Creation ex nihilo

Creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, is the doctrine that God brought the universe into being without any pre-existing material, so that God alone is uncreated and everything else depends on God for its existence not only at its beginning but at every moment. It is the standard position of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and it separates them from the many cosmogonies in which a deity shapes material already there.

Whether it is stated in scripture is disputed. Genesis 1:1-2 can be read as creation from nothing or as the ordering of a formless waste and a deep that are already present; the Hebrew syntax is genuinely open, and modern translations divide between "In the beginning God created" and "When God began to create". The earliest text usually cited as explicit is 2 Maccabees 7:28, and Romans 4:17 and Hebrews 11:3 are read in this sense in Christian tradition. Historians of doctrine generally hold that the formulation was worked out in the second century CE, by writers such as Theophilus of Antioch and Irenaeus, and worked out specifically against Platonist accounts in which matter is eternal and against Gnostic accounts in which the shaping of it is the work of a lesser and inferior being. Some scholars argue for an earlier Jewish version; the question turns on how a small number of contested texts are read.

The doctrine does identifiable work. It makes matter good, since God made it, which is the point of the second-century polemic. It makes creation free rather than necessary, distinguishing it from emanation, in which the world flows from God as light from a lamp and could not have been otherwise. It denies any independent principle limiting God. And it grounds continuous conservation: the world does not merely start but is held in being.

The rivals are still live within the theistic traditions. Emanationist schemes in Neoplatonism and in Islamic philosophy, Ibn Sina's necessary procession from the Necessary Existent, were attacked by al-Ghazali precisely because they made the world eternal and its production necessary. The eternity of the world was defended by Aristotle and by Muslim and some Christian philosophers, and Aquinas took the notable position that reason cannot demonstrate that the world had a beginning, which is known only from revelation, while creation in the sense of total dependence can be argued philosophically whether or not there was a first moment. Latter-day Saint theology rejects creation from nothing outright, holding matter and intelligence to be eternal and organised rather than made, one of the clearest doctrinal breaks between it and historic Christianity.

Article one traces creation from nothing through Theophilus, Irenaeus, Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali. One medieval argument from that dispute has had a second career in contemporary philosophy of science, argued now partly on the strength of physical cosmology rather than only on scriptural or metaphysical grounds.

Al-Kindi and al-Ghazali argued that an infinite regress of past events is impossible, and concluded that the universe must have had a beginning and therefore a cause outside itself, a version of what is now generally called the kalam cosmological argument. William Lane Craig revived the argument from the 1970s onward, adding to the medieval reasoning the empirical claim that Big Bang cosmology independently supports a universe with an actual temporal beginning, which he presents as physical confirmation of a conclusion the medieval theologians reached by argument alone.

The physics is more contested than that presentation suggests. Stephen Hawking and James Hartle's "no-boundary proposal," and separately Alexander Vilenkin's models of quantum tunnelling from nothing, are both offered as accounts of the universe's earliest state that avoid a sharp, singular first moment of the kind the kalam argument requires, and cosmologists disagree about whether current physics settles the question of an absolute beginning at all. The dispute is now one of the more active points of contact between philosophy of religion and physics, and it inherits directly from the medieval argument: whether the universe's dependence on God, which the Abrahamic traditions hold on theological grounds regardless of the science, also requires a datable first instant, a considerably narrower and more contestable claim than the theological doctrine itself.