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

by dhw, Sunday, December 12, 2010, 19:27 (5094 days ago) @ BBella

BBELLA: If I were God, or a creator of all I could imagine, I would want to create beings with the capacity to grow and learn, especially developing the capacity for love, compassion and creativity. So I would want to create a situation or place where they could go to do so. [...] Beings could come to earth to experience all of their free will abilities (according to whatever limits them). I would give them a choice to come here or not. I would give them the choice to come as many times as they want. It would be a place that a life would only be so long for intense training purposes. In their in-between times they would remember each life and what they learned in each one.-Ah, BBella, at the next divine election, you will have my vote! You and I had already agreed (on the "Paradise" thread) about our idea of what existence ought to be like, and of course there's no harm in hoping! But the problem I'm grappling with here is very different. I'm trying to put together an image of a hypothetical creator in accordance with the world as I see it, and not as I'd like it to be. This involves not only the extraordinary and wonderful mixture of human life, but everything that leads up to it and everything that is not so wonderful. More in a moment.-BBELLA: You asked why would a creator create life? Why not? What greater creation could a creator create than to create and give beings the opportunity to become conscious and know how it feels to feel? It is like asking a mother or father why they want to give birth to children, knowing this world ain't always a pretty place and there will be trials and tribulations. But still, we choose to give birth. The joy of birth and the new child's life is always worth the pain and sorrow we know that child will eventually experience...isn't it?-I must stress that I'm delighted to have had the opportunity of life myself, I believe my (grown-up) children feel the same, and nothing I say is meant in any way to downgrade what I still regard as a miracle ... whether made by God or by chance. That is absolutely NOT what this thread is about. If God exists, I want to know what he's like, and the only evidence I have is the world as I see it. One highly conventional image is totally anthropocentric, holding us humans to be the be-all and end-all, and sets God up as a loving father figure ("God is love" is, I think, far more common than "God is organized energy"). At the opposite end of the spectrum is the total impersonality of atheism. I believe in neither, but here are some major gaps in my vision of the world which can easily be filled by my artist/scientist/spectator God: 1) I believe that all life evolved from one or a few forms (Darwin), but our knowledge of evolution does not explain the major innovations that may in turn have led to new species. This, in conjunction with 2), suggests to me experimentation; 2) Science has not come up with any link between humans and the millions of extinct species such as dinosaurs, and unlike Tony I have no faith that links may one day be discovered. I therefore can't believe in an original human-centred plan (barring initial ignorance of how to do it), and so I ask what God could derive from so many unrelated species. My answer is entertainment and/or knowledge through experimentation. 3) As regards your parental analogy, I love being a father, and although my children are free agents, I'm there to share their pleasures and pains and to help if required. I see no sign of God the Father being there to do the same. You, BBella, have triumphed over your suffering, but you won't need me to tell you that every day there are thousands who don't even have the chance to emulate you. What parent stands idly by while his child perishes even though he has the means to save it? The conventional religious answer to this question is that God works in mysterious ways and we must have faith. That does not satisfy me, because if the pieces don't fit, I can't believe the image is right and the pieces are wrong.
 
Nor can I believe in an afterlife in which we remember past lives, and get to choose whether we come back or not ... great though it sounds. Where's the evidence? If God created life as an experiment and an entertainment for himself, this in no way diminishes his genius as a scientist and creative artist, nor does it lessen the many positives of existence; but it does explain the negatives, including his apparent indifference to suffering, it fills in the gaps relating to evolution, including the roundabout "progress" to humans, and it can be applied to just about every aspect of life as we know it, apart from the (idealized?) scenarios offered to us by ancient man-made texts. I don't expect anyone to accept it. From the comfort of my padded picket fence, I don't accept it myself. I do, however, find it more convincing than "have faith", and so I'm asking if anyone can see a loophole in the argument.