This leads to the Powers, and the mortal wizards who serve them, running damage control for all of time.

* In The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Heinlein, you find out that the world is a [[spoiler:work of art]] made by a newb creator. The content is actually considered to be very impressive overall, but the underlying structure of the world was made by [[spoiler:"painting over" one of the creators earlier works]] which leads to issues with [[EldritchAbomination things]] seeping through.

-->''If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that He's evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that basically He's an underachiever.''
-->--'''Boris''', ''[[WoodyAllen Love and Death]]''

-->--'''Boris''', ''[[WoodyAllen Love and Death]]''

* In The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Heinlein, you find out that the world is a [[spoiler:work of art]]
made by a newb creator. It is actually considered to be very impressive overall, but it was made by [[spoiler:"painting over" one of the creators earlier works]] which leads to issues with [[EldritchAbomination things]] seeping through.

* Daryl Van Horne (Jack Nicholson)'s rant in ''TheWitchesOfEastwick''.

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But in retrospect, they botched a few things up in the original design, a few things just don't do what they were probably intended to do, and there's all these little bits of design that make people go "What the.. * I* could have designed this better!" These aren't moral things; there is no refuge in claiming that {{God is Evil}}. It's just shoddy worksmanship.

* Tom Holt's ''HereComesTheSun'' features a Celestial Bureaucracy and a very hands-off God, and says that the world went wrong very early on due to the incompetence of one of the bureaucracy's employees. The heroine thinks she could have done better, and gets a chance to prove it.

* ''{{Misfile}}'''s filing system, in combination with it's {{Celestial Bureaucracy}}, has at times been viewed as this.

* The philosopher David Hume, in his ''Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion'', wrote: ""The world is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died". He was not proposing the hypothesis seriously, but using it as a parody of theological arguments that tried to prove the perfection of God from the perfection of the natural world.

Might also deserve a separate trope to describe a world with design errors, independent of its creator. [[AC:Beta Test World]] maybe?

* Oh God! and its sequel portray God more or less in this way.

* the 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 during the film, and with the universe in general. The bandits are in possession of a map that shows where all of the "holes" are in the fabric of the universe, which drives the whole story.

->Daryl: Do you think God knew what He was doing when He created woman? Huh? No shit. I really wanna know. Or do you think it was another one of His minor mistakes like tidal waves, earthquakes, FLOODS? You think women are like that? S'matter? You don't think God makes mistakes? Of course He does. We ALL make mistakes. Of course, when WE make mistakes they call it evil. When GOD makes mistakes, they call it "nature". So whaddya think? Women... a mistake, or did he do it to us ON PURPOSE?

** Although that last bit is very often associated with this trope. Gods apparently hate to admit that they messed up when most people will let them off the hook with a mumbled "..Exactly as I planned.. no, really, I'm always right..."

* One of the {{Myst}} novels contained one of these, an island in a universe in a book which was slowly shrinking and disintegrating due to a thermodynamics problem inherent in it's design.
* In Terry Pratchett's Nation, the people of the eponymous nation have a creation myth saying that this world is just God's first attempt, and that now he's off somewhere creating a better world using the lessons he learned from his mistakes with this one.
* Tom Holt's Here Comes the Sun features a Celestial Bureaucracy and a very hands-off God, and says that the world went wrong very early on due to the incompetence of one of the bureaucracy's employees. The heroine thinks she could have done better, and gets a chance to prove it.

** I had not on the first reading of that series tried to reconcile the Question ([[spoiler:What do you get if you multiply six by nine?]]) and the Answer, which is as everyone knows, [[spoiler:Fourty-Two]]. Which sort've makes the whole series fit this trope even better...

* {{Misfile}}'s filing system, in combination with it's {{Celestial Bureaucracy}}, has at times been viewed as this.

* {{World Tree RPG}}: The Khytsoyis. "I lost track of time, so i'm going to grab up a violent monster I was designing, one that was actually designed to work as a duo with another monster in fact, and make it my Designated Player Character Race!" One of the other gods in the setting took time out to help said god create another PC race which was more appropriate, but they didn't undo the original issue.

* The philosopher David Hume, in his ''Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion'', wrote: ""The world is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died". He was not proposing the hypothesis seriously, but using it as a parody of theological arguments that tried to prove the perfection of God from the perfection of the natural world.

The philosopher David Hume, in his ''Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion'', wrote: ""The world is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died". He was not proposing the hypothesis seriously, but using it as a parody of theological arguments that tried to prove the perfection of God from the perfection of the natural world.

* ''{{GURPS}} Cabal''. Before the Creation, God made a "first draft" of the universe as a test. He then destroyed it and remade it as the universe we know today. The Qlippoth are the remaining fragments of the 1st Creation. Their intent is to remake the universe over in their diseased, broken, toxic image.

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