So much to write, so little time. To avoid oversaturation, let me skip forward in the chapter. Previous writings in this series have included:
2.1 Relationships between Science and Faith
2.2 Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth
2.3 Approaches to Scripture
3.1 General and Special Relativity
3.2 Three Cosmologies
8.1 Approaches to Genesis 2-3
8.2 Situating Genesis 2-3
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Einstein's general theory of relativity and Guth's inflationary universe both potentially prompt reflection on the concept of ex nihilo creation, creation "out of nothing."
3.5.1 Anachronistic Readings
First, a little background on the doctrine. One dynamic of our interpretation of Scripture is that we inadvertantly read our assumptions into the words of the Bible. For example, we will see in the next chapter that Genesis 1:1-2 probably did not originally picture creation out of nothing. It simply wasn't a perspective that existed at the time. [1]
Similarly, when we read Romans 4:17, which says that God calls into being things that do not exist, we are prone to hear creation out of nothing. However, the paradigms of people at the time did not likely hear such comments in the way we do. For example, when I make a pancake out of various ingredients, I am "calling into existence" something that did not exist before.
In the past, some have seen 2 Maccabees 7:28 as the first instance of creation out of nothing (early 100s BCE). The verse speaks of God not using existing materials to make the skies and the land. However, many currently think it is anachronistic to hear ex nihilo creation here. It seems to fit the time of writing better to think the author is saying God did not use materials as they appear to us but rather formless hyle, as in Wisdom 11:17 (first century BCE or CE).
Hebrews 11:3 would arguably fit in this same category as well: "that which is seen has come to exist not from things that appear." As in 2 Maccabees 7:28, the verse was not likely a denial of God's complete use of any material at all but an affirmation that he did not create the world out of materials as they currently appear (phenomena). We arguably see ex nihilo creation in these passages because it is our existing paradigm, but it arguably was not a paradigm that yet existed at the time.
3.5.2 Gnostic Controversies
Most scholars currently hold that the doctrine of creation out of nothing developed as a Jewish and Christian doctrine during the Gnostic controversies of the 100s CE. [2] Prior to those debates, it was not uncommon for Christian thinking to be dualistic. For example, the Gospel of John says, "That which is born of flesh is flesh. That which is born of spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). Despite efforts to reinterpret such comments differently, John seems to assume a metaphysical dualism of some sort. [3]
To be fair, the kind of stark dualism that we find in Descartes in the 1600s did not yet exist either. As Dale Martin has demonstrated, the ancients still saw the heavens as material even if much thinner material than that of our bodies. [4] For example, Aristotle saw the material of the skies as a fifth element, ether, from which we get the word ethereal. [5] The key distinction was more between the corporeal and embodied versus the disembodied spiritual. It was not so much between material and immaterial.
Nevertheless, it is common to confuse any dualisms in the New Testament with the Gnostic dualism of the second century. However, Platonic dualism is not the same as Gnostic dualism. The dualisms prior to the second century CE saw the embodied world as inferior to the disembodied heavenly realm ("the spirit is willing; the flesh is weak" -- Mark 14:38). However, they did not see the embodied world as intrinsically evil. Plato saw the body as the "prison of the soul," a negative connotation. [6] But he did not see the body as evil.
Gnosticism took that next step. Building on the common assumption that God created the cosmos out of underlying, eternal material (hyle), they saw this material substratum as a basis for the existence of evil. In the mid-second century CE, the Christian Marcion went so far as to suggest that a "Demiurge" was the creator of the Old Testament, an evil god different from the Father of Jesus.
In response to this Gnostic dualism, both Judaism and Christianity increasingly asserted that God had not only organized the material of the world -- the previous view -- but that God had created the underlying material of the heavens and earth itself out of nothing. We find this development as early as Theophilus of Antioch around 177CE. [7] As the Nicene Creed would clarify in 381 CE, God is the maker of everything "seen and unseen."
3.5.3 Creator of Emptiness
For two millennia, you could argue that the doctrine of ex nihilo still carried certain cosmological assumptions of which its proponents were not aware. Namely, I suggest that Jews and Christians throughout the centuries often understood creation out of nothing to be the placement of matter into emptiness. They may not have seen this emptiness as vast. More likely, they saw the imagined space into which God placed material as extremely small compared to our sense of the universe's vastness today.
Speculation was limited about what might be beyond the earth, the starry firmament above, and whatever underworld might be beneath us. The “edges” of the cosmos were often thought to be bounded by the primordial waters of Genesis 1:7. Even after the heliocentric debates of the 1500s and 1600s, it is doubtful that someone like Isaac Newton envisioned the universe on anything like its modern scale, though by his day the stars were increasingly seen as distant suns scattered through a much larger cosmos than the biblical authors might have imagined.
Einstein's theory of relativity and developments thereafter have given us a sense that space itself can curve and expand. These insights may prompt still further developments in our understanding of creation ex nihilo. It should now be clear that a robust sense of creation out of nothing should not only include the matter within the universe, but the space in which that matter exists. Moving well beyond anything the biblical authors or Christians of the first two millennia envisaged, we should now see creation as the creation of both space and matter.
I alluded earlier in this chapter to the distinction between zero and the empty set. Zero still suggests a framework of numbers. However, the empty set is the set that contains no numbers, not even zero. Let me suggest that, in a post-relativity, inflationary universe framework, creation out of nothing is creation out of empty set rather than creation out of zero. God creates both matter and the space that matter occupies. God created energy, antimatter, and any quantum fields that may anchor space. God created the singularity that expanded into our current universe.
It is difficult for our human minds to imagine what non-space emptiness might be, a nothing beyond both vacuum and emptiness. Yet it would seem that this is the "non-state" of the universe prior to creation. A clear implication is that God created the rules for the universe out of nothing as well. We cannot assume that any prior rules of logic or metaphysics existed that we could fathom. We should suspect that even notions we have of the Trinity and such are analogies rather than literal.
We are speaking of true incomprehensibility, that of which we cannot speak. A via negativa on a level we cannot fathom. [8]
[1] In John Walton's book, The Lost World of Genesis 1 (InterVarsity, 2009), he argues that ex nihilo creation simply isn't addressed in Genesis 1. The point of Genesis is that the creation was "non-functional" before God created. In his view, the question of the materials God used simply wasn't the question they were asking (see especially Propositions 1-4).
[2] For a comprehensive treatment of the doctrine's development, see Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of "Creation Out of Nothing" in Early Christian Thought (T & T Clark, 1994).
[3] Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic, 2008). So also N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003), 440-47.
[4] Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body (Yale University, 1999).
[5] Aristotle, De caelo 1.268b–269a, 1.3.270b
[6] E.g., Plato, Phaedo 82e. In Cratylus 400c, he calls the body the tomb of the soul (soma sema).
[7] Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum 2.4.
[8] The notion of a "negative way" or via negativa suggests that we can only say what God's reality is not rather than what it is.
________________________________3.3 An Expanding Universe (inflationary cosmology)
3.5 The Cosmological Argument
3.6 The Fine Tuning Argument
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