Most of those who accept Creation believe in two distinct kinds of freedom—uncreated and created, with God enjoying the uncreated freedom and every other actual being experiencing the freedom God supplied them with when he made them from nothing.
Created-freedom believers hold to the idea that such freedom is still authentic even though it is inherently inferior to God’s uncreated freedom. How could it be otherwise?
After all, belief in created freedom immediately elevates God to an entirely separate category of being, to the point that any comparison of God’s freedom and human freedom is immediately declared a category error.
When asked why an absolute God would bother with Creation in the first place and what he wanted to achieve with it, created freedom believers tend to spout on about God desiring that his creatures “get to know him” or explain Creation as God’s ultimate expression of love.
Why an absolute, utterly self-sufficient God would be interested in creating creatures that can “know him” remains a mystery. The love explanation also runs into some headwinds when one understands that the absolute God was perfect before he created and had no need for love of any sort.
The volume of work dedicated to addressing such questions with supposedly coherent, logical answers is enormous—yet the volume of work also reveals an overarching question that very few consider or contemplate.
Why does the purpose of Creation require so much explanation? Why does it require arduous logic and philosophical struggle to “get it.”
Why did God make the purpose of Creation—getting to know him and expressing his love— so laborious to understand?
Well, because he’s in a category all his own, and at the end of the day, you can’t expect to ever “really” know him.
I posit that the purpose of Creation is only difficult to understand if one insists upon placing God’s freedom into a category of its own and relegating the freedom of every other being to just another aspect of God creating from nothing.
Take away that assumption—that is, place the essence of God’s freedom in the same category as all other freedom—and the matter of God desiring that we “know him” and Creation as the medium through which he “expresses his love” immediately becomes more accessible and comprehensible.