If the biblical God exists, he is self-centered and conceited, because he created an entire universe just to sit around and be worshipped.

If the God you are describing were a needy king demanding applause, the objection would be exactly right. That is worth saying plainly, because the God of classical Christian theology is not that God.

1. The charge assumes God needs something. Paul told the Athenians that God "is not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:25). If God gains nothing from creation, creation cannot be the product of divine ego. A being with nothing to gain has no motive for self-advertisement.

2. Praise is a response to worth, not a supply. "Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things" (Revelation 4:11). The worth is real and prior to the praise; the praise adds nothing to it. Telling the truth about something magnificent is not flattery, and withholding it is not humility.

3. Pointing someone to the highest good is love. If God is the greatest good, then drawing us to himself is drawing us to our own deepest happiness: "in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore" (Psalm 16:11). Directing a friend toward the best thing available is generosity, not vanity.

4. The Trinity removes the audience problem. A solitary ego needs a crowd. Father, Son, and Spirit are eternal love within themselves, so God did not create in order to have someone to love him (John 17:24; 1 John 4:8). Creation flows out of fullness, not out of lack, which is the precise opposite of self-centeredness.

5. We become like what we worship. "Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them" (Psalm 115:8). Worship is formative, not merely expressive. So a command to worship is a command to stop becoming like money, or status, or a nation, and start becoming like something worth imitating.

6. Turn it around: everyone worships. The objection assumes a neutral, unworshipping observer, and no one occupies that position. The secular professional also organizes his life around something finite, whether career, family, politics, or self, and treats it as non-negotiable. The question is never whether you worship but whether your object can bear the weight.

7. The critic's standard would condemn ordinary love. If wanting to be loved by the person you love is vanity, then every parent, spouse, and friend is vain. Christians hold that God's desire for our love is like a father's desire for his child's, and that it is good for the child rather than merely gratifying to the father.

8. Christ is the test case. A self-centered deity does not enter his own creation and die for it. Philippians says he "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant" (Philippians 2:6-7). Whatever else the Christian God is, that is not a cosmic narcissist.

9. Honest note on the language of glory. Christians differ over how far the biblical language of God's jealousy, anger, and glory should be pressed as literal description of divine psychology. What they agree on is that God has no unmet need. The objection lands against popular preaching, not against the doctrine.

The God the objection describes really would be contemptible, and the objection is a useful mirror for any Christian who presents him that way. But the God of the creeds has nothing to gain and everything to give, which is why the charge of conceit misses its target.

Sources: C.S. Lewis; Reflections on the Psalms; Paul Copan; Peter Kreeft.

Related challenges:
• My Grandma was a sincerely nice person who happened to NOT be a Christian. Let me get this right...your "all-loving" God is going to punish her in hell for eternity because she didn't "accept" Jesus?
• Can God make a rock so heavy that even HE can't lift it?
• Is it fair that a North Korean woman who never heard 'boo' about Jesus, let alone the Gospel, is going to burn in hell for eternity because she didn't choose the right set of parents, geographically?