Faith Seeks Understanding Pt. 11: Why did God create the world?

Word on Fire introduces a new video series featuring Father Robert Barron entitled "Faith Seeks Understanding." This series explores questions frequently posed to Father Barron by believers and skeptics alike. Word on Fire has taken a different approach for these videos, employing more of a discussion format. We hope that Fathers lively responses to these questions will be both clarifying and edifying and serve as yet another helpful resource in the dialogue of the Faith and culture.

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• Fr. Robert Barron
• Word On Fire
• Catholicism
• faith
• Christianity
• Jesus
• God
• bible
• creatio ex nihilo

[DrHowbeit]

Is there a pause in the heavenly bliss? Just one night's sleep?

[DrHowbeit]

Children often take the interminable "Why?"-approach. Let's copy that strategy. "God wants your love." "Why?" "Because He wants you to be reunited with Him." "Why?" "Because He wants you to share absolute harmony." "Why?" "Because God is love" "Why?" Does this satisfy? Is "Love" and "Perfection" answers to anything? Isn't there still a "Why?" creeping? What's the prospect of being encapsulated in a frozen state of perpetual bliss? Isn't plain death by comparison the greatest mercy?

[danieljosephwilliams]

@ideasforfeeling --- When we are free for God and free from all other, lesser things, then we are perfectly happy. This is what God created us for! This is what Fr. Barron means when he says that God wants us 'fully alive." Haven't you ever wondered how saints are able to perform miracles? How people can be healed (spiritually and physically) and even risen from the dead? The saints are so united to God that they are fully alive, practically overflowing life into others. It is beautiful!!!

[danieljosephwilliams]

@ideasforfeeling --- It is only proper, as Fr. Barron comments in this video, to be free for something or someone perfect. To be free for anything else will lead us to less than perfect happiness. To be free for God means to be free from all that would keep us from Him, including selfish attachment to the things of this world. Ultimately, the goal is to be free from Satan and his minions and then our natural inclinations to put ourselves first, becoming fully united to God in all things.

[danieljosephwilliams]

@ideasforfeeling --- Of course, this must be true in your view as well. You would say that you must be free from God to be free to do whatever you will. Of course, that means that you are free from God to be free for your own desires. This is what God warns against way back in the Old Testament. In fact, it is the First Commandment: "I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me." Putting yourself and you desires before God is to make yourself a god, set above the one God.

[danieljosephwilliams]

@ideasforfeeling --- You are thinking in terms of autonomy, equating that with freedom. This is a very western, specifically American way to think. You see freedom as a lack of restriction of any kind, especially from an exterior force. Christians, and specifically Catholics, see freedom as a freedom FOR something. This something is a greater purpose, union with an infinitely greater being, who we know as God. A result of being "free for" God is that I must be free from other things.

[danieljosephwilliams]

@bigbrotherhal9000 --- Creation does not imply dependence; on the contrary, one who creates must be, by virtue of the fact that they are creating, independent of that being created. Could anyone claim that a person who builds a car is dependent on that car? The person must understand what materials he needs to create it, the interactions of the parts, and many other things to build a car. How, then, can he be dependent on the car? That is foolishness! So far, there is no good argument...

[danieljosephwilliams]

@bigbrotherhal9000 --- A perfect being, a being who "IS" existence itself, would not and could not be selfish, proud, or conceited. If you are, in reality, perfect, then to create things less than yourself to manifest your glory would actually be love. It would be humble, if nothing else, to create beings imperfectly when you could do better. When a professional athlete tells you that they are excellent at their sport, they are not being conceited; rather, they are being honest. So with God.

[danieljosephwilliams]

@ideasforfeeling -- Even they are subject to the rules of what sounds good. Without knowing it, they could be following certain patterns set down as audibly pleasant. Perhaps they are naturally inclined to begin with actions known as exercises to the educated.

There are laws in nature (gravity, which you can't fight too successfully as long as you are earth-bound), laws in science (mix x with y and you get z reaction, every time), and other laws. Rules, laws, whatever you want to call them.

[Jim1905]

@bigbrotherhal9000

This is all predicated on there being no God, which there is substantial evidence for the contrary. I mean I could use your "argument" for anything: "There is no blank" consequence-of-blank is a mad made idea..." the rest is just ramblings of the premise and the premise is false.