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

The Bible makes it clear from beginning to end that God is anything but good.

Yep, far from it. A god that was merely good would just be a big half-assed idol.

Hello Bluejay, Thank you. Thats quite ok. I do it myself sometimes to help another clarify their thoughts on a subject. I hope you can help me to clarify mine. The verse I had in mind about this point is Genesis 1:26 'Then God said, "let us make man in our image, in our likeness..."'. I read this as God referring to himself in the trinity. I also vaguely remember another verse talking about the love within the trinity, though I cannot find it just now. Perhapps you could help? This whole topic is a grey area to me so please bear with me as I blunder through it, learning as I go. It looks to me that love already existed within the trinity, and because of this love He/they created us. The depth of this love is revealed in Jesus, as God forsaw our need to be saved from our sins, and so had already planned to die for us before we had even been created. No. I was trying to present the idea that God created the world for our benefit, and to share a whole lot of good stuff with us. I do not think we can give anything to God that he does not already have. Even us praising God is seemingly for our own benefit, not Gods. For our benefit. To reveal Gods power. 'For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.' (Romans 1:20) It appears that God's creation as a whole can also reveal to us that He actually exists. I could also suggest that the created world is also an extention of God's revealed laws, in that we are condemned by the created world, if we deny that it reveals God. This is perhapps similar to the question in post 12. I'm reluctant to give a short answer to this as it would not do such an important question justice. However I will try and examine one aspect of it.God does not make bad things. Consider one of mans discoveries such as nuclear power. Nuclear energy is not of itself moral or imoral. It can be used for good purposes, but also for bad. The same can be said for just about anything. Sex is a good thing, but some people can try and obtain this good thing in a bad way, such as in rape. If God were to not create anything that could possibly be used in a bad way, then there would probably not have been a creation at all.Also, you perhapps present punishment for disobedience as being a bad thing? The Bible indicates that if God punishes you, to be glad, as it shows that He loves us. If a parent allowed their child to play on a busy road, you would perhapps consider them uncaring. A Loving parent may severely punish their child for playing on the road, because they know that their punishment is not likely to kill their child, but their hope is to prevent their childs death.

In this you would be wrong: the question has not been answered.If you could I would be in your debt. I do want an answer to this question.Edited by Larni, : cut and paste

I see your point but would it not be better for the clay if Yahweh did not imbue the clay with the ability to suffer?

Wouldn't it have been better for Hamlet if Shakespeare had let him win a few, and go on raiding Britannia and marrying witch-queens and so forth for years and years thereafterward the way Amlethus does? Or would it?Do you worry one moment about all the terrible suffering that sometimes happens in dreams? Or do you stretch yourself, and say Hmm, wonder what that was really about?. . . If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear. -- Puck To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep! perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?-- Hamlet Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.-- Prospero A play there is, my lord, some ten words long,
Which is as brief as I have known a play;
But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,
Which makes it tedious; for in all the play
There is not one word apt, one player fitted:
And tragical, my noble lord, it is;
For Pyramus therein doth kill himself.
Which, when I saw rehearsed, I must confess,
Made mine eyes water; but more merry tears
The passion of loud laughter never shed.-- Philostrate

You are comparing the trials of people in a play to the real people in the real world?How does this in anyway address my point? It certainly makes history more interesting for the scholar for people to have had blood drenched, dramatic lives but that can't be your meaning, surely; that Yahweh puts so many people through misery to make it entertaining? Again, I can only assume you mean that our lives are as but a dream to Yahweh.This is of course false insofar as we (humans) are not dreams in any way that matters to us as individuals.We bleed and suffer at the behest of Yahweh.The (still) unanswered question is why? Either he is a deliberate bastard or he does not care for the suffering of individuals.

Yes. (With a minor quibble about the word "real") One important version or teaching-tool of this model, is that the secret "real" author of the Bible (in some sense) is also the secret "real" author of our own spacetime (in some sense.) This puts us in the position of a character in a Stephen King novel in which other King novels exist at the local bookstore. If we were to go and read Salem's Lot, or even just catch that terrible 70's made-for-tv movie of it on late night cable somewhere, we would know to stay the hell away from New England. In the same way, if we read the Bible, we know we need to get as far away from the Middle East as possible, something called "the New World" ought to sound pretty appealing. And if we do meet God anyway, or any of his representatives, we know that they are vulnerable to nails and crosses. Strike quick and strike hard! Not just entertaining, inspiring, educational, noble, beautiful, and terrible. Not just to him, to us. I'm sure you have suffered in life; not much maybe, compared to the untold millions, but enough to understand this. When your suffering was done, were you not happy? And was that happiness not totally out of scale compared to the dull peace and contentment that you might have had before the troubles began?It is common in our modern cow-to-the-slaughter existence to think of happiness as a synonym for mere pleasure. But this is false, real happiness is something far better than a mere lack of pain. As Nietzche tells us, happiness is the feeling that strength increases as resistance is overcome. That means, not peace at all but war; not contentment, but rather more striving.The man who eats an expensive lobster at a fancy restaraunt is content, perhaps even pleased if his pleasure centers even work after so much dullness; the man who fights his way through the storm to his traps, and finds that this time he has actually caught enough to be able to eat one for himself and still make enough money to support his family, and manages to only get clawed once or twice in the cleaning and boiling process, and licks his wounds and settles down to enjoy his meal, is happy. Not according to the model that we are discussing here. Our lives in spacetime are similar to a plane, across which we spread for a certain prelimary period. When that period is over, the base we have made for ourself begins to expand upward into eternity, Everything we made of ourself in this life (or more likely, these lives) trails along behind us as we proceed to grow outward. All these minor "sufferings" we thought were so awful when they were our main concern, have become the callouses that keep us from falling over into the abyss.The pitiful troubles of this year are accomplishments next year. The silly things the clay was concerned about are key strengths of the pot. What the caterpillar thinks is the end of the world, the world receives as a butterfly. What would make this an either/or situation? He is rather clear about this, he is the most cold-blooded bastard in all eternity, a real genocidal spirit king. And he is doing it deliberately, for a reason, with the highest level of premeditation we can imagine.But beyond that, his view of "the suffering of individuals" is so different from ours, that he did not hesitate to enter into that suffering himself, and make it a part of his own eternal nature. Whatsoever any one has done to the least of these, has happened to him, by his own intention, from the beginning.He laughs in the face of our suffering, and says "Please, sir! May I have another!" And his advice for us is to learn to do the same.

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.

Hello Bluejay, Sorry about that. I sometimes tend to compartmentalise different aspects of an idea. However when I wrote "God created the world for our benefit", I assumed it would be self evident that this was because of His love. My bad for assuming this. This is the danger of trying to write a one sentence summation. I've tried to keep my posts short for ease of reading, but also tried to make it clear that there is always much more to each point. I know, this does seem a bit wierd. All I can put it down to is that God, having such an intellect, could already forsee us down to every last detail, even before creating us. So perhapps for him, with this ability, He could have love for us before creating us.This also brings to mind what is the definition of love anyway. We mostly talk of it as a feeling, an emotion, a chemical reaction that takes place within us when we see a fine specimen of the opposite sex. But it also appears to be a choice and involves sacrifice. To love someone in this sense would mean first making a choice to love them, even if they reject you. This kind of love involves actions. Have you heard this before; 'he says he loves me but he never washes the dishes'. So when saying that God created us out of love, it could mean that He decided to create beings which He chose to give his love too, and sacrifice Himself for. Creating us to be an object of His love. Why? What I hear you saying, is that if given an answer which you personally have difficulty accepting, it just can't be the correct one. Will you keep on asking the same question until you get an answer you like? Or will you read the Bible to see if this really is what it appears to say? Don't get me wrong, I'm not chastising you here. I have also asked this very question in a pit of pain & dispair, wondering if 'LOVE' was really worth all the anguish, pain, wars, misery that has gone on since the fall of Adam. I Wondered that surely God could have done it better or differently. But when I read the story of Job and God's answer to him, that I speak with 'words without knowledge', I keep being brought back to the same answer, 'LOVE'.

Hi I am new hereIf I had to answer that question personally I would say because Man made God in his image.

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.

And very angry that I had to suffer. No idea what you mean, here. Then having pain inflicted by Yahweh to high light the contrast is pointless. Agreed; the child born with AIDs who dies at 2 years old has had the wonderful opportunity to strive heroically (in agony).That is in no way cool for Yahweh to do, is it? Rubbish.This is what rich pampered people tell themselves to assuage there moral conscience. If your trapper had less time slogging and more free time he would have an opportunity to help others.A better feeling of happiness, I think. You honestly believe that being born with AIDs (par example) is 'pitiful'? Sure; adversity helps build character but not in these situation. What has the hole in the heart baby who dies at 3 months learn? But he does so because he chooses too. He deliberately chooses to put people through misery when he does not need to. So he tortures himself and others even when he does not need too because he's a godStraying from the point: he can torture himself all he likes but he does not need to torture babies, can't you see that he could achieve all of his aims with a hand wave. He chooses to put people through misery and xians lap it up.

Hello Larni,I must say that I am surprised that nobody has tackled this question yet. However after doing some research I can see why. Any answer I attempt will perhapps not be satisfactory to a non beleiver. Even Christians struggle with the problem of evil. There is no one sentence answer as there are many aspects to this question that we could examine. I can only hope that you may see the forrest after I've attempted to described all the trees.I havn't formulated a coherent explanation as yet, just a jumble of thoughts for topics to discuss. So I'll give you what I've got so far and let the chips fall where they may.DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL;-Is physical pain a bad thing? - Re Phillip Yancey book 'where is God when it hurts'.-Article: The Atheist Professor - Evil is just the abscence of good/god, like darkness being just the abscence of light.-Book of Job - Our pain, comfort, safety, does not appear high on God's list of priorities. Faith seems to top the list. Therefore the elimination of evil may not be God's
no.1 priority.-Free will V's evil - free will enables evil to occur. God created us with free will. God forsaw this evil yet created anyhow. Is it possible for us to understand the importance of obedience without experiencing evil? If God attempted to explain why death is the consequence of sin to Adam, could he have understood it? Because evil at that point would have been like an abstract concept to Adam. You may tell your child 'don't touch that, it's hot & will burn you', but would your child understand what 'hot' and 'burn' mean until they disobey you & experience it for themself. Adam chose to disobey God & discover for himself 'the knowledge of good and evil', and so most of the evil in this world occurs because of this.-Is it not possible for a loving God to remain loving while allowing evil to exist?-Is it possible for a loving God to use evil to acheive his goals?-Are we determining what is evil, and then accusing God of evil by our standards?That will do for now.

Nothing to see hereEdited by Larni, : No reason given.