For Glory and for Sport: Jonathan Edwards and the Vedanta School on God’s Motive for Creating the World

The Vedanta school of Indian philosophy endorses a rather unusual account of God’s motives in creating the world. He created the world, they insist, for sport. An interpretation is off ered of the view and the main argument given in its defense, in the hopes of showing the view to be plausible. This is done primarily by making an extended comparison to the views of a Christian philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, who said that God created the world for his own glory. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of sport, I argue that the Vedantin view and Edwards’ view are versions of the same basic view. The major motivation for the Vedantin view is that it seems to be able to solve a dilemma for the view that God created the world. That solution is developed and assessed here, concluding that the Vedantin view does derive some support from the dialectic, but that the support is stronger in a Christian context than a Vedic (Hindu) one. Christian philosophers therefore have even more reason to accept this Vedantin account of God’s motives for creating the world than Vedic philosophers do.