So goes the claim in an antiphon somewhere in the “Christian Book of Prayer” (one-volume version of the liturgy of hours, Catholic version).
Man was made to glorify God.
This statement points to a great truth for sure, but we have to understand that all truths, even the greatest of truths revealed by God are spoken in human language and are interpreted by those who read or hear according not only to the meaning of individual words but according to human concepts.
What means ‘made’? I’ll answer from a Biblical standpoint.
God is a story-teller.
He tells a story by shaping landscapes and characters from stuff He made in a different way. We should always keep in mind that God’s creation of the stuff from which He shaped this world is one sort of act-of-being and His shaping of that stuff into a particular world and into that world’s stars and butterflies and used-car salesmen is another sort of act-of-being. We have to avoid confusing the two sorts of creative act, that which brought into being from nothing the basic stuff of Creation and that which brought into being a world and its entities.
We Christians, and many others, believe God made man, but modern empirical knowledge indicates that the Almighty made man by processes corresponding to those in the Biblical narratives which describe God’s shaping of the People of Israel. He made man by shaping Him through the events of this world. We should respect the Creator and the ways in which He works and if those ways don’t meet our standards, we should question our standards rather than trying to force our ideas upon the world. As always, we should do as St. Thomas Aquinas advised:
[J]ust as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can reach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made… [From St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on 1 Corinthians.]
This raises difficult questions, such as: was there a first human being and, if so, what were his parents? Such a question is best ignored after contemplating it for a while, but it leads to a whole series of questions about human nature and its moral aspects, about the incoherence which lies under the word ‘person’ as generally used. We begin to question free-will and see the need to radically revise our understanding of sin to retain the connotation of ‘separation from God and His Creation’ but to allow for all that we know of evolution and genetics and the brain sciences. We even need to see that some suffer that separation because of the events caused by God’s chosen acts of shaping men and their environments. Over many centuries, we’ve been forced to see that disease is caused by microbes and nutritional deficiencies and genetic problems. We’ve been forced to see that volcanoes and earthquakes are caused by the same movements of the earth which give us fertile soils and harbors both useful and beautiful. Now, we’re struggling against the realization that even serious sexual sins can be at least partially caused by genetic problems.
There is much effort being put into various revisions of our incomplete or impoverished understandings of Creation, but such revisions aren’t good enough. We need to return to fundamentals, to realize that our Christian ancestors understood the most important of all empirical truths when they chanted, “Man was made to glorify God,” — that God is the source of created being, but to also realize that they had radically inadequate or even incorrect understandings of the divine acts pointed at by the word ‘made’.
Those who wish to understand why I think we should glorify God can download the short article: Justice: The First Step Towards God.