Old catechisms asked, “Why did God make you?” The answer: “God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.” Here, in just 26 words, is the whole reason for our existence. Jesus answered the question even more briefly: “I came so that [you] might have life and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). …
source:
catholic.com/library/Pillar.asp
If he’s up for a read, or if you’re up to search out the pertinent sections online, he or you could also look the the book
Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed. An excerpt:
GOD is infinite, the utterly sufficient All.
There is no need of His nature that is not satisfied by what He is.
Not the smallest chink through which anything can be added to His fullness of existence,
to the limitless perfection of His happiness.
Beside Himself He needs no other being.
There is no way whatever in which any other being can bring Him the most infinitesimal gain.
Yet other beings exist, and exist because He brought them into existence. Why?
Not only did creation provide nothing that His nature needed, it provided, so to speak, no luxury either; it brought Him no profit, no increase, for there was nothing in it that was not already in Himself in greater, because uncreated, perfection. Why, then, is the created universe here at all?
The answer that leaps to our lips still leaves our precise question untouched.
The created universe exists, we say, for God’s honour and glory,
each thing necessarily glorifying God simply by being what it is:
neither creation as a whole nor any element of it
could have any other reason for existence that is not subordinate to that first reason.
It is the glory of every being that in some way it serves the Supreme Being;
if it served only some lesser being and not the Supreme Being,
that would be sheer servitude and, if we ponder over it, a nightmarish degradation.
Thus created beings achieve their own perfection in glorifying God:
but it still remains that they do not add anything to His:
so that our question likewise remains:
Why did God create the universe at all?
Obviously because He knew that we should like it.
It brings Him no gain, but it can bring us tremendous gain.
And apparently it goes with the infinite goodness of God that our gain can be a motive for Him.
It is of the nature of goodness that it wants to spread outwards, to confer itself, and God is Supreme Goodness.
In some ways one of the most staggering phrases in all Scripture
is St. John’s statement (John iii.16) that God loved the world,
yet St. John had come to know God’s love so well
that he could make a statement so breathtaking almost casually and in his stride.
God could love things less than Himself and could act to give them pleasure.
So he brought them into existence.
He knew that there were possible beings capable of enjoying Him, and He made them.
The Lord has made all things for Himself
(Prov.xvi.4):
apart from Himself there existed nothing to make them for.
He made them for His own sake, for His own pleasure.
But it was His pleasure to bring into existence things that could take pleasure in existence.
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