Concept

Creatio ex Nihilo

Creatio ex nihilo ("creation out of nothing") is the Christian teaching that God brought everything other than Himself into existence without using any pre-existing material and without making it out of His own being.

Intro

When people ask "what did God make the world out of?", they usually picture a builder who needs bricks. Christianity says creation is not like that. God did not shape some older stuff that was already lying around, and He did not break off a piece of Himself. He simply willed the universe to exist, and it began to exist.

That means there are only two kinds of reality: God, who has always existed and depends on nothing, and everything else, which exists because God made it and keeps it in being. The world is not God, and God is not the world.

"Out of nothing" does not mean "nothing" is a strange kind of material God used. It means there was no material. The phrase tells you what God did not use, not what He did use. What He used was His word and His will: "he spake, and it was done" (Psalm 33:9, ASV).

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In full

The doctrine makes three claims:

1. No pre-existing material. Nothing existed alongside God for Him to work with. Against Plato's Timaeus, where a divine craftsman shapes a chaos that was already there, Christianity holds that matter itself is created.
2. Not from God's own substance. Creation is not an emanation or a portion of the divine nature. Against Neoplatonic emanation (Plotinus) and against pantheism (Spinoza's Deus sive Natura, "God or Nature"), the world is distinct from God.
3. By free will, not necessity. God was not compelled to create and gained nothing by it. Creation is a gift, which is why Scripture grounds it in God's will: "because of thy will they were, and were created" (Revelation 4:11, ASV).

Classical theology adds a fourth point that follows from these: creation is not only a past event but a continuing dependence. What God made from nothing would return to nothing if He ceased to hold it in being (Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:17). See Divine Conservationism and Divine Providence.

Aquinas states the logic precisely. Creation is "the emanation of all being from the universal cause," and "from nothing" means not from anything: the "from" marks order (first nothing, then something), not a material out of which (Summa Theologiae I q.45 a.1).

The biblical basis

No single verse uses the phrase, and honest exegesis should say so. The doctrine is built from several lines of evidence that converge:

1. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1, ASV). In its basic (Qal) stem the Hebrew verb bārāʾ ("create," H1254) takes only God as its subject in the Old Testament, and it never names a material. That does not by itself prove creation from nothing, but it marks creation as an act only God performs.
2. God alone made everything. "I am Jehovah, that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone" (Isaiah 44:24, ASV). "Thou hast made heaven... the earth and all things that are thereon" (Nehemiah 9:6, ASV). If God made all things, then there was no uncreated matter He worked on.
3. All things through the Word. "All things were made through him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made" (John 1:3, ASV). "In him were all things created... and he is before all things, and in him all things consist" (Colossians 1:16-17, ASV).
4. Not from what appears. "The worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which appear" (Hebrews 11:3, ASV).
5. Calling into being what was not. God "calleth the things that are not, as though they were" (Romans 4:17, ASV).
6. Before the world, God. "Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God" (Psalm 90:2, ASV).
7. The Jewish background. A mother in 2 Maccabees urges her son to "consider that God made them of things that were not" (2 Maccabees 7:28, KJV Apocrypha). Scholars debate whether that phrase means absolute nothingness or unformed matter, but it shows the idea was in the air before the New Testament.

History of the doctrine

• Theophilus of Antioch (To Autolycus 2.4, c. AD 180) argued against the Platonists that if matter were uncreated like God, God would not be the maker of all things, and His power would be no greater than a human craftsman's.
• Irenaeus (Against Heresies 2.10.4) put the contrast plainly: people can only make things out of material that already exists, but God is superior in that He called into being the very substance of what He made.
• Augustine (Confessions XII.7) gave the argument that answers the pantheist directly. God did not make heaven and earth out of Himself, for then they would be equal to His only-begotten Son, and there was nothing besides Him to make them from. So He made them out of nothing.
• The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) defined God as the creator who "by his almighty power... made from nothing" both spiritual and bodily creatures.
• Modern scholarship. Gerhard May (Creatio ex Nihilo, 1978; English 1994) argued that the doctrine was formulated explicitly in the late second century, against Gnostic and Platonist views. Others reply that the formulation was late but the conviction it states (God made everything, matter included) is already in the biblical texts above. Both sides agree that by Irenaeus the church held it as its settled teaching.

Positions compared

See Pantheism, Panentheism, Mormonism and Materialism.

Why it matters

1. God is truly God. If anything existed alongside God uncreated, God would be one eternal thing among others, not the source of all things. See Aseity.
2. The world is truly good and truly not God. It is good because God made it (Genesis 1:31), and it is not divine, so it can be studied rather than worshipped. Paul names the alternative: people "worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25, ASV).
3. Evil is not part of God. If the world were made of God, its cruelty would be God's. Because the world is distinct, evil can be a corruption of something good rather than a feature of the divine. See Evil as Privation of Good.
4. It fits the evidence of a beginning. Modern cosmology does not prove creation from nothing, and Christians should not claim it does. But a universe that began (see Big Bang and Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem) is what the doctrine would lead one to expect, and an eternal, uncreated universe is what it denies.

See also

• God Is the Eternal Atoms Objection Defeater, the pantheist claim that God made the world out of Himself
• Pantheism, the view that God and the world are identical
• Aseity, God's existence from Himself alone
• Causal Principle, whatever begins to exist has a cause
• Zero and the Metaphysics of Nothing, what "nothing" means
• Argument from the Creation of Time, why time itself is part of creation
• Divine Conservationism, creation as continuing dependence
• Classical Theism, the doctrine of God this belongs to