If one spends a few moments looking at creation, one of the first things one will notice is that one sees it. Creatures exist in relation to each other. This need not be so; it would be possible for God to create each creature in a way that has only a direct relationship with God and nothing else; it could be enough for a creature to be born into the everlasting beatific vision and nothing else. And yet that didn’t happen, or at least didn’t happen to us. Why not?

Before I give an answer, I should not that it is foolishness to try to give an account for the actions of God as if one can know the mind of God, and though I’m a fool I’m not that much of a fool, so the answer I’m going to give should not be understood in that sort of sense. Neither I nor any creature can give a comprehensive answer to why God did anything, except the very general answer, because it is good. Which can also be phrased, out of love. If we want to be more specific, we are limited to noting one or more particular types of goodness which are contained within an action of God, and that is how my answer should be understood. The purposes of God I cannot know, but one sort of good which God does I can know. And it is absurd to suppose that God does anything by accident.

A theme running throughout creation is that of delegation. God could create each person individually, but instead he gives it to parents to be his act of creating their children. God could give each of us all the knowledge we’re capable of understanding, but instead he gives us speech so that we can tell truth to each other, and be his act of giving us knowledge. All of our interactions with other creatures—at least where we do rightly—involve us being some sort of gift to them. This is itself a sort of theosis; we not only know God, which we could do if it was just us-and-God, but we actually become incorporated into God’s goodness.

This also helps explain how evil acts which seem positive are none the less negative (since evil is a privation of good): it was given to all of us so as to order the world for the benefit of all others; to shoot a man with a gun is to fail to order the world for his benefit.

As I said above, I don’t claim anything so ridiculous as this being all that God is doing, but it seems inarguable that it is something which God is doing, and it seems to me to obviate a number of questions of the form, “why is God hidden?”, or “why doesn’t God act?” God isn’t hidden. God did act. You were just distracted by the man waving his arms.