Perfect Creator, Imperfect Creation?
Why did a "perfect" God create imperfect, sinful beings?
May, 2024
People often ask, if God is perfect, why didn't He create "perfectly?" In other words, why not make a world where there is no sin and error: where we will only freely choose to love Him and never decide to sin? Why not make a world where no one ever chooses to be lost? How can we say the Creator is perfect if what He created has flaws? It's a great thought experiment leading to basic principles of logic.
God is the only necessary being, and the only perfect being. Anything He creates is different from Him: therefore, it's different from perfection. It must be imperfect. It's not that God lacks the power to create beings with His perfection. Rather, it's that the concept is nonsensical. God can't change, or cease to exist, or sin, because those are contrary to the definition of what God "is." The same would be true of creating a being exactly identical to a God: causeless, necessary, and timeless. When it comes to human choices and salvation, that's important. Either a being is capable of meaningful "love," or it lacks all free will. Only those beings which lack free will can be imperfect and yet totally sinless.
As always, we need to be careful not to put words in God's mouth. People often speak of God's initial creation as "perfect." I understand the sentiment behind that. People aren't going about daily life speaking with pedantic precision, any more than they are when they refer to a "perfect" sandwich or a "perfect" test score or a "perfect" day. But applying that word to Creation in this line of discussion is unbiblical. God called His original work "good" (Genesis 1:25) and "very good" (Genesis 1:31). That progression proves this point: God's creation changed for the better when He created mankind. Regardless of what definition we want to use, it's clear that the initial creation wasn't "perfect." And nothing God created was "perfect" in precisely the same way that He is perfect.
A helpful summary of this thought process is the phrase "have one's cake and eat it, too." The original expression was reversed: to eat one's cake and still have it. The point is that of contradiction. When two things are not the same, we can't speak of them as if they're identical. When attributes are incompatible, one must choose between them. A person cannot have the pleasure of eating their cake and at the same time have the pleasure of possessing that cake. Some things are not an issue of power, but of logic and reality. When it comes to God, His perfect, unchanging nature implies some of those same conclusions, even when it comes to His creations.
This becomes confusing because it's so easy to create logically nonsensical sentences that follow language patterns. Rules of grammar are not the same as the rules of reality. The famous sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" illustrates this. It's a correctly formed English sentence but has no actual meaning. The same is true of phrases like "square circle." It's not that such things are too difficult to imagine, nor that they requires too much power to create. It's that the phrase is as meaningless as a random scribble of ink. "Square circle" is contrary to the fundamental nature of reality. It never even gets to "impossible," because it doesn't describe anything.
We see the same thing in mathematics. Early on, students are taught the rule "you cannot divide by zero." Strictly speaking, such things are not forbidden or incorrect or even too hard. It's because the phrase "divide by zero" is nonsensical. "How many pieces of nonexistent size does it take to add up to the whole?" The inability to divide by zero doesn't represent a limit of power. It's just another way of phrasing the law of noncontradiction: things are what they are, and not their opposites.
The law of noncontradiction is a property of God's nature. God does not change. He does not begin or end. He is the origin of everything else that exists. He just "is" (Exodus 3:15). He is the standard—the basis, the ideal—for everything. Whatever God creates is different from Himself; whatever is different from absolute perfection is imperfect. This means God "cannot" create beings who match His attributes in every way. Even using the word "cannot" is imprecise; the issue is not God's lack of ability. Rather, the phrase "God exactly duplicating Himself" has no more real meaning than "square circle" or "divide into nonexistent-sized segments."
Apparently, the same applies to the kind of love which God wants from His creations. A robot can be programmed to say, "I love you." But that's not the same as a free-willed being submitting and choosing to love. When God desires "love," He seems to mean something willed, not programmed. That hints as to why God would create beings capable of sin: it's the only logically possible means to accomplish His desire. Being made in His image means we're moral beings because we reflect God's moral nature. If we were incapable of making moral judgments, we'd be the biological-instinct machines called "animals." Love hard coded and outside of our will isn't "love," at all.
As with many thought experiments, further questions pop up. A key example is to ask how we expect to be sinless in eternity? We won't be as "perfect" as He is then, either, but presumably we'll still have free will. After God's plan for creation is complete, those in heaven will have made a free-will choice to submit to God. They'll have been "filtered" such that we're incapable of sin because of that choice. That's very different from being created with no capacity for sin, at all.
Of course, we're never going to fully understand the mind of God (Isaiah 55:8–9). We're given enough intellect and enough evidence to know what we must know (Romans 1:18–20; Metthew 7:7–8). But to fully grasp all God is doing, we'd need to be God. We must recognize that at some point, our understanding reaches a limit. It's healthy to stretch that boundary, of course. But it's good that we recognize that it exists. God created as He chose to create (Romans 9:20), and that meant giving us the ability to disobey Him.
Editor
