The Pope answers a vexing question: what did God do before he made the world?

January 25, 2016 • 1:30 pm

I wonder if Pope Francis was speaking ex cathedra when he figured out, as recounted in a new book for kids, what God was doing before He made the world. I have, in fact, often wondered that myself. There was eternity before there was the Earth, and unless there were an eternity of multiverses before our own Universe, God must have been terribly bored. What did he do?

Well now, according to thejournal.ie, His Holiness has the answer. It’s recounted in the Pope’s new children’s book Dear Pope Francis, to be published by Loyola University Press on March 1.  In it the Pope answers letters from thirty children, one of them asking the question above. And the Pope, showing the most Sophisticated Theology™, gives his answer. It’s in the screenshot below:

deepity

HE LOVED!!!!!  But that raises further questions.  WHO, exactly, did he love? There wasn’t anything around to love! Maybe he loved himself? But that would make him a narcissist!

I’m sure the book is full of bromides; check out his second answer above.  One thing the Pope wasn’t allowed to answer, though, was “How the hell do I know?” After all, as Archie Bunker said, the Pope is inflammable.

h/t: Grania

82 thoughts on “The Pope answers a vexing question: what did God do before he made the world?”

  3. The pope’s response also raises another question: how did God get to be the sort of thing which “loves?”

    The bottom-up explanation of evolution tries to answer questions regarding emotions and relationships by looking at the process and seeing how everything gets to be what it became. An ability to feel affection would not evolve in a social vacuum.

    But the so-called “beauty” and “simplicity” of sky hook answers is that they’re not technically answers at all, because the questions are not permitted. God, a Being which “loves,” doesn’t have or need a history of development for this surprising capacity. God loves because that’s what God is, full stop. A Being which loves, which is love by its very nature. Always.

    That’s not just pointless and uninformative, it’s lazy. And, of course, childish. Children’s questions about God aren’t really that different than those of adults. The answers to both are designed to appeal to our inner child.

    1. Children’s questions are usually better than adult’s questions, IMO, because they are not as trained in the taboos and piety filters they are supposed to use. Children ask blunt and obvious questions that occur to everyone. Obvious questions that, moreover,should probably have straightforward answers. The replies children get from adults often mean, essentially,”Stop asking such questions.” And in short order most of them learn to do this.

      The who don’t probably become atheists or some such.

    2. Oh Sastra. Don’t you recognise the Most Sophisticated Theology of All Time Ever when you see it?
      😉

      1. “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3-4)

  5. Maybe he simply “loved” the peace and quiet! That would explain why, soon after creating humans, he got so annoyed he just drowned everyone, including all the babies in the world. So “love” is apparently a double-edged sword.

  6. Are comments still open? I have one:
    Dear Dopus Franciso,
    How was god feeling as he looked down at Bruno getting BBQ’d alive in the public square?
    Rev El, 5+

    1. That’s easy. “God was crying along with him.”

      Follow-up questions regarding possible conflicts with God’s omnipotence redirect to more complicated bafflegab.

  7. But that would make him a narcissist!

    One of the standard answers to the question of why God made humans is that it was so we could glorify Him.

    So, yeah, a narcissist.

  8. If you’re a trinitarian, isn’t the answer that he loved Jesus and the Holey Spirit and they loved him and each other? And then there’s the angels, who must have been created at some point. They’re not mentioned in the Bible much, but quite important to Catholics (St. Micheal the archangel, defend us in battle!) so presumabley his popishness know when they came into being?

    To a materialist like me, it’s hard to imagine how you can love without a body. Did God’s heart beat faster? Did his skin tingle? Did his pupils dilate when he looked at the face of his beloved, floating in the void? Did his guts clech? Did his lips twitch upwards into a smile? What does it mean to love in a place where no time is passing and nothing is happening and neither of you has any needs to fulfill?

    I’m not sure Catholic leaders should be able to meet with children privately anymore. They need a chaperone.

    1. All Catholics need chaperones, real, rational ones to remind them that God isn’t outside of time, but since the 16th century has been running out of time.

  9. I’m surprised the child didn’t get the answer seemed to be trotted out at our church: God is outside of time, so it doesn’t make any sense to ask what he was doing before the universe was created. For God, all times are the same. This same timeless quality of god was also offered as a excuse for why his “plan” takes so long… it’s not long for God.

    I guess they could be imagining some kind of 5th dimensional being for whom our time dimension is like a spatial dimension to us, but it seems that such a creature would have to have something like a time dimension in which to, you know, actually do things, otherwise it’s just a fixed object in that fifth dimension. An odd kind of object with contours that squeek out a 4th dimensional revelation here and there, but that in it’s own terms doesn’t move or change or have time or anything. God is a 5th dimensional stone if there is no time for God.

    In other words, the answer sounds like word salad.

    1. Or concept salad. God is like numbers, or emotions, or abstractions … and those are real and they do things and they have no space and are out of time. Until you start to break this down and analyze it.

      But that’s reductionism and philosophy and it’s arrogant.

  11. Oh boy, I bet that answer really satisfied Ryan from Canada. I remember asking tough questions regarding life/death as a child. Adults always gave this kind of answer, and I always found the answers disappointing. Even kids can see through this kind of patronizing bullshit.

    And besides, “What’s love, but a second hand emotion?”

    1. Yes, absolutely. Kids are so good at detecting bullshit answers. It’s only later on that humans learn that this sort of answer is “deep”.

  12. Re: “WHO, exactly, did he love? There wasn’t anything around to love! Maybe he loved himself? But that would make him a narcissist!”

    See the end of Dante’s “Paradiso”.

    In Tuscan:

    O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,
    sola t’intendi, e da te intelletta
    e intendente te ami e arridi!

    In English:

    O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,
    knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself
    and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!

    1. Do you suppose he had a cigarette after knowing himself? Puts the whole “one flesh” thing in a new light. No wonder priests get all pervy.

    2. Reminds me of The Point in Abbott’s Flatland:
      …there arose from the little buzzing creature a tiny, low, monotonous, but distinct tinkling, … from which I caught these words, “Infinite beatitude of existence! It is; and there is none else beside It.”

      “What,” said I, “does the puny creature mean by it’?” “He means himself,” said the Sphere: “have you not noticed before now, that babies and babyish people who cannot distinguish themselves from the world, speak of themselves in the Third Person? But hush!”

      “It fills all Space,” continued the little soliloquizing Creature, “and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness ah, the happiness of Being!”

  13. Wouldn’t an infinite god have an infinite navel and thus infinite lint? That’d have to keep one busy for a while.

  14. I think God is just a big ego created by human mind,he could create it, and sometimes manipulate like toys.A replication of narcissism.

    1. If he lived in Nanaimo, the earth really would have just gotten off the ground about six thousand years ago.

  16. I’m reminded of a Christian, complaining about why they felt the Left Behind series is terrible. Well, one of many reasons, as Slacktavist has spent over a decade tearing those books apart.

    But one of the reasons is that, in the end, Jesus doesn’t defeat Satan because love is stronger than hate. But just because Jesus is stronger than Satan. When it comes to killing your enemies, Jesus is just better at it than Satan.

    It makes me think about the ‘objective’ value of what we see as good. Good isn’t just pulled out of the vacuum. Thanks to evolution, we have come to see as good that which helps us survive. Co-operation evolved, because it helped us to survive and flourish. Love evolved, because it helped us to survive and flourish. Societies which encourage greater internal co-operation do better than those that do not. Free inquiry creates greater standards of living.

    We see these things as good because they have power. Because this ‘goodness’ has greater utility than hatred and division. This goodness means something in an objective sense.

    But what does it mean for God to be good ‘just because’? He didn’t do anything to earn it, and if he was already omnipotent, being good has nothing to do with his ability to achieve his goals. He’d be just as successful if he were evil.

    The bottom-up approach always seems a better solution than that of the skyhook.

    To clarify, I’m not talking about objective morality here. Rather, I’m saying that there is greater value in subjectively determining something to be good when it has practical value. To simply say that God is good “Because it’s his nature” or by mere definition, is vastly less compelling or meaningful.

    For God to ‘Love’ absent anything to love, or reason to do so, is meaningless.

    But to realize that it is indeed the better angels of our nature that make us stronger, that make us better, means so much. It means that in a cold and unfeeling universe, where there is no guarantee of justice, that goodness still succeeds, in the long term at least, where evil cannot. On the timescale of evolution or civilizations, good simply has more power than evil, not because of some arbitrary bequethment of power, but because of the very nature of that which we choose to deem good.

    1. I agree. The idea of God being “good” before he created the universe seems like utter nonsense. It seemed like nonsense to me even when I was a Christian.

      “Good” seems inherently a social concept to me. If there is no one else, just you and that’s it, the way God might be conceived to be before creation, there is no good/evil. There are, at most, preferences. Good and bad only enter into it when your actions have effects on other people’s preferences.

  17. “Maybe he loved himself? But that would make him a narcissist!”

    Or a wanker. 😶

    “I’m sure the book is full of bromides; …”

    Maybe God should take some.

    /@

    2. God jacked off to Internet porn, like the rest of us.

      (What? No I didn’t say that. It must have been my cat…)

  18. The mental gymnastics that must be executed in order to foster the idea of an independent, immaterial, all-powerful entity never fail to amaze me- pursue any of their claims logically and you always run up against the bottom line: “Well, it’s just…just MAGIC, you know?”

  19. One can only hope that 8-year old Ryan from Canada will turn away from religion and focus his intelligence on something worthwhile.

    It such an intelligent question, and to be sent of with such a patronizing answer is disheartening to see.

    2. I have a great-nephew who is not the brightest of kids, but when he was ten y.o. he asked my sister (his grandmother) whether she believed in God. She said “No, not really”, and asked him why he had asked.

      So he told her that his parents had told him about the Tooth Fairy, and that wasn’t true; and they had told him about the Easter Bunny, and that wasn’t true; and they had told him about Santa Claus, and that wasn’t true; and now they were telling him about God…

      Tell them woo enough times and they’ll start questioning it.

      1. That was very much the path our kids took, but we never tried to tell them about God. Just after the conversation about the Easter Bunny, when they worked out that we were putting the shop-bought chocolate eggs around the house, a little voice came from upstairs, “Santa’s not real either, is he?”

        Which reminds me of the joke about the mother who told her little boy that she was the Easter Bunny. “But, Mummy, /how/ do you get round to all the other houses?”

        /@

        1. I don’t remember just how old I was, but it was at the time that my belief in Santa was starting to waver, and my parents secretly arranged a personal visit from him for me. The doorbell rang one December evening, and there was this jolly man with red coat and white beard (no reindeer, though – I suppose that would have been hard to arrange on a small island) with a big sack of presents.

          That caused me to believe for a little longer – after all, I had seen him with my own eyes, and I still had the present that he had pulled out of his sack for me! 🙂

          God never showed up, though.

  20. It’s kind of obvious g*d loved himself before and after. A quick glance at the 10 commands kind of makes that true.

  21. I’m surprised that no-one has mentioned the standard answer: “Creating Hell, for people who ask questions like that!”

  23. OK, Pope, obviously you have no idea so why not just say, “I have no idea?” Guess that doesn’t sound very infallible.

  25. Perhaps not a narcissist, but suffering from dissociative identity disorder. We already know about the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Maybe there was more. Fredo the chef? Dr. Froidmain, the proctologist? Mimi, the masseuse? Luna, the salad tosser?

    Christians, besides being greedy and slavish, are love junkies.

  26. I’d like to suggest God loved (or knew) other gods, in the Greek tradition. We call Christianity a monotheism, but perhaps the others were temporary liaisons until the time of the old testament. Don’t we all need someone to have a drink with. It seems likely, if he could create humans to entertain and worship him, he might very well have created various gods and goddesses to while away the long afternoons.

    1. Although Onan is generally associated with masturbation, this was not what he was smited for. Under the rules of the time, if your brother died without leaving an heir, it was you job to impregnate his widow on his behalf. For whatever reason, Onan didn’t want to do this so he pulled out at the last moment and “spilled his seed on the ground”. Those six words are in the Bible and from that the priests have managed to make wanking a sin.

      2. Yes, but as the descriptivists tell us, you can’t fight popular usage. Kind of a knock on poor old Onan; tho wanking’s probably better than raping your brother’s widow.

        1. I don’t think that he raped her, it was expected of him, by the society of the time and presumably the widow too.

          1. I suspect, even when it was normal practice, there have always been a fair number of women who’ve silently (and quite likely despairingly) rebelled against their status as chattel.

  29. The “God loved” answer is simply laughable. But poor Alexandra got some crappy advice. I doubt he was asking why “some” parents argue, I’m sure he was asking why his parents argue. And if he’s asking the Pope, they must argue a lot. Alexandra has no control, but the Pope says he should respect his parents no matter how bad it gets. If he isn’t good, and it gets worse, I’m sure Alexandra will feel he is to blame. That’s the answer that deserves our scorn.

  30. This question bothered me as a child as well. I was brought up to believe Jehovah needs nothing, yet taught he needed all sorts of things from us. If Papa is correct, and he loved then that means there was a need for love. Before he created. As one commenter above noted, this could lead you to assume self love of the kind that does not lead to procreation, which is still a sin in the Catholic Church. So is he saying God himself sinned? Where was the procreation as a result of this love prior to creating?

  31. So, we all agree that the Pope’s answer to the question of what God was doing before he created anything is pretty lame. So my question to everyone here is, what answer would you give?

    Mine would be something along the lines of, well I don’t think there is a god at all. No one really knows where the universe came from, we can only give it our best guess based on the available evidence. Some people think that if we don’t have an answer then that must mean that there is a god, other people don’t think that. Some people think that using god as an explanation doesn’t explain anything at all, it is just giving a name to the phrase ‘I don’t know’. The best way for you is to find out as much as you can about both ways of thinking and work it out in your own mind.

    1. As with anything in life, the less said is the better. Once you speak, you in your position of authority must realize you either have a bad PR guy by your side or you think you will never be questioned.
      That worked way back in the old day.
      It does not work now that we see a thing for what it is and what is has been.

    1. “Your user name, Stoney ground is from the bible: Matthew 13:5”

      Yes, that’s kind of the point, my brain wasn’t very fertile ground for Biblical dogma to take root in. I’m not sure why I need to try again, I’m quite happy with Stonyground. Also I’ve been using it for quite a long time, if I change it now no one will know who I am.

  33. If anyone is interested in a serious answer the point of which is not to just mock the religion, here is an attempt at one.

    Christian religion was heavily influenced by ancient Greek philosophy ever since the early years, many of the so called “Church Fathers” were themselves scholars of the ancient Greek texts.

    Much of the work of theology in the middle ages was trying to fit ancient Greek philosophy with Christian mysteries and dogmas. This is where many of the current beliefs come from, for example the belief that every Sunday a priest manages to turn bread into flesh (a belief rejected by Protestants, but still held by Catholics).

    In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, God is logically demonstrated to be an entity that only does the most perfect activity, thinking, and thinks the most perfect thing it can think, itself.
    While for many of the Greeks the highest virtue was that of thinking, in Christianity the highest virtue is that of loving.
    You can see, then, how it is acceptable to think of a God that only loves, and loves himself.

    With this I’m not saying that it makes sense with all the other dogmas, as Aristotle’s God is incompatbile with the antropomorphic God that came to be with monotheism. Just that historically, in Christian lore, a God that only loves and loves himself is perfectly acceptable.

    Thanks for reading if you got this far 🙂

    1. How is this a serious answer? All it does is use “logical demonstration” to buttress an empirical claim. So the Christians considered loving the highest virtue. Do you SERIOUSLY think that this shows that before God created the Earth that he was “loving himself”? SERIOUSLY? You talk about things like what is “acceptable” or what “makes sense” but what’s lacking from your “explanation” is evidence that a. God created the Earth and b. before that sat around loving himself.

      If you think that this answers the question in any meaningful way, I don’t know how to tell you that the question isn’t one of logic and what “makes sense” but an empirical question. And your answer is manifestly NOT a serious one. You and the earlier theologians are just making stuff up.

      1. Hi,

        I am no theologian, neither I am a Christian or a theist for that matter.

        Despite what my beliefs or lack thereof are, I like to know what is in my people’s and other people’s religious and philosophical roots. Agreeing on something is not required to be able to study it. I really hope i don’t have to justify interest in learning to someone who seems to appreciate knowledge.

        This being said, at no point i tried to advocate such positions as coherent with current knowledge, current (as in after 1800s) logic, or even current Christian beliefs – I even mentioned that such vision is incompatible with it in the big picture.

        However, in the middle ages this vision was generally accepted by the Christian scholar community, and having the Catholic Church never denied those past positions, it makes sense _historically_ that a pope would hold them in some form.

        So again, hoping I won’t be misinterpreted this time: for Christians, being their history what it is, it makes sense to have a God that loved himself before creation.

        This has nothing to do with evidence, with empirism, or with thing B following from thing A. Just history.

        Lastly, about logic: Aristotle is the father of classic logic, and flawed as it was, he used it to prove the existence of a God that thought about itself for all eternity. It’s easy to ridicule a flawed logic when you live 2400 years later, but at his time his work was revolutionary. If you read it (Metaphysics, Lambda book), you’ll even find that he started from empirical observations. Again, keep in mind that you don’t have to agree with someone just to understand his point of view.

        Best regards

        1. It’s not the Middle Ages any more. The Pope made an empirical claim, and if all you were doing is saying why that empirical claim could be LOGICALLY true, that’s fine. But the claim is still ridiculous and completely unsupported by any evidence whatsoever. You know, I could also say it “makes sense” to say that God is not good, but evil or uncaring. In fact, others have made that argument. So justifying something because it “makes sense” is not a good tactic for theologians or believers.

          Admit it–there’s no evidence for any of these claims about reality, including the existence of a god. If that’s the case, why waste breath trying to figure out what that “god” was doing before he supposedly created the Earth (which he didn’t).

          1. If one was only allowed so say things coherent with the time he or she lived in, there would be no church at all. I agree with you on that, and on the fact that many of the dogmas have contradictions. I don’t see why you should bring them up in the first place.

            What I don’t agree with you on, is that the pope’s claim was empirical: “I saw God loving” would have been an empirical claim, “God loved” is not. Empirical claims are supposed to be backed by evidence, faith based claims are not by definition.

            Arguing whether faith based claims are supposed to be given equal dignity as empirical ones is a whole other matter, and it’s something i never implied mind you.

            The question was: how could the pope say this?
            I answered: in their lore, it makes sense to say it – and I tried to give a short historical explanation as to why. That’s really it.

            Do I think he is right? Nope. Do I think his answer is justified by evidence? Nope. Do I agree with the pope’s belief system and all that jazz? Nope.
            Then again, does this mean one shouldn’t try to figure out what goes on inside their minds and how someone is influenced by his or her culture’s history? Nope.

          2. Of course it’s an empirical claim. “What did Jack do on the day his wife died?” gets an empirical answer. “What did God do before he created the Earth?” also gets an empirical answer. Unless, that is,you’re assuming the whole thing is fiction and giving a fictional answer, like “How did Santa attach his reindeer to the sled.” The Pope’s question presupposes the empirical existence of a God, and a claim about how he behaved before he created the Earth (as well as the statement that he did create the Earth.

            As for trying to figure out what goes on inside the mind of a theologian: that’s a stupid waste of time. Seriously.

            If faith claims aren’t supposed to be backed by evidence, why do religious people and their theologians (Plantinga, biblical archeologists, etc.) always GIVE evidence for God. They claim they don’t need any, but realize in their hearts that they do, and so they’ll grasp onto weak evidence for God. That’s what apologetics is all abouty.

            This discussion is over now.

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