If God Knows the Future, Why Did He Create Us?

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ecstasyofavila

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I know that this questions probably been asked a million times before, but I can’t find an answer. If God knows the end game, then why does he still create us and our free will, knowing that we’ll end up in either heaven or hell? And I don’t want the Starving Man metaphor.
Thank you.
 
God knows all things at once. His knowledge does not change. He doesn’t know it before, he knows something as it happens. His knowledge touches all points in time at once. I stress this because God doesn’t know the future in the way a man would be seen as knowing the future. God touches all moments in what to Him seems as one eternal moment.

Anyway, in answer to your question, He wished to share His goodness with others. He allows people of many grades to share in it. He doesn’t reserve His gift of life to only the perfect.
 
To know this, we will have to die in a state of grace and ask Him. However, do you love? Can you love? Are yo loved? Is that not a good enough reason, since God is love?
 
ecstasyofavila said:
I know that this questions probably been asked a million times before, but I can’t find an answer. If God knows the end game, then why does he still create us and our free will, knowing that we’ll end up in either heaven or hell? And I don’t want the Starving Man metaphor.
Thank you.
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His ways are not our ways…!
 
Thank you for your replies, everyone! This helped a lot.
 
ecstasyofavila said:
I know that this questions probably been asked a million times before, but I can’t find an answer. If God knows the end game, then why does he still create us and our free will, knowing that we’ll end up in either heaven or hell? And I don’t want the Starving Man metaphor.
Thank you.
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Your question appears to be aimed at both

predestination
and the wrong understanding of predestination
 
ecstasyofavila said:
I know that this questions probably been asked a million times before, but I can’t find an answer. If God knows the end game, then why does he still create us and our free will, knowing that we’ll end up in either heaven or hell? And I don’t want the Starving Man metaphor.
Thank you.
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Have you read the Baltimore Catechism?
  1. Why did God make us?
    God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.
Eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what things God has prepared for those who love him. (I Corinthians 2:9)
 
ecstasyofavila said:
I know that this questions probably been asked a million times before, but I can’t find an answer. If God knows the end game, then why does he still create us and our free will, knowing that we’ll end up in either heaven or hell? And I don’t want the Starving Man metaphor.
Thank you.
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With or without God’s foreknowledge, our choices and actions are free. With or without God’s immediate presence, nothing changes in the drama that makes up our lives. So we’re still culpable, not Him, for our actions, still responsible for our ultimate destinies. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the rules of such a game, where God desires the best for us, and aids us with grace to achieve it, but ultimately won’t interfere with our freedom to refuse it, to reject the right thing.
 
Wesrock said:
The Catholic answer is total, I believe. Certainly the most popular schools of thought on free will use total.
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Wait so you are saying Yahweh knows everything. Then the fall was planned? Yahweh made humans to have suffering and hardships? If Yahweh has total omniscience then there is no getting around the view it had to be planned.
 
It’s precisely because God knows the future that He made us.

Think of the author who writes a story that ends with the words “happily ever after”.
Think of the stone mason who crafts a beautiful sculpture then stands back to admire its beauty.
 
If God knows the end game, then why does he still create us and our free will, knowing that we’ll end up in either heaven or hell?
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forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=754076

That thread was me four years ago struggling with the same question. Hence my name struggle (and the ‘Mt71314’ part is the scripture about the narrow path). Perhaps that’s not the exact nature of your question since maybe it looks like you’re just being more philosophical and inquisitive about this whereas I was going through a pretty serious struggle.

I think I’d like to piggy back on some of the previous posters by saying it is important to remember how massive and infinite God is and that all of space and time is enveloped in His massive, loving hands and it’s probably not quite as blunt as like God saying: “Oh there goes Sandy, she’s a lovely creation… See you back in heaven in twenty-five minutes!” (Perhaps twenty-five minutes is the duration of an earthly life in God’s perspective lol - not really.)

Any attempt to limit God in this way is fairly futile. I find it’s best and most effective (and very freeing and graceful) to see God as incredibly dynamic and organic, willing us to live these incredibly abundant lives filled with grace, truth, and joy. Once we open ourselves up slowly to just encounter God rather than question or doubt Him, we will find that we’re left with peace rather than anxiety. (However, I don’t think questioning is necessarily bad.)

Sorry if I’m not being that relevant to you. I have no clue if you are a believer or just a philosopher or where exactly you are coming from with this great question.

To everyone: If anyone remembers me, I’m back after four years of not being on the forum! I made that thread I linked above and pretty much never came back since. It was cool to read a piece of my past and something real I went through. God is good! 😃
 
NM505StKate said:
Wait so you are saying Yahweh knows everything. Then the fall was planned? Yahweh made humans to have suffering and hardships? If Yahweh has total omniscience then there is no getting around the view it had to be planned.
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I would have a problem with that concept. If we take God as not limited by time and space, Omnitemporal one may say. Then it would follow that he does not have a plan. To have planned something would mean that one has to start without a plan and ended up with one. That would involve time but time is not a concept with God. God does not know the future because there is no future with him, since he is not limited by time. It only seem that way to us who is limited by time and must have a present & a future.

By the same token, he cannot change his mind not to destroy the world again after the Flood because that involves time; he can’t look for Adam & Even in the Garden as that involves time and space. It only seem like that to us who are interacting with him from the limitations of time and space.

So how does it seem to him then? I don’t know because I have no idea what is it like not be limited by time and space. It is like a man who has lived his whole life in a single storey building and have no view of the outside world - he wouldn’t be able to conceive of people above and below him, occupying the same space in two dimensions but in a different third dimension. So it is with us I guess.

Therefore, I don’t think we can figure out how God acts. All we know is that he does not act in a way limited by time and space - unless he chooses to intervene in the physical world I guess. To impute on him the same way of thinking/acting/etc because that is what we do, only makes him a super-human in our image (just a little more sophisticated than the way the Greeks see their Olympian gods, but still fundamentally similar), not a dimensionally and diametrically different being to us. So, I don’t know how God exists outside of time and space but I am jolly sure how he is not.

So, to answer the OP: God does not know the future the way we foretell futures, because he is already living the future (from our perspective). God did not decide to create us even with his foreknowledge because he did not decide anything the way we make decisions, because he is already deciding, implementing, reviewing, regretting, etc etc etc in every single moment of of our instances (from our perspective).
 
NM505StKate said:
Wait so you are saying Yahweh knows everything. Then the fall was planned?
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Knowing something is going to happen doesn’t mean one planned that something to happen. If I tell a kid to slow down in his car or he is going to get hurt or even kill someone, and he ignores the warning, never slowed down, does that mean I planned his accident that he had, or the people he killed?

So why blame God just because He knows all things in advance and gives us warnings?

He created us with free will. Truly free. In the end, It’s what makes us culpable for what we do.
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Kate:
Yahweh made humans to have suffering and hardships? If Yahweh has total omniscience then there is no getting around the view it had to be planned.
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In the beginning, God made the first humans perfect. No suffering, no hardship. Life was great! After all , they were in the garden of EDEN.

Sin however changed all that. The first 2 humans disobeying God, and THEN hardship and suffering entered all human existence as a consequence. Life was no longer perfect.

By who’s fault?

Certainly not God.
 
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