Creatio Ex Nihilo: Creation Out of Nothing and Its Rivals

Creatio ex nihilo, Latin for "creation out of nothing", is the doctrine that God made everything other than Himself without using any pre-existing material and without drawing it out of His own being. It follows that the world is wholly distinct from God, finite and dependent on Him at every moment, while He depends on nothing. Four serious alternatives have been proposed (eternal matter, emanation, creation out of chaos and a universe co-eternal with God), and a fifth view accepts the doctrine while changing what God is. Each is set out below at full strength before the dispute is dissolved.

Key takeaways

• Creatio ex nihilo is the claim that God made all things without material and without drawing them from His own substance: the world is neither a second eternal thing nor a piece of God.
• The first known written statement of creation out of nothing is Theophilus of Antioch's, in the late second century, and the Fourth Lateran Council confessed it in 1215.
• Its rivals each guard something true: Plato's craftsman guards order, Plotinus's emanation guards the oneness of the source, process theology guards creaturely agency.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) answers the co-eternal universe objection without Craig's hybrid view, in which God becomes temporal, or process theology's eternal chaos: the world is finite because contingent, created and sustained in one eternal act.
• Creation from nothing secures the creature's own existence and freedom, because what is not made of God is really itself.

What is creatio ex nihilo?

Creatio ex nihilo is the doctrine that matter, and everything else that is not God, had a source in God's free act and in nothing else. Wikipedia's entry states the core claim well: it is "the doctrine that matter is not eternal but had to be created by some divine creative act." The contrasting view, creatio ex materia, holds that "matter has always existed and that the modern cosmos is a reformation of pre-existing, primordial matter."

The word "nothing" needs care. It does not name a dark stuff God worked on, as a potter works clay. Thomas Aquinas put it exactly: creation, "which is the emanation of all being, is from the 'not-being' which is 'nothing'" (Summa Theologiae I q.45 a.1). "Out of nothing" means "not out of anything".

The doctrine makes three denials and one claim. It denies that the world was made from eternal matter. It denies that the world was drawn out of God's own substance. It denies that creating changed God. And it claims that the creature depends on God for its whole being, so that, in Aquinas's phrase, "creation in the creature is only a certain relation to the Creator as to the principle of its being."

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That is why the doctrine sits at the base of the classical attributes of God. It fixes the line between Creator and creature, and every later chapter of the doctrine of God assumes the line is where creation ex nihilo puts it.

Volume One of the Many Beings series is free; download it here.

Is creation out of nothing in the Bible?

Yes, though no single verse states it in the vocabulary of philosophy. The case is cumulative, and it begins with the first sentence of Scripture:

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." (Genesis 1:1–2, NIV)

"The heavens and the earth" is the Hebrew way of saying everything. The grammar of verse 1 is debated, and Wikipedia notes that rabbinical commentators and Hebrew scholars have long argued that the traditional reading, an absolute beginning, cannot be preferred over the alternatives "based on purely linguistic and exegetical grounds." We return to verse 2 when the rivals speak.

John's prologue removes the exceptions:

"Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made." (John 1:3, NIV)

If any material were uncreated, something would exist that was not made through the Word. Paul says the same of the Son, and in one breath joins making to keeping:

"For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:16–17, NIV)

Hebrews comes closest to the formula: "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" (Hebrews 11:3, NIV). Strictly, it denies a visible source. Revelation names the cause and the standing result: "you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being" (Revelation 4:11, NIV).

Romans 4:17, on the God who "calls things that are not as though they were" (NIV), is often added, but its setting is Abraham's and Sarah's deadness, so it supports the doctrine by analogy. And 2 Maccabees 7:28, outside the Protestant canon, says God did not make heaven and earth out of things that existed, a reading some scholars contest. Together, the "all things" texts leave nothing outside God's making.

The full series is listed on the books page.

How did the early church formulate the doctrine?

The church formulated creation ex nihilo against the Platonists. The first known written statement comes from Theophilus of Antioch in the late second century. In To Autolycus he reports that Plato and his school "maintain that matter as well as God is uncreated, and aver that it is coeval with God", and he draws the consequence: "God is no longer, according to the Platonists, the Creator of all things." His own claim is the doctrine in miniature: "out of things that are not He creates and has created things that are."

Irenaeus of Lyons made the contrast with human making the centre of the argument:

"While men, indeed, cannot make anything out of nothing, but only out of matter already existing, yet God is in this point pre-eminently superior to men, that He Himself called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence." (Against Heresies II.10.4)

Augustine added the second denial, against emanation, in a single prayer:

"For Thou created heaven and earth, not out of Yourself, for then they would be equal to Your Only-begotten … And anything else except You there was not whence You might create these things … therefore, out of nothing You created heaven and earth." (Confessions XII.7.7)

The argument is tight. What comes from God's own substance is God, which is what the church confesses of the Son and denies of the world. Nothing else existed to be used. So the world came from nothing.

The Fourth Lateran Council fixed the teaching in 1215, confessing the God "who by his almighty power at the beginning of time created from nothing both spiritual and corporeal creatures" (Constitution 1). Aquinas then gave it the precise scholastic definition quoted above, and Thomism has carried it since.

If you want the argument and not only the history, start with Volume One.

What are the rivals to creatio ex nihilo?

Five positions press against the doctrine. Three replace it, one claims to undo it from within classical theism, and one keeps it while changing what God is. Each has a real motive, and each is stated here as its friends would state it.

Eternal matter and Plato's craftsman

In Plato's Timaeus a divine Craftsman, "imitating an unchanging and eternal model, imposes mathematical order on a preexistent chaos to generate the ordered universe", as the Stanford Encyclopedia summarises. Before he acts, the receptacle is "subject to erratic and disorderly motions." Whether the story describes a real beginning was disputed from Aristotle on; the metaphorical reading was "the prevailing (though not exclusive) view among Platonists." Aristotle went further and held the cosmos eternal.

The view has three strengths. It honours the maxim that nothing comes from nothing. It explains order as the work of mind. And it gives a ready account of imperfection: the Craftsman did his best with a material he did not make.

Emanation and the overflowing One

Plotinus, the third-century founder of Neoplatonism, held that the cosmos is an emanation of God. All things proceed from the One as heat proceeds from fire, the image the Stanford Encyclopedia notes he used habitually. The entry also notes "the necessity of what results from it", while Plotinus describes the One's activity as its total freedom.

Emanation keeps two things the craftsman model loses. The source is absolutely one, with no rival matter beside it. And the world is intimately joined to its source, as radiance to light, so that nothing exists cut off from the divine. Jewish philosophers and the Church Fathers rejected it, yet its sense of the world's nearness to God is a real good.

Process theology and creation out of chaos

Process theology, the school that grew from Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics, rejects creation from nothing outright. Its clearest statement on this point is David Ray Griffin's 1981 essay "Creation Out of Chaos and the Problem of Evil." Griffin read Genesis 1:1 as "When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void", and said "most Hebrew scholars believe this to be the more accurate translation." On that reading verse 2 describes a material already present, and God's work is formation, not origination.

Griffin judged that the traditional doctrine has "so little direct biblical support", with 2 Maccabees 7:28 "the only clear statement." His deeper motive was evil. If creation is from nothing, "the beings of this world are absolutely dependent upon God", and a God with that power seems answerable for every horror He does not stop. Griffin's alternative was a God who orders a chaos He did not make: "God cannot control but can only persuade."

The strength of the view is moral seriousness. It takes evil and creaturely agency with full weight, and it reads the omnipotence of God as persuasive love. Its milder cousin, open theism, keeps creation from nothing but shares the instinct that God must make room for the world.

The co-eternal universe objection

The fourth challenge comes from inside classical theism. The classical God is timeless and knows the whole of history in one eternal present. Then the whole of history, from the first moment to the last, stands complete before Him: a finished four-dimensional whole that simply is. If that whole is eternally present to an eternal God, the world looks co-eternal with Him. Creation from nothing seems to lose its point, since nothing is ever "not yet" for a God who holds it all.

The objection is serious because it uses the classical theist's own commitments against him.

Craig: a real beginning, and a God who enters time

William Lane Craig affirms creation from nothing and defends it with the kalam cosmological argument, which he set out in The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979). Its premises are simple: "Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause" (Wikipedia). The argument descends from al-Ghazali. Two philosophical supports carry the second premise: an actual infinite cannot exist in reality, and a series formed by successive addition cannot reach infinity. The questions about the infinite are taken up in Volume Five.

Craig pairs the argument with a view of God's relation to time: God is timeless without creation and temporal with it. In his words, "having become temporal at the moment of creation, God can never revert to timelessness" (Good Book Blog, 2014). The view honours a real beginning, takes the cosmological evidence seriously, and lets God relate to a world with a history.

Volume Three takes up the beginning of time at length; see what it covers.

What does each side press against the others?

Each rival has a strong point against creation ex nihilo, and its defenders have strong points against each rival.

Against eternal matter, the classical theist presses Theophilus's point: if matter is uncreated, God is not the Creator of all things, and there are two ultimates, one of which God did not make and cannot fully master. Matter would have the self-existence that belongs to God alone. The Platonist answers that creation from nothing breaks the maxim that nothing comes from nothing. The classical reply is Irenaeus's: the maxim governs makers who work on material, and God is not that kind of maker.

Against emanation, the classical theist presses Augustine's point: what comes from God's substance is equal to God, so an emanated world would be divine and, if it flows as heat from fire, necessary. The Neoplatonist answers that creation by will makes God arbitrary, a ruler choosing among options, and that a world made from nothing seems cut off from its source, a thing set outside God rather than radiance from Him.

Against process theology, the classical theist presses ultimacy. A God who persuades a chaos He did not make is not the source of all that is, and cannot guarantee that His purposes will be completed. On Genesis 1:2, either reading of verse 1 leaves the earth of verse 2 as the earth God is creating, and John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16 leave nothing uncreated. The process theologian answers with the problem of evil and the charge that absolute dependence leaves no room for real creaturely agency. If God could have made a world without chaos and did not, the theodicy question becomes harder, not easier.

Against the timeless God, the co-eternal objection presses as stated above, and Craig presses with it: a God who never enters time seems unable to share the world's "now".

Against Craig, the classical theist asks how God can pass from timelessness into time: such a passage gives God a "before" and an "after" in Himself, which is the change the doctrine of creation was meant to exclude. Craig's answer is that a God who really relates to a temporal world must share its present, and that the cost is worth paying. Aquinas, for his part, cautions against resting creation on proofs of a beginning: "By faith alone do we hold, and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist" (ST I q.46 a.2).

How does FICT answer the co-eternal universe objection?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT), the position argued across the Many Beings books, answers the objection by reading "before" as dependence rather than duration: from God's own frame, the whole history of the world is held in one act, and the world is not thereby eternal as He is. Craig's hybrid view and process theology each give something up at this point. Craig keeps the beginning by putting God into time. Process theology keeps creaturely agency by giving up creation from nothing. FICT holds that neither price is necessary, because both rivals read creation from our finite, human frame, in which "before" means earlier on a clock, and making and keeping are successive events.

Volume Three, Resolving Time and Eternity, states the conclusion directly. The world's whole history is "not 'made of God.' It is a wholly distinct, finite, and contingent object that the Divine Will brought into existence without antecedent material conditions." That sentence makes both denials at once: no eternal matter, no emanation.

Why is the world finite? The book's answer rests on contingency first. Because the created order exists only as God sustains it, it cannot be a self-standing, beginningless whole; that is the primary and decisive ground of its finitude. The argument from contingency shows why dependent things need a ground. The traversal argument and the cosmological evidence corroborate the conclusion but are not asked to carry it. Here FICT agrees with Craig that the past is finite and departs from him on the route. His instinct is right: the beginning is real, and God really relates to a world with a history. The overreach is the step that puts God into time to secure the relation.

This is how FICT keeps creatio ex nihilo intact against the co-eternal objection. To say God existed before the world is to say that if the world were removed, God would be wholly unchanged, and if God were removed, the world would vanish.

Aquinas, following Boethius, had already seen the core of this: "Even supposing that the world always was, it would not be equal to God in eternity" (ST I q.46 a.2 ad 5). FICT accepts that and adds the book's further claim that this world is in fact bounded. Where theistic personalism holds that a God who relates must change, FICT holds that the change is the world's. The six days of Genesis are kept, too: one eternal decree, received within the world as a real sequence.

The position is stated in one place; read the statement.

Are creating and sustaining one act?

Yes. Creatio ex nihilo is not only a doctrine about the first moment. Volume Four, on immutability, argues that God's creating and His sustaining are one simple, eternal act, because a God who is pure act admits no second act added to a first. That follows from divine simplicity. "Creation" and "conservation" name that one act as the creature meets it: at its first moment, origination; at every moment after, preservation.

Aquinas said the same: "The preservation of things by God is a continuation of that action whereby He gives existence, which action is without either motion or time" (ST I q.104 a.1 ad 4). His image is light: "every creature may be compared to God, as the air is to the sun which enlightens it." Take away the sun and the light is gone at once. God is in this sense the ground of being, not a builder who walked away. The psalm puts it in one line: "For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm" (Psalm 33:9, NIV).

This settles Augustine's old question, "What was God doing before He made heaven and earth?" He declined the jest that God "was preparing hell … for those who pry into mysteries" and answered that "there was no then when time was not", since, as he prays, "You had made time itself" (Confessions XI). No new relation is real in God; the newness is the world's, which is why creating does not mean God changes His mind. The act is also free: God's self-existence means the world adds nothing to Him, which is the root of why God created at all.

Volume Four holds the chapter on the creation interface; see the book.

Does creation from nothing threaten our freedom?

No. The process worry is that a creature which depends on God for everything can do nothing of its own. But dependence for being is not determination of action.

Volume Four answers the worry by distinguishing two kinds of causing. God acts on the whole, sustaining the entire order of causes in being. Creatures act within that order as real causes: fire really burns and people really choose. God gives the fire its heat and lets it burn. Deism keeps the creature's causes and loses God's sustaining; occasionalism keeps God's sustaining and turns the creature's causes into illusions. The classical doctrine of divine providence refuses both.

Creation ex nihilo is what makes the creature's own existence secure. Because the world is not made of God, a person is not a part of God or a passing phase of His life. Because it is not made from a rival matter, nothing in the person stands outside His gift or beyond His care. A creature made from nothing is wholly given and wholly itself, and that is the condition of a real "I" who can answer God.

Self-existence, or aseity, belongs to God alone. The creature's existence is received, and receiving it does not make the choices it makes any less its own. That is the ground for genuine, libertarian free will.

Volume One, on freedom itself, is free: get your copy.

How the positions compare

Each position keeps something worth keeping. The table sets out where each locates the world's source and what it costs.

Frequently asked questions

What does creatio ex nihilo mean in simple terms?

It means God made the universe without using anything. There was no raw material and no piece of God's own being that became the world. God freely gave the world its whole existence, and He still gives it, so the world depends on Him at every moment while He depends on nothing.

Who first taught creation ex nihilo?

The first known written statement is Theophilus of Antioch's, in his late second-century To Autolycus, where he argues against Plato's uncreated matter. Irenaeus made the same case soon after. Some scholars find an earlier Jewish witness in 2 Maccabees 7:28, though the reading is contested.

Does Genesis 1:2 mean matter already existed?

Process theologians such as Griffin read Genesis 1:1 as "When God began to create", which places a formless earth before God's work. On the traditional reading, verse 1 states God's creating of everything and verse 2 describes the earth He has just created. John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16 leave nothing uncreated on either reading.

What was God doing before He created the world?

Augustine's answer still holds: there was no "before". Time is a feature of the created world, so there was no stretch of empty time in which God waited. "Before" in this question names dependence: the world depends on God, and God does not depend on the world.

Does the Big Bang prove creation out of nothing?

No. Cosmology supports a finite physical past, and Craig uses that evidence in the kalam argument. But physics can show a boundary to the measurable order; it cannot show that the boundary is the edge of being, or name its source. Those are metaphysical questions, which the contingency of the world answers.

Where to go from here

The rivals to creation from nothing each treat the world as something more than a creature: an eternal partner, an overflow of God or an order God found already waiting. The classical doctrine treats it as less than any of these, and that is the gift. What has nothing of its own except what it is given can be given everything, including itself.

The series begins with Volume One, and your copy is free.