With the revelation that the homeless man was God, Bruce's initial rescue attempt could be a Secret Test of Character; seeing Bruce attempt to protect a man he didn't really know assured God that Bruce wouldn't just abuse his power to hurt others.
Bruce is also a good fit for God in a different way. At the end of the movie, his news phrase changed to "Be the miracle," which everyone said with him. How is he able to spread such a positive message to so many people? Because he's a news reporter!
When Bruce makes the night sky look more romantic, he does things like clear away clouds, and pull the Moon closer. He also puts several more stars in the right spots, and extinguishes others. Without even thinking about it, he just wiped several stars out of existence. Those stars probably had systems of planets around them, some of which may have had life on them...
The moon part at least gets used for a Brick Joke, when one character is flipping through channels and sees a story about "bizarre lunar activity" causing massive changes in the tides in many countries.
You just have to have faith that God would not let entire inhabited planets die for the sake of proving a point to one foolish human.
Was I the only one that noticed the star he wiped out was one he had just created himself? And knowing Bruce's simplistic grasp of the situation, he probably DID just make little dots in the sky, rather than gigantic balls of nuclear fire untold light years away.
Since actually wiping out a star won't change the way the night sky looks until the last light of that star completes the years-long journey to reach Earth, it's almost certain that the changes he made were merely to the incoming light rays. (Omnipotence could be used to reach back a different distance in time to snuff out each undesired star, but that's a lot more work for exactly the same effect.)
Keep in mind this is about the movie and God as he's portrayed in the movie. Whatever your beliefs, the situation in real-life is quite different from this movie.
Bruce replied "YES" to every prayer, resulting in stuff like the Sabres winning the Stanley Cup and hundreds of thousands of people winning the lottery. What would happen if someone else asked for God-like powers? Or wish for an entire race of humans to be wiped out? Bruce's laziness may have wiped out an entire nation of people.
Hell, what about less drastic and noticeable but much more probable malevolent prayers? "God, please give my asshole boss/boyfriend/neighbour an embolism!" How many people did Bruce up killing?!
Are any prayers for such malevolent things during Bruce's brief time filling in for God depicted in the movie? If so that would be a problem, if not it's a hypothetical scenario that never arose, therefore the fears are groundless.
Not directly in the movie, but there are pics of the prayer post-its from the movie floating around online, and one of them is "Please let those corporate bastards burn in Hell".
Minor meta one, but during the classical "If he's God, then I'm Clint Eastwood." bit, it starts out with an unseen gunman shooting at his back windshield. Implying that the real Clint has to deal with people shooting at him on an every day basis.
Maybe it turned him into Bruce's conception of Clint Eastwood rather than the real one.
One of the first uses of Bruce's godlike powers, he used to...pleasure his wife. If what the Bible said is true, the last time someone used that sort of power, it created Jesus. Bruce may have accidentally created the second coming or at the very least conceived a child, permanently endowed with God's powers.
This is based on a huge mountain of unsupported assumptions. The least of which is that he was trying to impregnate her when he was instead just using his new powers to have amazing sex.
Exactly. Bruce was just using his powers to make their sex indescribably...pleasurable. What we saw on screen was Bruce willing Grace to have orgasms. Grace wouldn't get pregnant from being willed to orgasm, she'd get pregnant from Bruce cumming inside her. Grace is probably on the pill (Since in the morning she expresses no concern she might get pregnant, and I can't see God-Bruce wanting to use a condom), and even if not, Bruce would likely use his powers to prevent pregnancy. And even if Grace were to become pregnant, which, with potentially both normal and divine contraception at work, is only happening if Bruce wills it to happen, there's nothing to suggest the baby would be anything other than a normal human, barring any divine gifts Bruce should choose to give it.
Just how many people died due to Bruce using his powers recklessly? Changing the position of the Moon is explicitly mentioned to have caused a tidal wave in Japan, or was there anyone who just happened to be close to the impact point of the meteorite? And finally, what if someone prayed for the death of someone they hated and Bruce answered yes?
Many of the prayers on the post-its can be read online here and here, and one of them is "Please make these corporate bastards burn in Hell".
Well, it's possible that wouldn't happen until they died, and depending on the theological rules at play, unless they were adherents to whatever religion the Film's God represented, that was likely happening eventually anyway. And in such circumstances, God could restore their status Himself once He returned, and if they repented and became His followers, then they were redeemed and all is well.
One of God's rules is that Bruce cannot violate free will. However, that doesn't seem to extend to artificial humans created by Bruce, whom he can just will into existence and made to do whatever he wants, like the Columbian coffee man in the prayer answering scene. If he wants to, he can kill everyone in the world and replace them all with identical people that obey his every whim. Though he thankfully never does that, it's a loophole that God just left in there.
a time well-known for brutally executing non-Christians.
and here