[NotReady]

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but I'm hoping NotReady and the other informed believers can clarify these things for me.


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DavidL's post is excellent.

One point concerning why God created. He did not do so out of necessity. The creation is therefore contingent and gratuitous.

I mostly accept the statement of faith in the Westminster Confession. It says on this subject:

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It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create ...


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I agree this is almost a non-answer. But the plain fact is Scripture gives no other reason. It is incomprehensible to humans. If I was God, why would I bother creating, since I would be wholly self-contained, self-sufficient and infinitely better than anything I create? As a human, I can't answer that. It makes no sense to me. Thank God I'm not God.

But I also believe that God is absolute rationality. He does nothing arbitrarily. He calls His creation good in Genesis.

So it's a paradox. Some call it the full bucket difficulty. Van Til said this:

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To the non-Christian our position may be compared to the idea of adding water to a bucket that is already full of water. “Your idea of the self-sufficient ontological trinity,” he will say, “is like a bucket full of water. To God nothing can be added. He cannot derive glory from His creatures. Yet your idea of history is like pouring water into the full bucket. Everything in it is said to add to the glory of God.”

No Christian can answer this full-bucket difficulty in such a way as to satisfy the demands of a non-Christian epistemology. We can and must maintain that the Christian position is the only position that does not destroy reason itself.

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