One of the most common objections to the Christian belief God revolve around the question as to why God would create creatures simply to worship Him. “After all,” they reason, “if He is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, then why would He need to create anything? Isn’t it just a little egotistical to create something so that it can worship you?” Because this challenge often arises from those schooled in the New Atheism, we tend to dismiss it without treating it as a serious objection, one that many people seeking the Truth actually have. With that in mind, we will examine a line of reasoning that leads to a satisfactory response.
That God is “egotistical” would appear to be a moral assessment of God, but in actuality it carries with it a metaphysical claim. In fact, it is a metaphysical claim. It is not just that God is not egotistical, but that He can’t be. Egotism implies that God is lacking something—the approval of some other being. This is something that would negate His existence as the Supreme Being and therefore is impossible. Put in logical terms we are saying that if the Christian conception of God is true, then God cannot be egotistical. I say “impossible” not to dismiss the question, but because it is a loaded question that contains a contradiction. If you do not accept the “If”, then the “then” becomes a non-sequitur. No matter what answer we give to the charge of egotism, it won’t matter because they do not accept His existence.
This is why the question serves as an excellent illustration of separating the wheat who are genuinely seeking from the chaff who seek only to debunk the “God myth”. For atheists and non-believers to ask about God’s existence is certainly a valid line of inquiry. But once they ask about His properties, they must be willing to accept God (or at least assume) as the Christians know Him. Questions like this really try to ask both at the same time. The question, then, needs to be properly framed in order to get to the heart of the issue, which is why would God create us and then demand our worship?
God’s Goodness
Looked at from the human perspective where honor is given and never forced, it seems a little backwards. Backwards, that is, until we are forced to wrestle with what we mean when we call God “all-good”. We have a tendency to view God’s omnibenevolence as Him being the “best”—the most loving, the nicest, the most morally perfect, etc. But God doesn’t just have goodness but is Goodness itself. All things participate in God’s goodness, whereas God is essentially good. Why this distinction matters is because, if God is Goodness, then He is perfectly happy in Himself and under no compulsion to create. Nevertheless, He did create, and He did so because one of the properties of Goodness is that it diffuses itself and spreads out. God freely chose to create so that He could diffuse that goodness. But this was not enough because it was even better if He created creatures who could appreciate and freely choose to participate in that Goodness.
Once we grasp this we find that it is only through worship of the source of goodness that we can appreciate and participate in it. God Himself, a Trinity of Three Persons, enjoys His Goodness and by worshipping we are brought into that Goodness. Worship then is for our own benefit and adds no benefit to God. God commands worship because we need it and not because He egomaniacally feeds off of it—it is us that feeds.
A Jealous God?
How do this jibe with God describing Himself as a “jealous God” then? Because worship is something that is good for us, it is written by God into our spiritual DNA. We have a natural inclination to worship such that the only question is whether we are going to worship the Creator or the creation. Because God has poured His goodness out upon many things, it is very easy for us to allow the creature to eclipse the Creator. We substitute the sign for the Real Thing. By demanding our worship God reminds us not to fall into that trap but instead to look along these things (at not at) to see Him. Because divorced from Him, these things lose their value and their attraction. He obviously then cannot be jealous of things He made, but He is jealous in the sense that we settle for far less than He is offering.