Why, God? Why?!

[Godscreated]

I have a question for our Christians:  Why did God create people?   Further, why did he create anything at all?

I scanned the thread and saw several good answers to your question and your follow ups were mostly why does a perfect God have wants/desires and I ask you why you think being perfect eliminates wants/desires. God has existed for an eternity already, meaning He has no beginning (try and get your head around that one) and He will exist for an eternity from now own, meaning He has no ending. God was perfect and is perfect and will always be perfect in all of His will and His nature. It is His nature to love without being limited so in that He has love to give abundantly. We and all His creation receives that love continually because He wants to do it, He never needed to do it and there lies the difference, He wanted to He did not need to. So God created a perfect universe and two perfect people to inhabit this perfect world only to have them screw up the relationship He had with them and then God cursed the rest of creation to match the lost relationship that He had with them before they sinned. There was something God couldn't do in all this, stop loving all people that would be outside His will and why because those who go to an eternal punishment will not receive love from God anymore, this is part of the punishment. Not one person before their death has ever experience a time without God's love, people may not realize it but God loves them no matter who or what they become and live to be. But as AM said only those who accept Christ as their savior become children of God, we are the only ones to experience the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit ie. the triune God. To experience God is to experience all three and the love each have for us. Love is the key to your question use it to unlock some of your questions about God.

GC

[The Grand Nudger]

The love of a being who will abuse me if I fail to love them in return isn't attractive to me in the least.  Besides..he's not even one of the allegedly fiaxable abusers that you tell your friends is just so sweet whenever he's not beating the living shit out of you.  Guys an asshole from sunup to sundown.

[Amarok]

There has not been a single good answer little more the waffling and excuses . Like with everything else Christianity falls massively short of having ant real answers . Only empty dogma .

[Cod]

Hanging on to God the creator makes them feel special, when in actual fact there is nothing at all special about us. I don't think some people can accept the fact that we are just animals scratching out an existence just like any other, and are doomed to the same fate.

Think happy thoughts people.

[LadyForCamus]

I have a question for our Christians:  Why did God create people?   Further, why did he create anything at all?

I scanned the thread and saw several good answers to your question and your follow ups were mostly why does a perfect God have wants/desires and I ask you why you think being perfect eliminates wants/desires. God has existed for an eternity already, meaning He has no beginning (try and get your head around that one) and He will exist for an eternity from now own, meaning He has no ending. God was perfect and is perfect and will always be perfect in all of His will and His nature. It is His nature to love without being limited so in that He has love to give abundantly. We and all His creation receives that love continually because He wants to do it, He never needed to do it and there lies the difference, He wanted to He did not need to. So God created a perfect universe and two perfect people to inhabit this perfect world only to have them screw up the relationship He had with them and then God cursed the rest of creation to match the lost relationship that He had with them before they sinned. There was something God couldn't do in all this, stop loving all people that would be outside His will and why because those who go to an eternal punishment will not receive love from God anymore, this is part of the punishment. Not one person before their death has ever experience a time without God's love, people may not realize it but God loves them no matter who or what they become and live to be. But as AM said only those who accept Christ as their savior become children of God, we are the only ones to experience the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit ie. the triune God. To experience God is to experience all three and the love each have for us. Love is the key to your question use it to unlock some of your questions about God.

GC

The problem that I see with this thread topic in hindsight, is that our resident theists are not in shared agreement on god’s attributes.  If, according to some of you, god is perfectly whole and self-fulfilling, then the distinction between a want and a need is irrelevant.  A whole, complete, perfect and self-fulfilling entity shouldn’t experience desire, because it should already have everything within itself.  

On the other hand, (to bring you guys back to Jor’s thoughtful response that no Theist has taken a crack at yet) if god is NOT complete, whole and self-fulfilling, and can experience needs and wants the same as humans do, where do those desires come from, and why does he experience them?  Of what value are they to a perfect god?

[vulcanlogician]

I think Khemikal has the right of it.

When we look at things like wants and desires, the things we value and the things we don't, there exists a material explanation in our origin as biological beings.  We evolved to have wants and desires and goals and values.  We hunger for food when it is necessary that we eat because if we didn't eat, we would die.  Evolution only preserves those solutions which are self-justifying.  Those animals that didn't get hungry and eat, they died, leaving the world to those that did.  Our wants and desires exist in us and other animals because if they didn't, those animals would be replaced in the gene pool by those that did.  So evolution provides a material explanation for both why we have wants, generally, and also why we have the specific wants and values that we do.  What explains why God has these specific wants, desires, goals, and values?

It's important to take a closer look at how our biology influences our psychology to underscore just how strange it is that an immaterial spirit would have a similar psychology.  For example, as a species, we depend upon one another for the success of the group.  We prosper as a species because we depend upon, and support, each others effort to live, succeed and breed.  We are a social species.  We live in groups, not as solitary individuals.  That has implications for our psychology.  We will have wants that prod us to engage in social behaviors.  We interact with one another because doing so is the ecological niche that we occupy as a species.  Why is God a social being?  It's not clear.

We are a sexual species, in that we are divided into male and female, and the interaction of the two is necessary for our species survival.  One might dismiss it as a mere artifact, but God has always been described as sexed.  He is a he, not a she.  A father, rather than a mother.  And Jesus certainly was no eunuch.  As theology and apologetics evolve, Christians have tended to distance themselves from such ideas, but they are the history.  In the original time in which these ideas were developed, it was a part of our culture that the male of the species was the head, the leader, the source of authority and power.  This just naturally gravitated to their ideas about God.

A key aspect of our biology is that we have a parent child relationship, and humans tend to engage in long term bonding.  This makes sense because as an animal, we have few offspring, with larger brains, and we invest in that solution to the question of survival by having a prolonged period in which the child is dependent upon the parents.  We didn't have to be this way.  It is our biology which determines that we are.  We could be like the oak tree, that cares not where it's nuts may plant themselves and mature into adult oak trees.  Bacteria reproduce and depart from one another, never to be seen together again.  Many micro-organisms are similar.  The guppy doesn't care for her multitude of young after they are born.  Why is God more like us than like the guppy or the oak tree?  God wants a parent-child relationship with us.  Why?  What is the explanation?  Our biology explains why we are like this.  What is the explanation for God?

What about goals, plans, and values?  Basically these are tools for managing the complexity of our behavioral responses.  They are psychological crutches which help us complete long term actions.  If we want to become an engineer, we become college students and commit to a goal of completing an education.  If we want to live in a house, we develop a plan for sustained effort over time, either to earn enough money or to simply build a house.  Why does God have goals, and more specifically, why does he have the goals he does have?  Why did God choose these particular goals over some others?  Is it just a brute fact of his existence?  That he just "happened" to have these goals and plans and values?  Why?

It's also worth noting how much the definition of God mirrors the assumptions of the era of the men and women who developed our stories and conceptions of him.  I already noted the sexist bias of the original stories and concepts, but there's also the historical concepts of nation states, magic, and divine kingship.  God is described as "our Lord" and Jesus is called the king of the Jews.  This mirrors the political structures of the time, in which ultimate authority and power descended from a king or ruler.  Except in Greece, there was little thought of distributing power equally among members of a society, such as in a democracy.  God is not an egalitarian; he inhabits a specific power structure.  That was also a time when the existence of empires and nations, and the commonplace acceptance of magic -- causing an effect by merely willing it to happen -- were readily accepted.  Thus we have a God who establishes a church and who does impressive feats of magic.  We no longer accept magic as commonplace.  Perhaps if God were re-imagined today, he would be an all encompassing machine.

And the details in which the God of such people as those who wrote the bible extend down to the question of values.  We value life, individual autonomy, family, sex, food, shelter, authority, adulation, loyalty -- many things, all of which can be traced back to our biological nature.  God appears to value many of the same things, which makes sense, as we are made in his image, but it doesn't explain why he values those things in the first place?  Could God have had different values and still be God?  I don't see why not.  If that's the case, then God having the values he does, and mandating them to us, seems rather arbitrary.  God essentially says my way or the highway, despite the fact that there doesn't seem to be any meaningful reason which answers the question of why God's way is in any sense privileged and right.  God's values just seem to have "just happened."  He is the way he is for no particular good reason; he "just is."  

Now one can imagine that there might be multiple explanations for why these facts apply.  One obvious explanation is that God is nothing more than a projection of the minds of mortal men, working in an ignorant age.  They attributed our wants and desires and behaviors to our personhood, to our spirit or soul.  For them, to imagine the ultimate person, God, was simply to take the human template and blow it up to larger proportions.  God becomes everything that a man is, only bigger.  He has all the things that a rational, loving man has, and more.  He's not only powerful, he's uber powerful!  He not only knows stuff, he knows everything!  They were drawing from their imaginations the qualities that they thought exemplified the existence of a perfect soul.  But in this they erred.  They didn't know that many of our psychological traits can be attributed to our material existence as biological beings.  How could they know?  Evolutionary theory and neuroscience were centuries ahead of them in the future.  They imagined a God based upon their assumption of what made a thinking man -- a Logos in the vernacular -- what he was, and simply extrapolated from those errant assumptions.

Now, I'm not saying this is the only possible explanation for why your God has the peculiar psychology that he does have, but the mystery remains.  I don't have an explanation that fits better than the one above, but I'm no longer a theist.  Perhaps I'm overlooking an obvious explanation for why God is the way he is, and I leave it up to you to provide that explanation.  Failing a suitable explanation, God's nature just becomes a brute fact; he isn't the way he is for any particular reason, he could have been different, he "just is" the way he is, as a random and arbitrary fact of existence.  So theists, what's your explanation?

I will also share with you that my concern is not solely motivated by LadyForCamus' question, the subject of God's values has been on my mind for some time.  The typical explanation for why God has the moral values he does is that there exists a right set of moral values, and a wrong set, and it's just a brute fact that God has only the right set of moral values (what these moral values are right with respect to, or in relation to, is never fully explained).  But fine.  It's an article of faith that God is good, and no deviation from that mantra will be tolerated.  Fine, fair enough.  But then we come to the question of God's values.  Surely he has some, any being without values must be forced to depend upon reflex actions to motivate them to do anything, but then God isn't a biological being, so the concept of reflexes doesn't apply.  So there are two questions here.  Why does God have values at all, as they seem to be an artifact of a biological nature, and not something an immaterial spirit would have?  And secondly, if God's specific values are simply a brute fact of his existence, they "just are," doesn't that make them essentially arbitrary and therefore meaningless?  Unlike moral values, there does not appear to be a right and a wrong set of normal values.  Their "rightness" is a consequence of the context, namely what processes and behaviors they facilitate, and in our case, a consequence of evolution that we have them.  So, again; why?

This has prompted me to reformulate the Euthyphro dilemma into a form which seems to target a lacuna in Christian theology.  Namely, what is the foundation of God's values, their explanation, so to speak.  This leads to a new and different dilemma:

"Does God value certain thing because those things are valuable of their own accord, or are certain things valuable because God values them?"

Ultimately, I see this as related to the questions of meaning and purpose.  Our values are the building blocks out of which we create meaning and purpose in our life.  We value having a loving, nurturing relationship with another human being, so we find having and raising children meaningful.  If God's values likewise are the foundation of the meaning and purpose he provides for people's lives, it is essential that we provide some foundation for those values, otherwise they are arbitrary, vacuous, and meaningless.  How can a set of values that are themselves just brute, arbitrary facts of his existence ever serve as the building blocks for truly meaningful lives?  To my view, unless an explanation for God's values is given, it's impossible to derive any meaning based simply on "what he wants and values."  Maybe I've overlooked something, but it appears to me that life under God is as essentially meaningless and without purpose as the supposed lives of non-believers.

I wanted to add my two cents here. It's certainly interesting to ponder why God was portrayed the way he was. As Jor said, "One obvious explanation is that God is nothing more than a projection of the minds of mortal men, working in an ignorant age." If God is to be an authority figure, he must be male--as ancients were less open to the idea of taking orders from a woman--he must be knowledgeable, he must possess tremendous power... in other words, he must possess all the attributes of a worthy leader. (Maybe even "divinity" as such may be interpreted as a human quality in this regard--ie a prerequisite for rulership. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt were not just seen as mere mortals but as divine beings, something which legitimized their power.) 

Why God would have such a host of attributes is a good question. But when God is seen as nothing more than a projection of the best of man's qualities, a plausible answer emerges: God needs to command respect. He cannot be a weak ruler. He must be a king whom his subjects can get behind and rely upon. But then the question remains: Why does God have the particular values he has?

One possible explanation, continuing along the same vein of thinking Jor started, is that people need values. As Nietzsche writes, (paraphrasing, sort of) "If a culture wants to thrive, they must not esteem as their neighbor esteems... whatever makes them rise and rule and triumph and shine to the awe and envy of their neighbors-- that to them is the most high, the most indispensable, and the most worthy." Cultures attain values by necessity, and when they sit down to tell stories to pass the time, they create heroic gods who mirror their highest aspirations and satisfy their deepest needs. A tribe of fisherman might revere a god who carries a fishing spear and who has the power to calm the mighty seas. The tribe of Israel needed a commanding volcano god, who could exert force when necessary and attain vengeance for himself--qualities necessary for a tribe who lives in a hotly-disputed desert region.

"Does God value certain things because those things are valuable of their own accord, or are certain things valuable because God values them?"

The Christians are going to find conflicting responses if they look to their scriptures for guidance here. On the one hand, God created the world and "He saw that it was good." The scriptures don't say that he pronounced it good. This tends to suggest that "goodness" is something separate from God's being, and God, being all-wise, and all-knowing, recognizes that which is good and that which is not good. On the other hand, you have the story of Issac. Is killing one's child good or evil? Well, it depends on what God says. If God tells you to kill your child, then killing your child is good. Obedience to God's commands is the only "true good" according to this way of thinking.

But I hate this latter way of thinking, and so did Plato-- hence his formulation of the Euthyphro dilemma. Put in a different way, god or no god, we can all identify certain things such as murder and rape as bad. Now, as the scriptures certainly reveal, God will command these things of his worshippers from time to time. The question is: does that make them good? The question is not: does God's command make it permissible? Does it make it good? Is there any scenario where even a devout believer would consider something like sadistic rape of a travelling housewife good? Does it even matter if God permits it or not? It's a good question to put to theists: if God were to permit rape, would that therefore make it good? Would it even make it okay? Our intuitions scream "no!" and our faculties of reason can barely scrape together a defense for such a heinous act. Certain things are bad, and we recognize that they are bad, not because of any divine commandment, but because we have good senses.

I think that Plato formulated the Euthyphro dilemma to challenge backward thinking. When we honestly and earnestly try to figure out what is best, we must dispense with the question: what do the gods want? We must see goodness as existing apart from gods if we are ever going to get a clear view of it; otherwise it will always be shrouded from view, lurking behind a veil of mysticism. MK and others have tried to cobble together arguments that begin with the premise that God and goodness are one. I think this is born of need for a dependency on God, so much so that one cannot even imagine goodness without him. Primitive people, trying to make sense of the world can be forgiven for conflating their figures of divinity with goodness. But in modern times it is, at best, a form of confusion to do so, and at worst, a shady attempt to circumvent genuine moral responsibility by claiming that the only good in the world comes from the brute force of God's hand.

[The Grand Nudger]

As a minor quip..it's meaningless to talk about "God" in a singular sense or insist that it must have specific attributes x to be acceptable -as- a god.  There were goddesses.  There were gods who were born.  There were limited gods.  There were causally ineffective gods.  There were gods who existed as foils.  There were gods who had no authority over men or who were incapable of enforcing whatever presumptions of authority they had.  Gods were not always the "best qualities of men"..and some seemed to exist as explicit comments to the contrary.  Some god's weren't anthropomorphized in the slightest. Further, there were communities that had no gods or had a novel interpretation of what a god was, fundamentally.

None of the attributes ascribed to any of them were necessary for the set, and the set itself was not a necessity. All of their attributes..however, were narrative necessities in the transmission of culture, and those attributes change even when the god in question doesn't....entirely predicate -on- a changing culture in the set of the faithful. People get hung up on the just-so stories of gods..and while these were absolutely ignorant attempts to explain natural phenomena or a state of affairs..the larger story of gods is a brilliant expose on humanity and the human condition. The judeo-christian faiths are, likely, the terminus of this narrative tradition. Representing the worst and most removed representation of gods as they pertain to their original subject. This is a consequence of the ever retreating veil of ignorance, of our finding better ways to express the concepts that gods were originally leveraged in elaboration of.

It's a story about us, not them, or why creeks run downhill.

[Imabeliever]

https://www.christianitytoday.com/iyf/ad...e-man.html

Over and out
PS: To God be the Glory

[vulcanlogician]

As a minor quip..it's meaningless to talk about "God" in a singular sense or insist that it must have specific attributes x to be acceptable -as- a god.  There were goddesses.  There were gods who were born.  There were limited gods.  There were causally ineffective gods.  There were gods who existed as foils.  There were gods who had no authority over men or who were incapable of enforcing whatever presumptions of authority they had.  Gods were not always the "best qualities of men"..and some seemed to exist as explicit comments to the contrary.  Some god's weren't anthropomorphized in the slightest.   Further, there were communities that had no gods or had a novel interpretation of what a god was, fundamentally.

None of the attributes ascribed to any of them were necessary for the set, and the set itself was not a necessity.  All of their attributes..however, were narrative necessities in the transmission of culture, and those attributes change even when the god in question doesn't....entirely predicate -on- a changing culture in the set of the faithful.  People get hung up on the just-so stories of gods..and while these were absolutely ignorant attempts to explain natural phenomena or a state of affairs..the larger story of gods is a brilliant expose on humanity and the human condition.  The judeo-christian faiths are, likely, the terminus of this narrative tradition.  Representing the worst and most removed representation of gods as they pertain to their original subject.  This is a consequence of the ever retreating veil of ignorance, of our finding better ways to express the concepts that gods were originally leveraged in elaboration of.  

It's a story about us, not them, or why creeks run downhill.

I wholly agree, but I was merely responding to a question put to modern-day theists. Because it was aimed at them, the question was put to them on their terms. People get hung up on just-so interpretations because there is a lot of "God is just-so" thinking out there. A bit of myopia transpires when you consider how gods were created in the formation of cultural myths and then relate that to the god concept of modern theists.

It's interesting to consider religion for its myth value, and then see what became of these myths through history. They were invented to give form to the inexplicable movements of the human psyche, at least according to some like Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung. But it also seems that the metamorphosis that occured in Judeo-Christianity also happened in some form the world over-- to many different religions. Hinduism was very mythical in its expression... then along came Buddhism which shaped it into a more rational and practical tool. The Chinese had similar myths that were replaced by Confucian and Taoist thought-- again, moving from mythological to rational and practical (while still retaining a mystical element). The same could be said of Islam, and maybe Socrates was such a rational figure for the Greeks/western culture.

IDK, it's just something I've thought about before... not a line of thinking I've developed to any extent. I'm sure that someone somewhere has probably thought of world religion and mythology on these terms, though. This change in the form of religion might explain the inherent myopia in speaking of gods this way.

[The Grand Nudger]

Yet another way that religion poisons everything.  Discussing it's contents on the terms of the religious is to rob it of anything worth discussing.  Theirs is a paltry devotion to sanitized factoids -about- their religions claims.  God said this and god said that.  Do this but not that.  Religion is lazy mythology.