I’m personally not going to debate it (I’m an atheist but I don’t proselytize) but given the sensitivity of the topic it seemed more apropos for here than General Questions.
I wondered this even when I was religious: why would an omnipotent, omnisicent Being who was and is and e’er shall be complete unto Himself feel the need to create humans (or anything else, for that matter)? Is it for the worship? The companionship? An experiment?
I’m not mocking the views of anybody, but I am curious what they are.
I figure it’s the same way parents have children. Not for worship, HOPEFULLY not an experiment. Companionship? Eh, sorta. I’m going to try and think like God. I would create this huge community of different types of animals and see how they live together.
Don’t know about the catechisms, but from the amount of Jesus talking about us and himself being God’s children I would have to suspect that it is because God wanted kids.
So the question is, is why do we want kids?
Err… assuming we’re talking about the all-knowing god in which so many believe, experiments, as it were, have absolutely no purpose. God knows the outcome before even undertaking them. I bet he could have even avoided the whole cold fusion brouhaha.
Of course, assuming we’re not talking about an all-knowing god, then who knows.
Piers Anthony had a nice layout for his gods (Demons) in the Xanth series. Because they were all-powerful, all-knowing, they had nothing else to do except limit themselves and their powers so that they could actually go around experimenting and getting into trouble.
I don’t know, God seems pretty insistent on worship throughout the Bible. I always assumed that he made us to worship him. The problem is that people don’t like the idea of being an ego-boost for an insecure God. But it’s hard to reconcile this feeling with the Bible’s repeated demands for praise and obedience. Hey, when the whole world stopped worshiping him, he drowned everybody! It seems pretty easy to argue that humans = worshipers.
However…
The whole worship thing could easily be part of an experiment. Perhaps God is subjecting our species to classical conditioning like Pavlov did to his dogs. I have no idea what the stimulus would be, but the observed response in this experiment would be the worship response. Perhaps when he is able to produce the worship response in a certain percentage of the population, God will publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal.
Or perhaps…
God made us as part of a school project. He’ll get up in front of the class and give a ten-minute presentation (complete with slides and complicated diagrams). Afterwards, the teacher is just going to flush out the petrie dish. Enjoy existence now everyone, for soon we meet the soap!
One answer that’s posited in classical Jewish sources is that G-d created humans because He wanted beings who would be able to (re)discover Him using their own intelligence and free will in a physical environment that conceals His presence. (Which, in a way, is exactly the opposite of the catechism answer that John Mace quoted, since it focuses more on earth than on heaven.)
Here are two brief treatments of this idea from different angles:
BTW, Lobsang, about the plural forms in the verse that Lord Ashtar quoted from Genesis, various Jewish commentators offer several explanations, including:[ul]
[li]it’s the “plural of majesty”[/li][li]it shows G-d’s humility (as an example to us), in that He “consulted” with His inferiors, the angels, before creating man[/li]G-d is speaking to all of the various forces of nature that He created, inviting them to join in this important step.[/ul](Note that the following verse does refer to the actual creation using a singular rather than a plural verb.)
I always thought that we were created to name the animals. I mean, isn’t that the very first thing that God told us to do? Sounds a lot like a mission statement to me. Further, isn’t that the only commandment given to us by the creator that is a “hey, go do this” statement, rather than damage control having to do with our fall from grace?
Actually, no to all of the above:
[ul]
[li]The first statement G-d makes to Adam and Eve after they were created is “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). (The simple meaning of that verse is that it’s a blessing, but Jewish tradition - as embodied in the Talmud - sees it also as a commandment to do one’s part towards populating the earth.)[/li][li]After the more detailed account of Adam’s creation in ch. 2, the first “mission statement” is that he should work and guard the Garden of Eden (2:15).[/li][li]The first explicit commandment (using the Hebrew verb tzavah, to command) is in verses 16-17, about being allowed to eat from all of the other trees except the Tree of Knowledge. (The Talmud also derives from Genesis 2:16 the seven Noahide Laws which are binding on all of humanity.)[/li][li]The naming of the animals comes only after all of the above, and it’s not introduced as a commandment.[/li][/ul]So based on all of the above, you might say that the core Biblical “mission statement” for humankind is: follow G-d’s laws of morality; keep busy with some kind of honest work (even if you live in a Garden of Eden-like lap of luxury); and inspire the next generation to do the same in their turn.
Getting away from the strictly biblical here, I (an atheist/agnostic) have always been fond of an argument that comes, IIRC, from Hegel. Namely:
Q: What is the one thing an infinite being can’t do?
A: Know what it’s like to be finite.
Therefore, the inifinite creator subdivided Himself to experience finity in all its facets (or, if this sounds too pantheistic for you, created lots of finite creatures who could then report back to him).
I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that if there is a God, there ain’t no telling what he (or she or it) is up to.
If God is all knowing, then whatever it is is not an experiment. It would pretty much have to be a plan with some definite outcome, but not neccessarily an outcome that has anything to do with us.
Let’s say his plan is to culminate in the creation of a being who will become godlike and be an equal companion to the original God. The role of the human race may be trivial. Perhaps this new, godlike being is to come to existence on a planet a thousand light years from here. Our role then might be nothing more than to transmit a signal (intentionally or otherwise) that gives the people on that other planet a reason to go into space.
I’m just pulling this out of the air, but you see what I’m trying to say is that all of the bible and the koran and all the other books and beliefs are there to bring the human race to the point where it achieves some goal of interest to God - after which we are of no more interest and will be ignored.
Or may be there isn’t a God, and all this shit happens just because. Which is personally my opinion.
Hm – the OP is put in terms of omni-whichever monotheism, which is something of a technical difficulty, but I’ll give it a go anyway.
One of the fundamental concepts within Kemeticism is that existence requires dialogue and interaction; the texts referring to the creation refer to the before of it as “before there were two things”. The universe came about as a result of the creative craving for existence, which demanded at least two things and soon propagated out into more, of many types and varieties. The creator divinity built the world, generated other gods, and in time the world generated other beings with other modes of thought who could look at the gods and be a different thing from them.
Unlike other mythologies, the ancient Egyptians did not have any particular care given to the development of humans in particular; the diversification of the world produced them. There is, however, a story of humans springing up from the tears of Ra; this is based on a pun. (The word for ‘tears’ is phonologically similar to the word for ‘human’; can’t find what those words are at the moment, unfortunately.)
Within this structure, humans are there because they can have a dialogue with the divine and with each other, and both the humans and the divine thereby become more clearly defined as themselves. Humans in this aren’t unique within the world, of course, but as we’re human we tend to mostly fix on us.
