Why did God create human beings?

The Divine Principle teaches that God created human beings for three inseparable reasons: to have a substantial object of love with whom He could share joy, to take on a visible form through completed sons and daughters, and to multiply a lineage of children who could inherit His heart.

Love cannot be felt in isolation — a subject requires an object — so the infinite God chose to realize His love through embodied partners made in His image.

This framework is developed in the Exposition of the Divine Principle, Principle of Creation, in the section on the Purpose of Creation.

The Exposition of the Divine Principle teaches that every being God created exists through a relationship between a subject partner and an object partner (dual characteristics).

God Himself, as the absolute subject, required an object partner toward whom He could direct infinite love and from whom He could receive that love returned.

Human beings, created in God's image with mind and body, were designed as the supreme object partners — the only beings capable of reciprocating God's love at the same qualitative level.

The well-known three great blessings in Genesis 1:28 (“Be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion”) are read in the Divine Principle as the three stages by which this purpose is completed: individual perfection, family formation through lineage, and loving stewardship of creation.

Key Concepts

Object Partner (대상, daesang) — The corresponding partner in a subject-object relationship through which love, life, and lineage flow; humans are God's supreme object partners.

Dual Characteristics (이성성상, iseong-seongsang) — The teaching that every created being, and God Himself, contains paired aspects (internal nature/external form, masculinity/femininity) that interact to produce existence and love.

Three Great Blessings — The foundational charge in Genesis 1:28 — be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth — interpreted in the Divine Principle as individual maturity, true family, and dominion over creation.

Four Great Attributes — God's essential nature as absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal — qualities He intended to transmit to human beings as His heirs fully.

The Everyday Picture

Rev. Moon often returned to a simple observation about parents and children when explaining why God created. A parent with no child, he said, can hold love inside but cannot complete it — love by its nature must flow outward to someone who receives and responds.

In one 1995 talk, he put it plainly:

“God created because He needed an object. Without an object, one cannot feel love” (270-272, July 16, 1995).

The infinite God, on this view, was in the same position as a parent before the first child is born — full of love with no one to pour it into. Creation was the decision to bring that child into being so that love could finally move between two hearts.

Deeper Context

The Unification account of creation begins with a problem internal to God Himself. God is described as containing dual characteristics — internal nature and external form, masculinity and femininity — in a harmonized, unified state, but as existing without visible shape.

For the love contained in such a Being to be realized rather than merely possessed, it required a partner capable of returning it. Rev. Moon identified three distinct reasons for this single act: God needed an object of love, a body to appear in the visible world, and a lineage through which His love could multiply. These were not three separate motives but three facets of one purpose.

God created because He needed an object. Without an object, one cannot feel love. He created for completion, He created to take on a body, and He created to multiply. Because of these three requirements, God created. God, too, needs to take on a body. To take on a body, one needs an object partner. The object partner upon whom He placed His body was Adam and Eve. Therefore, the form of Adam and Eve becomes the form of God.

— Sun Myung Moon (270-272, 07/16/1995) Cham Bumo Gyeong

This passage is the most compact statement Rev. Moon gave of the purpose of creation. The three reasons — object, body, lineage — are presented as a single interlocking logic, not a list of separate motives.

Why did God create humans? Because God also needs to take on a body. Adam and Eve become God's body. Next, because He needed an object of love, He created human beings. And He established substantial objects so that the people of the Kingdom of Heaven could be multiplied. That is, He intends to bear His sons and daughters and adopt them into the Kingdom. It is for this purpose that God created human beings.

— Sun Myung Moon (264-153, 10/09/1994)

Here, Rev. Moon frames human beings as “small Gods” who carry God's attributes — the means by which the invisible Creator becomes visible, and the Kingdom is populated by His own descendants rather than strangers.

The second dimension — embodiment — follows from the first. An infinite, unembodied God cannot be directly encountered by finite, embodied creatures.

In Unification thought, Adam and Eve, had they reached maturity without the Fall, would have become God's substantial form in the visible world. God would “dwell within them” and through them would be able to love, teach, and rule the physical creation He had made.

This is why the tradition calls God the "vertical Parent" and the perfected human couple the “horizontal parents” — one invisible, one visible, meeting at the same center of true love.

God's love ideal was to set up Adam and Eve, His children, as substantial object partners in the visible world and be eternally united with them. God desires to dwell within human beings. The point at which the love ideal of the invisible God is realized through substantial human beings is the moment human beings are completed as God's object partners.

— Sun Myung Moon (135-011, 08/20/1985)

The third reason is lineage. A creation without reproduction would be static; God's ideal, by contrast, is a multiplying family.

The purpose was not a single ideal couple but an entire expanding household of sons and daughters who inherit God's heart (shimjeong) and, through the give-and-receive action of love, extend that heart through generations. This is why the Divine Principle places such weight on true parents, true family, and true lineage as theological categories, not just ethical ones.

God absolutely invested Himself to create an absolute object of love. It was because He needed a substantial object of love that He created. Then, because He needed an object of love centered on the earth, He carried out the providence of creation. On that foundation, God granted the function of multiplication so that the human beings created as His absolute object partners could exist eternally. These are God's three great elements of creation. God is the root of love, the root of life, the root of lineage, the root of the Kingdom on earth and the Kingdom in heaven.

— Sun Myung Moon (565-315, 06/13/2007)

What all three reasons share is a single claim about the nature of love: love is never a solo act. It requires a genuine counterpart capable of freely returning it.

This is why Unification theology insists that human beings were given a portion of responsibility — a 5% share in completing their own growth. A pre-programmed love is not love at all; God's purpose required partners whose response was their own.

Comparative Religion

Christianity — The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647) famously answers its first question, “What is the chief end of man?” with “To glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Augustine, in the opening of his Confessions, writes, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” — framing creation as God's invitation into relationship.

Mainstream Christian theology has historically avoided saying God “needed” anything, preferring to say creation flows from God's free overflow of love (bonum diffusivum sui).

The Unification reading draws closer to the mystics here than to scholasticism: God's love is held to require a partner for completion, not merely to overflow into one.

Judaism — Classical rabbinic sources (Midrash Tanchuma on Naso, and later Hasidic teachers, including Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi in the Tanya) hold that “the Holy One, blessed be He, desired a dwelling place in the lower worlds.” <!– unverified: specific page citation for Tanchuma Naso and Tanya passage --> Creation, on this view, is God's chosen self-limitation (tzimtzum in the Lurianic tradition) to make room for a finite “other” who can freely respond.

The resonance with Unification thought is strong: both see creation as God's deliberate choice to have a real partner in love, not a self-contained act.

Islam — The Qur'an states, “I did not create the jinn and humankind except to worship Me” (Qur'an 51:56). Classical commentators, including al-Ghazali, read “worship” ('ibada) as loving servanthood that culminates in nearness to God (qurb). Islamic theology preserves a sharper ontological distance between Creator and creature than the Unification tradition does — God does not “take on a body” through humans in Islam — but both traditions agree that humans were made for a relationship of love directed back toward their Source.

Buddhism — The question "why did God create?” has no direct parallel in most Buddhist traditions, which generally do not affirm a personal creator God. The closest analogue is the teaching that all beings possess buddha-nature and are oriented toward awakening; existence itself is not explained by a creator's purpose but by the beginningless interplay of causes and conditions. Rather than force a parallel, it is more honest to note that on this specific question, the traditions ask different questions.

Across traditions, the shared element is that human existence is purposeful rather than accidental and is oriented toward love, knowledge, or communion with the ultimate. The Unification distinctive is the claim that God Himself required this relationship for His love to be realized — a claim most traditions handle with more caution.

Key Takeaway

• God created human beings because love cannot exist in isolation; it requires a real object partner to receive and return it.
• In plain terms, a parent without a child has love inside but nowhere for it to flow — God's situation before creation, as Rev. Moon described it.
• The three reasons — object of love, visible embodiment, multiplying lineage — are three facets of one purpose, not three separate motives.
• Human beings were designed to become God's substantial form in the visible world, inheriting His four great attributes: absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal.
• The purpose of creation required genuine partners, which is why humans were given a portion of responsibility — a 5% share in completing their own growth and returning freely chosen love.

Related Questions

What is the purpose of human life according to the Divine Principle?

The Divine Principle teaches that human life fulfills its purpose through the three great blessings: achieving individual maturity by uniting mind and body around God's love, forming a true family centered on God, and exercising loving dominion over creation. Each blessing corresponds to one stage of realizing God's original creation ideal.

Why did God give humans free will if He knew they could fall?

The Divine Principle teaches that love requires freedom — without the ability to choose, genuine love cannot exist. God accepted the risk of the Fall because coerced obedience would contradict the very purpose for which He created.

What does it mean that Adam and Eve were meant to be God's “body”?

In Unification thought, God is invisible and can only be directly encountered in the visible world through completed human beings. Had Adam and Eve reached full maturity, God would have dwelt within them as an indwelling Parent, and they would have become the visible embodiment of the invisible God. In Their Own Words

God's attributes are absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal. Human beings are the supreme masterpiece, created by fully inheriting these attributes of God. If Adam and Eve had not fallen, had kept God's commandment and achieved individual perfection, and had been able to hold their wedding under God's blessing — then their children and every descendant down the generations would have inherited God's attributes eternally and lived as God's very body.

— Sun Myung Moon (501-032, 07/14/2005)

This passage makes the continuity explicit: God's purpose in creating was not limited to Adam and Eve. Every human being was designed to inherit the same four great attributes and to live as an extension of God's own presence.

God is the origin of life, the origin of love, the origin of lineage — the place where human love, life, and lineage can become one with Him. To love by giving birth to sons and daughters is to inherit all the joy God felt when He created human beings. Because this is inherited through true love, one's sons and daughters come to possess a value that cannot be exchanged for heaven and earth, nor even for one's own self.

— Sun Myung Moon (223-267, 11/12/1991)

Here, the circle closes. God's purpose in creating was joy through love, and that same joy is meant to be re-experienced, generation after generation, through every parent who loves a child.

The purpose of creation is not a one-time event in the past but a pattern meant to repeat through every true family.