The Gospel according to Bruce

On and on, just one violent and stupid parlor trick after another. In this, Bruce shows himself to be very much like the God of the Bible. No substance, all parlor tricks.

Bruce's inability to do what he wants demonstrates how limited God's powers are. Here are two examples :

* If Bruce was all-knowing, he would have known instantly, when he pulled that moon down, that millions of innocents would be killed. And yet he didn't figure this out. So either he is not all-knowing, or he is not all-benevolent.

Either way, he committed mass murder so that he could have a better-looking sky to kiss his girlfriend to. Just as God wiping out the Earth and all its inhabitants because he's pissed off and wants to start over again, this demonstrates at least callousness on a cosmic scale.

* Bruce, through answering people's prayers, causes a million people to win the lottery, but all they win is 17$ each.

Grace: Debbie won the lottery.
Bruce: Really?
Grace: Yeah, well, she and about 400,000 other people so she only won 17 bucks.

So once again Bruce, imbued with God's powers, was really really stupid. He doesn't even have the excuse of being evil this time, since he truly was attempting to answer people's prayers. So Bruce really doesn't understand that, in order for people to become richer, you need to create more resources, so that money becomes more valuable. Instead of solving poverty by creating those resources, Bruce thinks like a really stupid human. So he cannot be all-knowing.

When Bruce commits these mistakes, he cannot go back in time to correct them. It seems that God's powers are very much bound by natural law and time. Neither God nor Bruce as shown to transcend anything: there is no evidence that God is anything but a material being.

Bruce: Okay, prayer beads, 'God, please give me a sign.'
[Truck with Danger signs passes him]

This is all God can do. Make a truck pass by. He cannot communicate with humans, except by choosing Bruce for special treatment.

Which brings us to the "sob story" theodicy. Obviously the makers of Bruce Almighty thought this was a profound addition to the Problem of Evil. This theodicy can be expressed in the following way:

1. Human and natural evil exists. But...
2. God

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