The biggest problem in my opinion is not whether some supernatural event could take place.(e.g. that a population could be subject to an external godlike being able to alter the rules of their world, is possible, for example individuals unaware of being in a simulation.), but the contorted reasoning behind performing a limited set of supernatural acts in the distant past instead of in modern times for an omniscient being.
Say, the crucifixion. It would likely have not been too much trouble to delay that by two thousand years(After all the people in the tens of thousands of preceding years had no problem waiting.), while one might mention prophecies omniscience could've easily allowed prophecies to be made taking this delay into account. The fake present day "jesus man" preacher guy is gaining tons of followers, a REAL present day Jesus would've shocked the world to its foundation(There are plenty of places for such a Jesus to get killed, like north korea, or some states.). But most importantly thanks to modern technology the documentation of his existence and miracles, had it happened in the present day, would have been all but irrefutable, and it would have provided rational open minded people with really convincing evidence. As it stands placing the crucifixion in the distant past, is a major blunder, most rational open minded individuals will be driven by the evidence to seriously doubt or entirely dismiss it. Assuming humanity is not going to die in the near term, that means the future of such a religion is bleak indeed.
In other words,
The problem with God acting miraculously through the early periods in history is simply that as described it would take a very contorted or convoluted reasoning to arrive at performing the rare miracles in such a distant past. If God is going to be fairly strict with his sprinkling of miracles, and if he hopes to convince most people....
it stands to reason that given omniscience if one is going to be very very strict in the sprinkling of miracles, which will provide the foundation for the only text that is supposed to establish the one-to-one relationship with each individual human, one would wait to perform such miracles until technology had progressed enough to document them and spread their word widely.
As stands it is unlikely most of post-humanity will take these wild tales seriously and virtually every religion will die out in the future, or become nothing more than something followed by some small irrelevant group(ala, amish).
Looking at it from a rational point of view the idea that god would have virtually zero contact with humans for countless tens of thousands of years, and start a small magical adventure near the advent of writing, stopping too early for technological documentation to be truly viable, is a bit difficult to swallow. After waiting countless thousands of years he said, wowzers writing's been invented lets perform the few scant miracles I'll ever perform, no reason to wait any more(after waiting tens of thousands of years to start this magical opera). Sure there's no means of distinguishing them from hallucinations, madness, etc but the omniscient superintelligence does not see that such will bring problems in the coming centuries. How can someone who knows the technology that would be available in say the 20th century, decide to waste the only few acts that could serve as evidence by not waiting for the technological documenting means to be available, if he waited for writing why not for modern tech?
If one supposes such god is, that act leads to an almost paradoxical answer, either god wanted the miracles to be nothing but obscure jokes that would not provide any real evidence or he was ignorant or malicious in providing the supposed evidence in such obscure form. The most reasonable conclusion is that a god with such contorted internal logic does not exist.
Edited by Cameron, 01 October 2010 - 03:11 AM.
