Why would God create the universe?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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I suppose I do favour the re-ordering itself scenario. Still, wouldn´t re-ordering imply prior imperfection? Why go perfect-imperfect (-perfect again?) instead of just staying perfect?

Besides, can the cosmos be “(im)perfect” anyway? It seems the property of perfection could only be the case if God did exist.

Along with lots of physicists, I believe the cosmos is evening out, that is, getting more uniform; order would be uniformity…the big freeze?! So is God black, vast and empty with one electron per quadrillion light-years? (Of course, God could be separate in some internal sense.)From our perspective, our “peak” (closest level to perfection) presumably would come long before this barren big freeze. That could suggest humanity is not God´s end.

So order I guess is synonymous with uniformity. But I´d like to think complexity is more “perfect” than near empty uniformity, even if the former entails a little disorder/chaos!

God being a “conscious part of the Absolute” sounds a fair compromise. I doubt most monotheists would approve, since it suggests God is more most-powerful than omnipotent. But what´s so bad (or even illogical) about most-powerful?

It would seem the problem of creatio ex nihilo can be ignored within an infinite Something. As you´ve implied, the next question is whether internal re-ordering requires intelligent control/“creation”. One of Dawkins´ key arguments in his The God Delusion comes to mind here, where he says that God/intelligence would presumably need to be complex in order to perform such a task, or at least more complex than the rest of the universe. Therefore, in an infinite universe, wouldn´t simplicity be far more probable than a comparatively complex God? I assume simplicity precedes complexity, so even if “God” would later occur, he would therefore only be finite.

Anyway, I´d rather drop a supposedly complex (and thus less probable) God and instead settle for an admittedly bizzare, tiny fluctuation of this Something which would eventually lead to the colossal discrepancies and complexities we today see around us. I guess that´s the big bang in a nutshell. The probability of the need for intelligent tinkering or tuning can be made far less likely when considering the possibility of multiverses, or even a single oscillating universe. Were this true, our existence would appear a less flattering inevitable.

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As it happens, I’ve dumped the idea of our God as the absolute since I wrote this. The ‘absolute’ is not an idea I can comprehend anyway, as it would assume that beyond God there is nothing, and I don’t believe in ‘nothingness’.
My idea has since evolved to the idea that God is an organism (in some manner), who was imperfect, having two aspects of his being which were not harmonious with each other. God could see that its inner being was not harmonious, and so imperfect, and so it was logical to change this if possible. God, then, separated the superior element (mind) from the inferior (matter) (which was itself separated into spheres / dimensions / densities), and is, through the medium of Soul (an image of the Divine Mind, or Godhead), moulding matter in the image of mind. Humans are a tool. A composite of mind and matter, and rooted in the soul (“God made man in the image of himself”, “the Kingdom of God is within you”) aimed at evolving the material world into a more ordered place and aiding mind in its re-moulding of matter. This also fits in with Plato’s theory of forms, the ‘ideal-forms’ being existent in the Divine Image, or Soul. And the material forms are gradually ‘evolving’ towards these ideal-forms.
Just thought I’d share that, as I posed the question, and have since partially resolved it.

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  • Kierkegaard
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I’ve read ‘Fear & Trembling’ twice. Both times it seemed equally gobbledegook. #-o

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Being matter, we cannot evolve fully into these forms. Plato asks us to tap into the divine via the intellect. Your ending is more teleological/Aristotelian.

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I used to think I understood Kierkegaard. A couple years ago I tried to read him again and I had no idea at all what he was on about. :stuck_out_tongue:

But that boredom quote is awesome! Now that’s what I love about existentialism.

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I don’t consider matter and intellect absolute opposites, rather just different manifestations of the same energy. Hence, it may be possible for the one to re-mold the other in its likeness. Think of it as re-tuning a string.

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I believe that, just like with everything else, we must approach this transcending topic from the immediate first.

Therefore the answer to that question is the same as the answer to this one:

Why does anyone create?

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Damn right, you gotta love that attitude, makes me wanna start reading Kierkegaard.

Can anyone suggest which is better to start with: Either/Or or Fear and Trembling?

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I think I see what you mean - the soul aspiring to mold itself and body closer to the divine.

The whole re-tuning thing sounds very Platonist/Aristotelian, as opposed to creation from nothing, which Genesis introduced.

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And what does Kierkegaard’s boredom, no less the Schopenhauer’s assessment that we exist between suffering and boredom, tell us about creativity and the human condition and does this not contradict the omnipotent, omniscient God of many religions?

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Yes. There’s a theory that Genesis just bastardized a couple of already existent creation theories and fiddled with it somewhat. I never actually took Genesis to talk of creation from nothing, it just doesn’t really start from the Beginning like it claims to. It’s like If I say: “In the beginning, I had my hair long, but then I cut it.” Such a statement isn’t exactly correct, as in the beginning of your life, you had no hair at all, and in the beginning of the universe, you either didn’t exist, weren’t an individual, or didn’t have a head. Genesis is being vague because it doesn’t try to, or can’t conceive of what happened before this ‘creation’. A topic which the likes of the Bhagavad Gita addresses. In fact, the particular story which Genesis is believed to be based on, the Enuma Elish, doesn’t put it in such a way. It just begins like this:

When on high heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsû, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both,
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods none had been called into being

This seems to imply that the aspects we now relate as heaven and earth were intermingled prior to creation. This fits comfortably with my theory that the material world was created by a separation of mind and matter, or two inharmonious elements.

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As far as I understand such creation stories, to speak of a “prior to” is nonsensical, because time was invented with the creation (God being eternal).

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Not in my interpretation. Time is gleamed purely from change. If things stopped changing (including our minds), time would cease also. Time is not a dimension outside of us which we pass through, it is an ordering principle existing in our mind. If we could not order things in spacial terms, on a ‘time-line’, all perceptions would jumble into one. We’d be unable to tell one moment from the next, and would probably become essentially vegetables. We call a revolution of earth ‘1 day’, but actually, it’s just ‘1 revolution’. This is equating movement with time. Movement is clearly just change. There is no time, then, only change. We might say, “this happened so and so many years ago”, but all we’re saying is, “on the mental time-line this happened so and so many revolutions around the sun ago”. A moment seems to me to essentially be the smallest possible change in the configuration of the universe. Time is a way of measuring movement, not something existing outside of it. In fact, perhaps its not a coincidence that ‘one moment’ sounds so much like ‘one movement’.
Now, if prior to the creation of the Universe as we know it (in the pre-big bang Universe), change was occurring, then time existed also. Hence, God must have created the Universe “in time”. Something ‘eternal’ must be something which is unchanging. What I consider the Godhead is not unchanging, being the Divine Mind, and so able to think, and therefore change (for my mind ‘changes’). Only Soul, an image of the Divine Mind superimposed on the material world as a sort of template to mold it to, is eternal, for it is an unchanging image.

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We are nothing more than an experiment by the Creator in the hypothetical illusion of separation,
which, because of Eternal Oneness, can never actually be.
“But why does our physical existence seem so real?”
Because the Experiment is as perfect as The Creator -
Because The Creator designed our senses to produce that effect.
We are The Creator having a hypothetical Human Experience
and, as such, we are, have always been and always will be.
Knowing this I can, as The Creator, enjoy the hypothetical illusions
of the experiment, and, at the same time, have the comfort
of the foreverness of my being. There is only one “God” and we are it.

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I have not read the whole thread. I just came to answer the question.

Just for the Hell of it! Seriously: he creates it with the earnestness of a child making a sand castle, and destroys it again with the innocent cruelty of that same child. Indeed, in creating he is always destroying, or in destroying he is always creating, and the universal process is only preserved by his never-subsiding joy in creating and destroying. This is a variation on my idea, or that idea is a variation on this one, that God is mad.

“All the children are insane”.
[The Doors, The End.]

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So she could percieve herself through someone else’s eyes. Tired of seeing “All” all the time, she decided to put on her blinders and see only parts, from limited times and places.

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God would create the universe because he’s a fictious character that can do anything humans think he can do (or has done).

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