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Ex nihilo
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The Latin phrase ex nihilo means "out of nothing". It often appears in conjunction with the concept of creation, as in creatio ex nihilo, meaning "creation out of nothing". Due to the connotations of the phrase creatio ex nihilo, it often occurs in philosophical or creationistic arguments, as many Christians, Muslims and Jews believe that God created the universe from nothing. This contrasts with creatio ex materia (creation out of eternally pre-existent matter) and with creatio ex deo (creation out of the being of God).
A number of philosophers in ancient times attained a concept of God as the supreme ruler of the world, but did not develop a concept of God as the absolute cause of all finite existence.
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The Latin phrase ex nihilo means "out of nothing". It often appears in conjunction with the concept of creation, as in creatio ex nihilo, meaning "creation out of nothing". Due to the connotations of the phrase creatio ex nihilo, it often occurs in philosophical or creationistic arguments, as many Christians, Muslims and Jews believe that God created the universe from nothing. This contrasts with creatio ex materia (creation out of eternally pre-existent matter) and with creatio ex deo (creation out of the being of God).
A number of philosophers in ancient times attained a concept of God as the supreme ruler of the world, but did not develop a concept of God as the absolute cause of all finite existence. Before the biblical idea of creation arose, myths envisioned the world as pre-existing matter acted upon by a god or gods who reworked this material into the present world. The Hebrew tradition and the religious thought that developed out of its world-view apparently originated the formulation of "ex nihilo creation".
- Son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them: and consider that God made them out of nothing.
(100 BC)
Ex nihilo when used outside of a religious context also refers to something coming from nothing. For example, in a conversation, one might raise a topic "ex nihilo" if it bears no relation to the previous topic of discussion. The term also has specific meaning in military and computer-science contexts.
Creation of the universe
Arguments in favour
Biblical citations
Some verses from the Christian Bible cited in support of ex nihilo creation by God include:
- "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made."
- "... even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were."
- "And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are"
- "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear."
- "My son, have pity on me; I carried you nine months in the womb and suckled you three years.... I implore you, my child, observe heaven and earth, consider all that is in them, and acknowledge that God made them out of what did not exist, and that mankind comes into being in the same way. Do not fear this executioner, but prove yourself worthy of your brothers, and make death welcome, so that in the day of mercy I may receive you back in your brothers' company."
Jerusalem Bible
Logical approaches
Not all ex nihilo thought specifies a divine creator.
A major argument for creatio ex nihilo, the First cause argument, states in summary:
- everything that begins to exist has a cause
- the universe began to exist
- therefore, the universe must have a cause
Another argument for ex nihilo creation comes from Claude Nowell's Summum philosophy that states before anything existed, nothing existed, and if nothing existed, then it must have been possible for nothing to be. If it is possible for nothing to be (the argument goes), then it must be possible for everything to be.
Other support for creatio ex nihilo belief comes from the idea that something cannot arise from nothing; that would involve a contradiction. Therefore something must always have existed. But (this account continues) it is scientifically impossible for matter to always have existed. Moreover, matter is contingent: it is not logically impossible for it not to exist, and nothing else depends on it. Hence one deduces a Creator, non-contingent and not composed of matter: God.
Ancient Greek speculation
Eric Voegelin detects in Hesiod's chaos a creatio ex nihilo.
Islamic views
Several Qur'anic verses explicitly state that God created man, the heavens and the earth, out of nothing. The following quotations come from Muhammad Asad's translation, The Message of the Quran:
- 2:117: "The Originator is He of the heavens and the earth: and when He wills a thing to be, He but says unto it, 'Be' - and it is."
- 19:67: "But does man not bear in mind that We have created him aforetime out of nothing?"
- 21:30: "ARE, THEN, they who are bent on denying the truth not aware that the heavens and the earth were [once] one single entity, which We then parted asunder? – and [that] We made out of water every living thing? Will they not, then, [begin to] believe?"
- 21:56: "He answered: 'Nay, but your [true] Sustainer is the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth - He who has brought them into being: and I am one of those who bear witness to this [truth]!'"
- 35:1: "ALL PRAISE is due to God, Originator of the heavens and the earth, who causes the angels to be (His) message-bearers, endowed with wings, two, or three, or four. He adds to His creation whatever He wills: for, verily, God has the power to will anything."
- 51:47: "It is We who have built the universe with (Our creative) power; and, verily, it is We who are steadily expanding it."
Scientific views
James Hartle and Stephen Hawking regard creation ex nihilo as possible from the Hartle-Hawking state.
Arguments against
Some have argued that one cannot deduce creatio ex nihilo from the Hebrew and that the Book of Genesis, chapter 1, speaks of God "making" or "fashioning" the universe. However, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812) disputed such arguments in section II of his book titled "Tanya."
Thomas Jay Oord (born 1965), a Christian philosopher and theologian, argues that Christians should abandon the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Oord points to the work of biblical scholars, such as Jon D. Levenson, who argue that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo does not appear in Genesis. Oord speculates that God created our particular universe billions of years ago from primordial chaos. This chaos did not predate God, however, for God would have created the chaotic elements as well. Oord shows that God can create all things without creating from absolute nothingness.
Oord offers nine objections to creatio ex nihilo:
- Theoretical problem: One cannot conceive absolute nothingness.
- Biblical problem: Scripture – in Genesis, 2 Peter, and elsewhere – suggests creation from something (water, deep, chaos, etc.), not creation from absolutely nothing.
- Historical problem: The Gnostics Basilides and Valentinus first proposed creatio ex nihilo on the basis of assuming that creation was inherently evil and that God does not act in history. Early Christian theologians adopted the idea to affirm the kind of absolute divine power that many Christians now reject.
- Empirical problem: We have no evidence that our universe originally came into being from absolutely nothing.
- Creation at an instant problem: We have no evidence in the history of the universe after the big bang that entities can emerge instantaneously from absolute nothingness. As the earliest philosophers noted, out of nothing comes nothing (ex nihilo, nihil fit).
- Solitary power problem: Creatio ex nihilo assumes that a powerful God once acted alone. But power, as a social concept, only becomes meaningful in relation to others.
- Errant revelation problem: The God with the capacity to create something from absolutely nothing would apparently have the power to guarantee an unambiguous and inerrant message of salvation (e.g, inerrant Bible). An unambiguously clear and inerrant divine revelation does not exist.
- Evil problem: If God once had the power to create from absolutely nothing, God essentially retains that power. But a God of love with this capacity appears culpable for failing to prevent genuine evil.
- Empire Problem: The kind of divine power implied in creatio ex nihilo supports a theology of empire, based upon unilateral force and control of others.
A few early Jewish and Christian theologians and philosophers, including Philo, Justin, Athenagoras, Hermogenes, Clement of Alexandria, and, later, Johannes Scotus Eriugena have made statements that seem to indicate that they do not hold to the concept of the creation-out-of-nothing. Philo, for instance, postulated pre-existent matter alongside God.
Process theologians argue that humans have always related a God to some “world” or another.
The doctrine may, as the quotation from Maccabees (above) illustrates, have arisen to explain the creative action of a God whom Judaeo-Christian tradition usually refers to in male terms, a patriarchal God even. Males do not gestate living things in the way normally capable of observation, so theology had to explain creation in a different sense.
Critics also claim that rejecting creatio ex nihilo provides the opportunity to affirm that God has everlastingly created and related with some realm of non-divine actualities or another (compare continous creation). According to this alternative God-world theory, no non-divine thing exists without the creative activity of God, and nothing can terminate God’s necessary existence.
Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, dismissed creation ex nihilo, and introduced revelation that specifically countered this concept.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that matter is both eternal and infinite and that it can be neither created nor destroyed.
Latter-day Saint apologists have commented on Colossians 1:16 that the "Greek text does not teach ex nihilo, but creation out of pre-existing raw materials, since the verb ktidzo 'carried an architectural connotation...as in to build or establish a city....Thus, the verb presupposes the presence of already existing material.'"
While the idea of God everlastingly relating with creatures may seem strange because of its novelty, even its opponents in Christian history – like Thomas Aquinas – admitted it as a logical possibility.
Physicists Paul Steinhardt (Princeton University) and Neil Turok (Cambridge University) offer an alternative. Their proposal stems from the ancient idea that space and time have always existed in some form. Using developments in string theory, Steinhardt and Turok suggest the Big Bang of our universe as a bridge to a pre-existing universe, and speculate that creation undergoes an eternal succession of universes, with possibly trillions of years of evolution in each. Gravity and the transition from Big Crunch to Big Bang characterize an everlasting succession of universes. However, this view does not take into account the problems of infinite regression.
Hindu Views
The Vedanta schools of Hinduism reject the concept of creation ex nihilo for several reasons:
- both types of revelatory texts (sruti and sm?ti) designate matter as eternal although completely dependent on God — the Absolute Truth (param satyam)
- believers then have to attribute all the evil ingrained in material life to God, making Him partial and arbitrary, which does not logically accord with His nature
- creation ex nihilo directly violates the perceivable principle of the law of conservation of mass-energy, and therefore logically remains unsustainable
The Bhagavad Gita states the eternality of matter and its transformability clearly and succinctly: "Material nature and the living entities should be understood to be beginningless. Their transformations and the modes of matter are products of material nature." () The opening words of Krishna in BG 2.12-13 also imply this, as do the incorrect doctrines referred to in BG 16.8 as explained by the commentator Vadiraja Tirtha.
Scientific Views
In the early part of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) demonstrated that matter and energy represent two forms of the same thing. He showed that matter can change into energy and that energy can change into matter, as expressed in his equation E=MC2 (1905). See conservation of mass and conservation of energy.
Computer science
Some computing environments use the tag ex nihilo to describe various techniques for creating data structures or objects. In prototype-based programming languages, a programmer sets up an object "ex nihilo" if it does not use another object as its prototype.
Military organization
A unit raised ex nihilo forms without the use of significant components from other units. Thus, when a military authority sets up a unit composed entirely of personnel transferred as individuals from other units, one can speak of raising ex nihilo. Alternatives to this method, (also known as "cutting a unit from whole cloth") include expanding a skeleton (cadre) unit, assembling a large unit from components taken from other units, and the splitting of an existing unit into two or more skeleton units for subsequent filling out with additional personnel. German-speakers call this last-named method "calving" (das Kalben). French-speakers refer to it as "doubling" (dédoublement), but only, as the name suggests, when forming two new units on the framework of one old one.
See also
Suggested reading
- Thomas Jay Oord, Science of Love: The Wisdom of Well-Being (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005), especially chapter 2.
- Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994; New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
- Sjoerd L. Bonting, Chaos Theology: A Revised Creation Theology [Ottawa: Novalis, 2002].
- James Edward Hutchingson, Pandemoneum Tremendum: Chaos and Mystery in the Life of God [Pilgrim, 2000].
- David Ray Griffin, "Creation out of Chaos and The Problem of Evil" in
- Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming [Routledge, 2003].
- Michael E. Lodahl "Creation out of Nothing? Or is Next to Nothing Enough?" in Thy Nature and Name is Love, Bryan Stone and Thomas Jay Oord, eds. Nashville, TN: Kingswood, 2002
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