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

Hello Larni, Not sure what you mean here. Please explain?

When it is pointless, yes. When it is helpful to the survival of the organism, no. Unfortunately this is an unsupported assertion. As we can never measure the existence of Yahweh (I assume that's the god you mean) we can never measure the affects of his absence. I have no qualms with this. It does however strongly imply that Yahweh does not love us as individuals. It also implies he needs faith. If Yahweh is all powerful he does not (strictly speaking) need faith. He just wants it. If he is all powerful he is able to fulfil his requirement without subjecting humans to distress.If he is not all powerful, why not? What places limits on him and relegates him to simply a super being? Yes. In the same way I could bring up my child to be dutiful without acting in an evil way towards him or her. My mother and father were never evil towards me and I turned out fine (ish). If Adam could understand cause and effect (which most humans can after the age of about 3) then he would have understood. Again, once they understand cause and effect the child will understand. The child may not act in it's best interest but it does understand. Why Yahweh should punish all humanity for one man's error is simply beyond reason. No. Unless he is not all powerful, then he may have no choice but to suffer evil existing in the world. If it is possible but he should choose not to if he actually does love us. Children can be disciplined without punishment as any good psychologist will tell you. Of course we are. What other standards matter to us when it is used as a measure of distress caused to us by Yahweh? That's cool. Always nice to talk to someone will to take their time rather than preach at me

I had posted a reminder for you but when I posted you had posted your post and so my post was no longer needed.We can't totally delete posts here so I deleted the content (as it was now irrelevant), sorry for any confusion.

I want to argue with you about your idea that all that out there was created to impress us. Please don't be alarmed, I see that you are taking a tentative approach to these questions, and I see that as a sign of wisdom.But I think that this idea shows a confusion on your part between use and purpose. A gun, for example, may be used to rob a bank, salute a fallen comrade, compete in sport, break up angry mobs, frighten off potential threats, open locked doors, or even crack a nut. But its purpose is to kill the living.In much the same way, in Job we see the wonders of creation used to impress a miserable and disturbed person who may be in danger of losing faith. But even there, we do not get the impression that this is their actual purpose. A good analogy for this story might be the father who takes a day off work to help cheer up his sick child. During this visit he talks a lot about what he does all day usually and how exciting and interesting it all is. This does succeed in impressing and entertaining the kid.But is that its purpose? Is that the real reason he does it? In one sense maybe it is, he works to support his family. But that is not why he does the specific things he does, simply why he works so hard at it maybe. He follows the particular vocation he has chosen, because this is what he does. This is what he is interested in, this is where his skills lie, these are things he loves and/or is good at and/or finds profit in.Do you see the difference? God makes black holes and quasars and dinosaurs and bumblebees for reasons that we are hardly likely to be able to understand at this point. We barely have a hope of understanding why he has made us, even at our smartest, as Larni is demonstrating profusely. But I think we can be sure that these things have a purpose for him that is well beyond any nonsense about their incidental value to us thus far.It is hard enough to argue against people intent on attacking "straw man" arguments like a god who could just wave his hands and make pots without torturing the clay, without feeding them egotistical concepts like a God who makes creation for creatures, to mock too. Sure it all fits together, sure that is one use, but you know, most of the theme of Job is about us not having the slightest clue what he is really up to.

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.

LOL, I'm just arguing the model. Stop believing things, start understanding what they mean and where they go and where they stop. Don't need to go that far yet, even. Half this argument is about a God who has free will in the same sense that we do. Isn't that clearly nonsense? Our alleged "free will" is really a mass of contradictory impulses, whims that pull us to and fro, the exact opposite of any real freedom. Our decisions are made over time, and in a state of ignorance. Though God can relate to this condition, having apparently submitted to it in one aspect of his great and eternal repentance, and use it as a model to help us understand, you must also understand that it doesn't really describe him properly.He already knows our future. He already knows what he is going to do. He knows his own nature and affirms it. He has no real alternative to doing what he does. He knows it, he is it, he cannot be or do otherwise. He creates both good and evil, with every move he makes. You are going to arrive at this state yourself, when you become "spiritually mature." The minor decisions you are making now, are the substance out of which this eternal nature is being made.

Hello Bluejay, I'm sorry if I've misunderstood you. But I can't figure out how I've done so. I was responding to your question; By first challenging you why love was not an acceptable reason, and then secondly admitting that I have also questioned this conclusion due to the problem of evil, but that ultimately this is the only answer I kept comming too.I know your concern is with the logic of how God could love us before we existed. My concern is that you may have rejected love as a possibility, because 'You’re confining your thinking within the reality we know'. I agree. Which is why I've only tried to suggest this as what I think to be the reason. However, though the Bible might not state it explicitly (I'll have to check on this), I think that it can be deduced, and that it is implied. God could have perhapps made many different versions. But would they acheive the goals that He wanted to acheive? Are there many possible ways to acheive the same exacting goals, or is there only one possible reality that could acheive this? This is really all just speculative. We ultimately have to trust that God knows more than we do about creating realities, and that He created our current one the way He did for very good reasons.If God did created a world where nothing bad ever happened, would there ever be such a thing as 'good' in that world? This makes me think of the end times when all believers are called to God & then spend an eternity in fellowship with Him. In that reality there will apparently be no tears or evil, but I guess we might still retain some memory of this world & evil for comparrison. (When I wrote that 'God does not make bad things', I had in mind God's summation of all that He had made, that it was 'very good'.)Yes you are right. God created this reality knowing it would allow evil things to occur. Car manufacturers make cars capable of breaking speed limits, but when one is caught speeding, who is fined, the driver or the manufacturer. Would you suggest that if they could, car manufacturers should make cars that cannot ever speed? What you are suggesting is the removal/controll of anything that we could abuse, therefore eliminating any temptation to sin. If we are physically prevented from being able to sin, does this make us better people, the type of people God wants to share eternity with?

Hi MR I know you said in your first post that you're unsure exactly what the purpose of our creation was, but why do we have to "trust that God knows more than we do about creating realities, and that He created our current one the way He did for very good reasons"?To reflect on a previous topic I raised about why God is a second rate creator, wouldn't a better creator have made the purpose perfectly clear? Couldn't the average human being make a purpose patently clear? Why is it so hard for the all-powerful creator to do so? If the purpose is obscure to us, then why didn't the creator make us in such a way that it is not obsure?

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 Bluejay I share your above view entirely.It's been interesting to see how this discussion on my topic of "what was God's plan?" has centred on the question of morality (i.e. good v evil).It reflects back on the point I made in my OP about how odd it would be if we made a new species solely for the purpose of following certain rules, and then got upset with that species (rather than with ourselves) if it failed to do so.If the plan behind our alleged creation was to do nothing more than follow pre-established rules, it seems as if creation was a very tedious and uninteresting idea. What might be the plan for our after-life? Do we just get to sit round in a circle and talk about the rules that we had to follow while on Earth?Those long winter nights in Eternity will just fly by!

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Bring on the wall! - Dale Winton

Hello Larni, Yes I agree. But perhapps what appears to be pointless pain from our perspective, might actually have eternal implications. Yes it is hard to imagine what point there could be to 1000's of people dying from a tsunami, but we also cannot see the big picture. What is temporary pain compared with eternal bliss? It was not an unsupported assertion made by me. It was an assertion made in the article 'The atheist professor', which I thought could be a topic which we could discuss. Perhapps you would like to discuss what is evil; is evil the absence of good, or an entity in and of itself?I agree that we may not be able to measure the absence of something, but I still think you can measure (not in a physical scientific sense) the existance of Yahweh (yes thats the one I'm talkin bout), using other methods. But I do not want to get sidetracked on that point. I do not see how relegating our comfort to a lower priority implies that He does not love each one of us. What is it about your comfort that requires it to be God's No.1 priority, in order for you to believe that He loves you? Parents still love their children, even when they don't pander to all their desires. This was not about understanding cause & effect. I was asking how could a child understand what 'hot' is unless they felt heat with their senses. Like how do you explain colours to a person who was born blind, or music to one born deaf. Relating this to evil, if Adam had no concept of it, as he was born (so to speak) into a world where it did not exist, then could God ever explain it to him? Would he ever be able to trust that God had his best interests at heart when requesting his blind obedience? Or was it necessary for adam/us to experience evil, by our own disobedience, before we could trust God?I'm sorry. I'll have to continue this later. The pillow beckons.Edited by Minority Report, : Adding names to quotesEdited by Minority Report, : No reason given.

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.

Zispin (Mirtazapine). You'll be under in 45 minutes