And maybe by creating us in the way he did - he limited himself.
Though such a thing would have been through his own choosing.
Unless we can strike some basic properties of God:
- Infinite knowledge
- Infinite capability
Of course, if we do that, God goes from some kind of supernatural entity to simply being a life form like us, only far more advanced, perhaps as far beyond us as we are over cats, or even as we are over bacteria.
I've seen how we deal with bacteria. We're not usually concerned with the subtle interactions between individual microbes. We have no qualms about freezing or packaging certain microbes by the millions, thawing them and putting them into a paradise of an environment, and then putting the bread dough into the oven and slaughter them en masse.
(What are the main things that yeast produce? Alcohol and carbon dioxide. We've got a knack for that as well. :hmm
After all, we got free will (I know a lot of people throw that out there) - but perhaps that limits what he can do. Which seems bizzare; why would he do that? can't he undo it? ... This is a huge hypothesis - I think he could by destroying everyone; but I wouldn't kill all my children because it was difficult for me to do things a certain way. Then you probably think that doesn't make him all powerful then - I disagree.
Free will: A fun philosophical argument. It is able to exist and not exist at the same time. It depends on perspective.
IF one could know the complete state of a system such as the human mind at any one point in time, it should then be possible to build a model or simulation that is capable of predict its responses to any stimuli. So in that case, free will does not exist, right?
However, there's that perspective thing: If you don't know of the information contained in the simulation, you could perhaps say that you have free will.
If granting us free will did indeed limit his options, either that was entirely of his own choosing, or else he is indeed a limited life form, and he accidentally created a design flaw but didn't want to fix it for whatever reason. Earth didn't work out, but there are billions upon billions of other planets out there. Sometimes it's easier to start fresh than it is to try to fix a mountain of buggy code. (Though, again, if this is the entity that created the Universe, he seems awfully focused on the behavioral quirks of one form of primate on a single small planet nestled among untold trillions of galaxies.)
And isn't
that a fun thought: God as the designer, engineer, and programmer. In our world, there are people who do those things, but they're really terrible at it. God's just one of 100 billion of his species, and he's one of their worst spacetime engineers.
and do we actually NEED to make many of those decisions - do we decide the best choice? Is it because of our limited resources that prevents better outcomes? So many times we don't even make the choice to save thousands over a few - so many times we make terrible choices despite a better choice... most of us are self serving - so NEED to is a strong phrase - most of the time our decisions are based on want- we WANT to EVEN if we have abilities to make it better.
"Want" and "need" certainly blur together at some point.
Your examples of making extraordinary sacrifices: Are they wants or needs? Whose wants and needs are they, and whose are more relevant?
I need food. Why? Because I want to live.
Oh.
Why do I want to live? Presumably because life forms that have some sort of ingrained drive to remain alive will tend to survive, so our response of "I want to stay alive" is an evolved behavior that came about as the result of natural selection. The "I don't really give a damn" genes didn't make it past the first bacterium that didn't distance itself from a toxic ocean vent.
What
can be classified as a need?