Did God really regret creating man in Genesis 6:6?

Yes, literally. Genesis 6:6 says the Lord was sorry He had made man and that it grieved Him to His heart. That is a true statement about God's real disposition, not a figure of speech invented to accommodate primitive readers. Yes, and I mean that in the plain sense. Genesis 6:5-6 reads: "The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart." Then the text quotes God directly saying the same thing: "for I am sorry that I have made them." Either God said that or He did not. Either the text is giving an accurate and truthful history of what God said, or it is not. If we accept "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased" in Matthew 17:5 as a real utterance at a real event that inaugurates the ministry of Christ, then we must accept every word of Genesis 6:6 as absolutely true. If we do not, we might as well throw out the rest. You cannot run a hermeneutic that takes the divine speeches you like at face value and dissolves the ones that trouble your metaphysics. That is exactly what happens with this verse. It gets dismissed as anthropomorphism, a way of talking down to ancient people. Think about what that explanation actually claims: that the ancients could grasp a doctrine as demanding as the immutability of the divine nature, but could not be told the truth plainly without God resorting to language that makes Him look like He changed His mind when He had not. I do not find that credible. The deeper problem is methodological. Aquinas, following the Aristotelian metaphysics newly recovered in his era, read Malachi 3:6, "I the Lord do not change," as a treatise on the immutability of the divine nature, and then used that reading as the foundation for the rule that God cannot change His mind. Read in context, Malachi is not addressing ontological immutability at all. It is asserting God's moral integrity over against the faithlessness of Israel. God's moral integrity certainly implies His immutability, as everything in God is related to His immutability. But once you have made a metaphysical rule out of a passage about integrity, you are obliged to treat Amos 7:3, where God repents of a judgment, and Exodus 32, where Moses persuades God twice to change His mind, as pious fiction. And if the Exodus narrative is not a real cause-and-effect sequence in which Moses, by his unique friendship with God, moves God to change a stated intention, then the whole drama is a fabrication. Any self-respecting theologian ought to shudder at what that does to the reliability of Scripture. In effect, that apologetic makes Scripture mutable in order to keep a metaphysics about God immutable. The Church's own rule points the other way. She has always held to the literal sense unless reason or necessity forces otherwise, which is Augustine's rule and Leo XIII's in Providentissimus Deus. She insisted on the literal sense of "This is my body" and of "unless a man is born of water and the Spirit," and only afterward supplied a metaphysical explanation to fit the literal doctrine, not the reverse. Do that here and you find no contradiction. God is immutable in His essence, and He is genuinely grieved by sin. And the Church says so. Trent teaches that Adam, by his transgression, incurred "the wrath and indignation of God," and wrath in the Church's usage covers both vengeful anger and retributive punishment. The Catechism speaks of God being moved from wrath to mercy when we appease Him, as Moses did when God intended to destroy Israel, and describes God as "grievously offended" by our crimes. If that disposition were not a historical reality, the Catechism could not report it as one. St. Paul tells us in Ephesians 4:30 not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God, which is not a courtesy phrase. If God has no capacity for remorse over the sins of man, then in Genesis 6:6 He has misrepresented Himself, and God cannot lie. Now, what did God do with that grief? He did not abandon the project. He preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, gave the world one hundred and twenty years to repent, and when none of them did, He cleansed the earth and began again through the ark. He chose to salvage what could be salvaged, and He bound Himself to carry the plan of redemption through to the end. So the verse is not a picture of divine second thoughts about whether creating man was a mistake. It is a picture of God telling us honestly what human wickedness does to Him, and then continuing anyway. I have written a whole book on this, The Immutable God Who Can Change His Mind, because the issue is bigger than one verse. Get it wrong and you end up with a God who says He is one way and is not that way. People who think they can escape that by appealing to their metaphysical principles only fool themselves, and they will never really know who God is or why He does what He does.