Is Creation Ex Nihilo Biblical?

[Spartacus]

This topic has come up in a few other threads, but I'd like to have an opportunity to discuss it outside of the partisan and polemical style that seems to characterize those discussions.

I am somewhat familiar with the shape of scholarly opinion on the matter, though I don't have much to offer outside of a conference lecture given by the professor who taught me everything I know about it: https://soundcloud.com/iclnotredame/...ilo-biblical-1 I don't really expect everyone to listen to the whole thing, but there's not much I can say on this question that he doesn't.

The argument he presented and which I find fairly credible is that, strictly speaking, no biblical author embraces the idea that God created the world out of nothing. However, the chronological progression of the biblical authors and their perspectives sets Scripture on a trajectory toward ex nihilo creation. We go from God slaying the leviathan (as marduk slew Tiamat in the Enuma Elish) to God taming Leviathan (both of these are variations on the "chaoskampf" creation story). We then reach the point where Leviathan is something God created as a way to amuse Himself, then, finally, in Genesis 1, Leviathan isn't even named as one of the many sea creatures God creates.

I can try to elaborate more, but are there any other perspectives on this point? Is creation ex nihilo a biblical doctrine? If so, on what basis? If not, is it nonetheless permissible for Christians to believe?

[Cow Poke]

[theophilus]

God is eternal and so has no beginning. If we reject the belief that he created the first matter ex nihilo then we must believe that matter is also eternal or there would be nothing from which God could create anything.

[Spartacus]

God is eternal and so has no beginning. If we reject the belief that he created the first matter ex nihilo then we must believe that matter is also eternal or there would be nothing from which God could create anything.

This is compelling logic to us, but it first arose in early Christian thought as a response to Greek philosophy. That reasoning would have been foreign to the human author of Genesis 1.

[Cow Poke]

This is compelling logic to us, but it first arose in early Christian thought as a response to Greek philosophy. That reasoning would have been foreign to the human author of Genesis 1.

If one assumes he was inspired by the Holy Spirit, his authorship is not limited by his own understanding or logic.

[Spartacus]

If one assumes he was inspired by the Holy Spirit, his authorship is not limited by his own understanding or logic.

But the text itself is still limited by the language used, yes?

[One Bad Pig]

This is compelling logic to us, but it first arose in early Christian thought as a response to Greek philosophy. That reasoning would have been foreign to the human author of Genesis 1.

While the author of Genesis 1 may not have had that argument in mind, creatio ex nihilo appears to be a pre-Christian concept:

Source: Paul Copan

Many have suggested that the intertestamental book of 2 Maccabees states clearly the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. There a mother pleads with her son willingly to accept torture rather than recant his beliefs:

I beg you, child, look at the sky and the earth; see all that is in them and realize that God made them out of nothing, and that man comes into being in the same way. (7:28)

Although May thinks that this passage does not have the necessary doctrinal context for the idea of creatio ex nihilo (pp. 6, 16), others are not so convinced. For example, Gerhard von Rad maintains, "The conceptional formulation creatio ex nihilo is first found" in this passage. Moreover, to say that there was no doctrinal context at all for such a statement does not seem quite right. After all, the Jewish understanding of creation was that "the world as a whole can only be understood in the context of its coming into being." It is, then, not a far step from this assumption to creation out of nothing.

We find another reference to creation out of nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls (which May does not even mention):

From the God of Knowledge comes all that is and shall be. Before ever they existed He established their whole design, and when, as ordained for them, they come into being, it is in accord with His glorious design that they accomplish their task without change. (1QS 3:15)

The noted first-century rabbi, Gamaliel, seems to have reflected this concept of creation in his thinking (although May calls this an "isolated" reference [p. 23]). A philosopher challenged him, "Your God was indeed a great artist, but he had good materials [unformed space/void, darkness, water, wind, and the deep] to help him." Gamaliel, responded, "All of them are explicitly described as having been created by him [and not as preexistent]."

In the early Christian homily, Shepherd of Hermas, the first command is to believe that God brought all things "into existence out of non-existence."

© Copyright Original Source

In fact, those in the early centuries who claimed that God created out of formless matter (Philo, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria) were heavily influenced by Platonism (which held precisely that).

[Cow Poke]

But the text itself is still limited by the language used, yes?

Translation issues notwithstanding, yes.

[psstein]

No, it's not necessarily Biblical. The text can be interpreted to God creating from pre-existing matter. The first word, bereshit, does not really mean "in the beginning." It means something closer to "When first" or "At the beginning of."

[Jedidiah]

Translation issues notwithstanding, yes.

Still the text, being inspired by the Spirit, can reveal more to us than the original author could have understood from it.

[Jedidiah]

Also we should recognize Hebrews 11:3 "By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible." What does the not visible refer to.

[Paula]

To my understanding, science has closed the door on the notion of an eternal universe anyhow. Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin in 2003 indicated that any universe that has been expanding in its past (even if we consider a multi-verse theory) has to have a beginning. Vilenkin said "It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning."

Yeah, I know the discussion thus far has been more on the biblical evidence for God creating the universe out of nothing, but I thought it was an interesting point. I find the existence of a finite universe to be a very strong argument for God's existence. After all, the cosmological argument is based on this. And of course, the Bible also seems to strongly support creation out of nothing. John 1 (one of my favorite verses) uses pretty strong language to confirm God as the creator of all:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. "(John 1:1-3, emphasis mine).

[Pentecost]

To my understanding, science has closed the door on the notion of an eternal universe anyhow. Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin in 2003 indicated that any universe that has been expanding in its past (even if we consider a multi-verse theory) has to have a beginning. Vilenkin said "It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning."

Yeah, I know the discussion thus far has been more on the biblical evidence for God creating the universe out of nothing, but I thought it was an interesting point. I find the existence of a finite universe to be a very strong argument for God's existence. After all, the cosmological argument is based on this. And of course, the Bible also seems to strongly support creation out of nothing. John 1 (one of my favorite verses) uses pretty strong language to confirm God as the creator of all:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. "(John 1:1-3, emphasis mine).

I support creation ex nihilo based upon John 1, but I disagree that "science has closed the door on the notion of an eternal universe," the Big Bounce theory claims that the universe will one day cease expansion, and then collapse and "Big Crunch" back into itself just as is hypothesized to have been the status of the universe pre-Big Bang, this if true means that inevitably the Big Bang would occur again creating a sort of samsara on a universal scale, an eternal universe with matter and energy alternatively expanding endlessly and then collapsing and contracting again. This is one of the eschatologies of the religion of Cosmology.

[robrecht]

Agreed. And there are additional multiverse cosmologies that posit an eternal and/or timeless larger matrix.

[Paula]

I support creation ex nihilo based upon John 1, but I disagree that "science has closed the door on the notion of an eternal universe," the Big Bounce theory claims that the universe will one day cease expansion, and then collapse and "Big Crunch" back into itself just as is hypothesized to have been the status of the universe pre-Big Bang, this if true means that inevitably the Big Bang would occur again creating a sort of samsara on a universal scale, an eternal universe with matter and energy alternatively expanding endlessly and then collapsing and contracting again. This is one of the eschatologies of the religion of Cosmology.

Oh I know others have come up with alternatives to the standard model, but from what I've read concerning this the conclusion of their theory would apply even to the cyclical model and the multiverse model. And unlike the standard big bang model, which at the very least we have observational data for (i.e. such as background radiation, expansion of the universe, etc), what evidence do we have that the universe is cyclical (I don't mean this entirely rhetorically, if there is some evidence that has been suggested let me know as I would like to read up on it)? And the bounce scenario doesn't seem plausible with the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. The big chill is more likely--the heat death of the universe as maximum entropy is achieved.

At any rate, I find the evidence for a universe of a finite age to be pretty persuasive from multiple perspectives (from a biblical, philosophical, scientific viewpoint). But while I do enjoy debating the scientific data, what I am interested in this discussion is whether an eternal universe would be within the pale of orthodoxy or if it would be heterodox or just plain heresy.