What was God’s plan behind Creation and why does he need one?

Hi, Minority Report.A belated welcome to EvC, by the way! So, I'm a lifelong Christian, and I've spent a lot of time trying to understand some of the ideas of what makes God God and the logical ramifications of Godhood. Forgive me while I play Devil's advocate.Honestly, there seems to be something very big missing from this idea that God created the universe because He wanted to share His love.Why would He experience love?
Before He created man, there was nobody else for Him to love.
It seems like you're suggesting that God was wired for something that wasn't appropriate for His situation. And, because of that, He had a pressing need to fill a void in His existence.
But, how could God have a void in His existence?
This sounds more like we're extrapolating our own situation onto God (i.e. we're making God in our image, rather than having God make us in His).----- But, God created lots of mindless machines, didn't He?
Rocks, planets, watersheds, atmospheres... why did He make these?----- Didn't God create all those bad things, too, though?That's the real complaint I think: why make something bad, and then make a bunch of rules to protect us from it, and punish us for not following the rules? Why not just not make the bad thing in the first place?-----To me, the only rational explanations for God's behavior would be:1. He is just a cog in the machine Himself, allbeit a bigger and more important cog than we are.2. God's reasons have nothing to do with human emotions.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Minority Report. Your original point was about His motivation for acting in our benefit. You said He had a reason for acting in our benefit (i.e. He loves us).You no longer included that dimension in this iteration of your point.I could understand love as the reason for His helping us after we were created.
But, to say that He created us out of love for us seems a bit contradictory.Surely there had to be a different motivation for our creation?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Minority Report. Okay, that's not even close to the question I'm asking. In fact, really only one line in your entire post addressed anything I said. And, that's this one: I'm certain that there's some "pulling yourself up by your own shoelaces" going on here, but I can't quite get my finger on it.----- I'm quite certain that the Bible does not say that God created us because He loved us. In fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any mention of any motive for Creation in the Bible.-----I would also like to address a point in your earlier post that I skipped last time. You said: You’re confining your thinking within the reality we know. But, what we’re talking about is the Creation of that reality. There is no reason to think that an omnipotent God couldn’t have made reality such that things could only accomplish good purposes. So, even if He didn’t directly make bad things, He did make reality in such a way as to allow bad things.You can’t avoid that by referring to the consequences of the mechanics of the reality God chose to create.----- You’re not seeing the big picture here. The dangers from which punishment is meant to protect us were also created (or at least made possible) by God. So, a more appropriate analogy is a parent intentionally building a busy road outside of her home, then punishing her child for playing on it. Any outsider would rightly call that person an idiot for building that busy road there in the first place, and a cruel monster for punishing her child for the consequences.That’s what the complaint is. There are a large number of circularities in the way we rationalize our existence and relationship with God.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Minority Report. Would it even matter if God hadn't made it necessary for us to understand obedience?What's so important about obedience, anyway?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Iblis. So, you believe that not even God can get something for nothing? That God's creative process also follows the restrictions of the physical laws that govern our universe?I suspect that I believe the same (but only time will really tell).I think you'll need to acknowledge, however, that your opinion and mine is very much in the minority among Christians in general, so argumentation against a god whose hand-waving could make a pot without clay is, in general, not a strawman.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Iblis. Meh. Semantics. "Believe" is just shorthand to me.----- First off, freedom and free will are not the same thing.
Free will is the fundamental capacity to act without prior causation.
Freedom is the relative lack of external input into the permissivity of various actions.Free will deals with causation.
Freedom deals with consequences.Second, I don't think human behavior is as capricious as you assert.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Minority Report. I'm not worried about the contradiction between God's love and the existence of evil. I don't personally have an opinion as to whether there is a contradiction there.My confusion is dealing with the reason for making it at all. Indeed, why make a universe of any configuration (all good, all bad, good-and-bad, etc.)?You either have to assume that good and bad were already there, and that God is therefore not the source or authoritative arbiter of either good or bad; or that they weren’t, and that God’s reasons for doing things were therefore not influenced by good (including love) or bad.You can’t have it both ways.----- This rhetorical question assumes that there has to be a tradeoff. Why do you assume that?Is duality the inherent nature of everything?
That is, does everything have to have bad points in order to have good points?
Does God have to have bad points in order to have good points?
If not, why do His creations have to have bad points in order to have good points?----- And this is, for me personally, perhaps the most sensitive religious topic of all.The type of people God wants to share eternity with, as described in the scriptures, are the type who blindly do whatever He tells them to, assume that He’s always right about everything, and never stop telling Him how great He is.Why would He want to share eternity with that type of people?
More to the point: Why would I want to be that type of person? And, why would I want to share eternity with the type of god that wants to share eternity with that type of person?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Minority Report. Quick thought on this: judging by the observation that God's commandments usually take the form of what not to do, it seems a bit more likely that God defines good as the absence of evil, rather than evil as the absence of good.----- "Comfort" was only one of three things Larni listed. How do you know comfort was #1 on his list? By the order he listed them, I would have put it at #2, behind "pain."Also, since I happen to know that Larni is in a medical profession, where the word "comfort" doesn't really have the self-indulgent connotation that we laypersons think of, I might have chosen to interpret that word under a slightly different context.Granted, this is just a little nit-picky, but I thought it might help communication a little bit.----- Talking pillows? Larni might be able to prescribe a pill for that.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, MR. I know the feeling. I was born with that weakness myself.Just take whatever time you need to reply to my unconventional religious views and thought-exercises. I'm just pushing to get to the crux of the matter, but I'll back off for awhile, since you've got your hands full already.Good day.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Iano. This is just an assertion!

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, MR. Here's a series of questions relating to this concept that I've toyed with before:What was His reason for creating good and bad in the first place?Furthermore, what was He like "before" He created good and bad? Was He capable of doing good?Could His creation of good and bad change Him in some way such that He was now "good" instead of "neutral"? Did it suddenly empower Him to do "good"? Why couldn't He do it before?Furthermore, isn't it written that He is always unchanging (Hebrews 13:8, Malachi 3:6)? So, how could He love us now if He was around "before" love existed? Doesn't that imply some kind of change?Edited by Bluejay, : Subtitle grammar

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Peg. Honestly, Peg, Message 73 (which I assume is what you’re referring to here) is just a list of random scriptures. I don’t think any one of the verses you quoted in that message has any relevance at all to the topic at hand---which is, Why did God create life?---or with the subtopic, Why is there evil/bad?This isn’t just a question of whether or not it’s all going to work out in the end, or whether or not we chose to do evil on our own: it’s a question of why we even exist at all, and why our existence is configured the way it is.You can’t get at this by expounding on biblical eschatology. You have to turn your mind to the point at which God made life and ask what was His motivation for doing so? To do this, you have to contemplate what was happening at that time, what the universe was like, and how God related to it.

• Was there already good and bad back then? Did God experience them?
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• Why did He choose to make a universe at all? Once He did, what made Him decide on this configuration?
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• Could He have made a successful, working universe that functioned on entirely different principles?
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• If so, was His choice to do it this way (free will, suffering, rules about "good" and "bad," etc.) arbitrary? Or, is this configuration superior in some way to other possibilities? What makes this way superior, and how do we judge superiority, anyway?
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• If not, what was preventing Him from doing things differently, and why/how was it preventing Him?

This is not a simple question! You cannot just sweep away Larni’s questions as the product of a biased, anti-Christian worldview! They are legitimate and important questions with huge metaphysical/theological implications!You do it a massive disservice by pretending that it’s simply a matter of whether or not it results in your eternal happiness.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, MR.Just so you know, I think you're doing well keeping up with all the stuff you have to deal with, and you're also not sloppy: these are two attributes that rarely coincide in one poster.Keep replying on your schedule. What do you mean by "they may be derived from God's innate character"?
Both good and bad derive from God’s innate character?----- This is fine for describing personality characteristics and actions. But, it doesn’t work for anything else. As an example, help me place these things on the spectrum of with/against God’s character: If these things are either neutral or of God’s character, why do we dislike them so much? Couldn’t God have made people who don’t strongly dislike neutral or good things?If these things are opposite to God’s character, why did He make them? Or, since you wrote, God can only ever do good things, how did God make these things?While answering these questions, keep this verse in mind:

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Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

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-John 1:3

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So, the options for the origin of any particular entity or object are, (1) God made them; (2) they were not made, and thus, always existed.----- We established that love is good, didn’t we? Remember the options? The options about the origin of good (and, thus, the origin of love) are (1) God made it; (2) it was not made and God somehow came to possess it.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, MR. It's not you... it's just the nature of the beast.I've been talking about stuff I don't understand since my first post on this thread.-----This part is off-topic, but I would like to add one more rhetorical question: I thought this was what you meant: I just wanted to be sure before I continued.In the Bible, God’s character is described, by God Himself, as vengeful (Deuteronomy 32:41; Ezekiel 25:14) and jealous (Exodus 20:5, 34:14; Deuteronomy 5:9). Doesn't this, by your definition, mean that vengeance and jealousy are good, and that forgiveness and charity are bad?So, why does God command us to forgive and not covet? Does He want us to do bad?This is an inherent weakness in defining good and bad in terms of God’s character.----- But, everything that was made was made by God, remember? That’s the verse I quoted:

quote:

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Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

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-John 1:3 (NIV)

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John, at least, thinks God made all these things.What you have added, though, is a potential reason why God made them (i.e. because of our sin).That leads us back in a circle to the main topic: why did He make us? And, why did He make us the way we are, such that we would goof up and need to be punished?I can see curiosity, boredom, or loneliness as being reasons why a being like one of us may want to create life, but these are all feelings that come from something that’s missing. I have a hard time imagining that the God described in the Bible would act out of these emotional considerations. Love goes along with those.Emotionality like that doesn’t make sense in a being like God.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, MR. I don't disagree with or take exception to anything you've said in this portion. Your conclusions would also be mine, based on my reading and understanding of the scriptures, along with the consensus explanation I've heard from teachers and peers in church.My only point of concern with it is that, under this system of interpretation, "good" and "bad" are determined situationally, and not absolutely. Specifically, in the examples you gave, "good" and "bad" are determined based on social considerations. This makes the contract, or the society, between parties the ultimate determiner of "good" and "bad."Basically, this sounds uncomfortably similar to the non-religious notion that "good" and "bad" are subjective terms defined by society.----- I know the feeling: that’s the most popular view in my church.It makes sense, though. In the scientific world (and in the professional world, in general), one’s work must be noticed in order to be successful. I work for an advisor, on whom I rely for training and for introducing my into the scientific community; but, he also relies on me to do good research under his tutelage, to meet his publication quotas and improve the success and notoriety of his lab and research program.In all honesty, I see no problem with this sort of mutualistic relationship: but, we Christians are uncomfortable with attaching such human limitations and social systems to God. However, all indications from the Bible, in my mind, align very strongly with this viewpoint: to God, we are proverbially a means of improving his lab’s productivity, while He is a means of bringing us eternal happiness.It leaves a bit of an uncomfortable feeling, though, doesn’t it?----- I think this comes from a lifetime of indoctrination and glorification of love. In reality, love is as much a dependency as boredom, curiosity and loneliness: it’s just one that we happen to like (curiosity, I think, goes along with love in this way).We don’t like to attach anything we perceive to be bad to something we perceive to be as good and as pure as love. We hold love to be sacrosanct, and, like everything else we deem good, we cannot bring ourselves to say anything bad about it. Basically, we love love. Even reclusive, agoraphobic people like Bluejay cannot get along with it, even for a week during a scientific conference that my wife can’t attend with me.Now, I very strongly love my wife, and, although she does things that I generally think of as bad, annoying or irritating, I don’t see these as bad qualities in her, and they don’t change my love for her. So love essentially has caused me to change myself situationally. Without that, it wouldn’t be love. Not as I understand the term, anyway.Thus, I don’t understand how this emotional construct, more than any other, could apply to God: it is a dependency, and involves a personal change, both of which are incompatible with the traditional view of God. So, if God loves, and if He creates because of love, then love must refer to something I have never felt (a possibility that I am not ready to reject yet, but an uncomfortable one anyway).Either that, or God is not the superlative being we have made Him out to be, but is much more human than we realize.-----This has been an interesting discussion. Thanks, MR.Edited by Bluejay, : No reason given.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.