If God exists, why did he create life? (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Saturday, December 11, 2010, 17:47 (5095 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: When I hear the word entertainment, I think of television, movies, books, music, games, shows etc. To me that is completely different from the satisfaction and joy a person gets from creating something. -Has it not occurred to you that TV shows, movies, books, music etc. have to be created before you experience them? A screenwriter gets the satisfaction and joy of writing the script, the satisfaction and joy of seeing it brought to life (usually with plenty of changes as the process goes along), and then the satisfaction and joy of watching it himself in the cinema. That is the joined-up image of God that I'm proposing, though his own script entails the additional excitement of the unpredictable.-TONY: My own personal views can not be brought into line really with this line of reasoning. You have effectively removed all possible causes and motivations from the equation except the ones that you have been trying to promote, i.e. entertainment and experimentation, by removing any possibility of an end goal. You ask what a UI possibly could have gained by creating the Dinosaurs which implies a) that there were no future plans of which that was just one step, b) that the UI must operate under purely selfish motivation, and c) ignores the fact that long before the Dinosaurs there was the small matter of the creation of the universe, which, when compared to life, must have been like watching paint dry.-I'm not trying to promote anything. As an agnostic, I'm simply exploring various avenues, and I find that there are huge gaps between the conventional image of God and life as we know it. I'm offering a possible explanation and am inviting you to look for loopholes in the argument. My scenario applies just as much to the creation of the universe as to the creation of life and of humans. The dinosaurs are simply one example of the many gaps (previously I took the dodo) which don't NEED to be filled if my scenario is correct. It doesn't matter what your starting point is, or what "end goal" you have in mind, if you believe there is only one God, and nothing existed before him, how can his motive not have been to please himself? There was no-one else to please! And what do you think is wrong with God creating entertainment for himself? Crucially for the anthropocentric view of life, we also need to incorporate into our theory his apparent non-intervention in human affairs and his apparent indifference to suffering. The scenario I'm proposing combines all of these factors without leaving any unexplained gaps. (So too, of course, does the atheist scenario, with its similar problem of an unidentifiable first cause.)-TONY: Basically, you might as well ask Di Vinci what he got out of painting the Mona Lisa's hair with the stipulation that he was not allowed to reference the rest of the painting in his reply. I know I keep coming back to this point over and over again, to the point of sounding like a broken record, even to myself. But you simply can not take any one thing and completely remove all the context surrounding it.-I have given you the whole context: God created the universe and life in order to provide himself with entertainment. This entertainment includes the satisfaction of creating as well as the pleasure of watching. Since none of your objections (negative view of the world, ignoring creative satisfaction, only giving examples out of context etc.) contradict my scenario, perhaps it might be more productive if you tell us what YOU think was God's motive for creating the universe and life, including humans.