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Ex nihilo

[eks nahy-uh-loh, nee-uh-]

The Latin phrase ex nihilo means "out of nothing". It often appears in conjunction with the concept of creation, as in creatio ex nihilo, meaning "creation out of nothing". Due to the connotations of the phrase creatio ex nihilo, it often occurs in philosophical or creationistic arguments, as many Christians, Muslims and Jews believe that God created the universe from nothing. This contrasts with creatio ex materia (creation out of eternally preexistent matter) and with creatio ex deo (creation out of the being of God).

A number of philosophers in ancient times attained a highly developed concept of God as the supreme ruler of the world, but did not develop a concept of God as the absolute cause of all finite existence. Before the biblical idea of creation, myths envisioned the world as preexisting matter acted upon by a god or gods who reworked this material into the present world. The Hebrew tradition and in the religious thought that developed out of its world-view apparently originated the formulation of "ex nihilo creation".

Son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them: and consider that God made them out of nothing.
(100 BC)

Ex nihilo when occasionally used outside of a religious context also refers to something coming from nothing. For example, in a conversation, one can be said to be raising a topic "ex nihilo" if it bears no relation to the previous topic of discussion. The term also has specific meaning in military and computer-science contexts.

Creation of the universe

Arguments in favour

Christian views

Some verses from the Christian Bible often cited in support of ex nihilo creation by God include:

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.
And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
My son, have pity on me; I carried you nine months in the womb and suckled you three years.... I implore you, my child, observe heaven and earth, consider all that is in them, and acknowledge that God made them out of what did not exist, and that mankind comes into being in the same way. Do not fear this executioner, but prove yourself worthy of your brothers, and make death welcome, so that in the day of mercy I may receive you back in your brothers' company.
Jerusalem Bible

Another major argument for creatio ex nihilo, the First cause argument, states in summary:

everything that begins to exist has a cause
the universe began to exist
therefore, the universe must have a cause

Another argument for ex nihilo creation comes from Claude Nowell's Summum philosophy that states before there was anything, there was nothing, and if there was nothing, then it must have been possible for nothing to be. If it is possible for nothing to be, then it must be possible for everything to be. This condition results in SUMMUM, i.e. the totality of creation.

Additional support for this belief comes from the idea that something cannot arise from nothing; that would involve a contradiction. Therefore there must always have been something. But it is scientifically impossible for matter to always have existed. What is more, matter is contingent, that is it is not logically impossible for it not to exist, and nothing else depends on it. So there must have been a Creator who is not contingent and not composed of matter: this Being is God.

Islamic views

There are several Qur'anic verses that explicitly state that God created man, the heavens and the earth, out of nothing. The following are taken from Muhammad Asad's translation, The Message of the Quran:

2:117 The Originator is He of the heavens and the earth: and when He wills a thing to be, He but says unto it, "Be" - and it is.

19:67 But does man not bear in mind that We have created him aforetime out of nothing?"

21:30 ARE, THEN, they who are bent on denying the truth not aware that the heavens and the earth were [once] one single entity, which We then parted asunder?*1 – and [that] We made out of water every living thing? Will they not, then, [begin to] believe?*2

1 The above unmistakable reference to the unitary origin of the universe - metonymically described in the Quran as “the heavens and the earth’’ - strikingly anticipates the view of almost all modern astrophysicists that this universe has originated from one entity, which became subsequently consolidated through gravity and then separated into individual nebulae, galaxies and solar systems, with further individual parts progressively breaking away to form new entities in the shape of stars, planets etc. (Regarding the Quranic reference to the phenomenon described by the term “expanding universe”, see 51: 47 and the corresponding note.)

2 The statement that God “made out of water every living thing” expresses most concisely a truth that is nowadays universally accepted by science. It has a threefold meaning: (1) Water was the environment within which the prototype of all living matter originated; (2) among all the innumerable - existing or conceivable - liquids, only water has the peculiar properties necessary for the emergence and development of life; and (3) the protoplasm, which is the physical basis of every living cell - whether in plants or in animals - and represents the only form of matter in which the phenomena of life are manifested, consists overwhelmingly of water and is, thus, utterly dependent on it. Read together with the preceding statement, which alludes to the unitary origin of the physical universe, the emergence of life from and within an equally unitary element points to the existence of a unitary plan underlying all creation and, hence, to the existence and oneness of the Creator. This accent on the oneness of God and the unity of this creation is taken up again in verse 92 below.

21:56 He answered: “Nay, but your [true] Sustainer is the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth - He who has brought them into being: and I am one of those who bear witness to this [truth]!”

35:1 ALL PRAISE is due to God, Originator of the heavens and the earth, who causes the angels to be (His) message-bearers, endowed with wings, two, or three, or four.*1 He adds to His creation whatever He wills: for, verily, God has the power to will anything.*2

1 The “wings” of the spiritual beings or forces comprised within the designation of angels are, obviously, a metaphor for the speed and power with which God’s revelations are conveyed to His prophets. Their multiplicity (“two, or three, or four”) is perhaps meant to stress the countless ways in which He causes His commands to materialize within the universe created by Him: an assumption which, to my mind, is supported by an authentic hadith to the effect that on the night of his Ascension (see Appendix IV) the Prophet saw Gabriel “endowed with six hundred wings” (Bukhari and Muslim, on the authority of Ibn Masud).

2 I.e., the process of creation is continuous, constantly expanding in scope, range and variety.

51:47 It is We who have built the universe*1 with (Our creative) power; and, verily, it is We who are steadily expanding it.*2

1 Lit., "the sky" or "the heaven", which in the Quran often have the connotation of "universe" or, in the plural ("the heavens"), of "cosmic systems".

2 See note 38 on the first part of 21:30. The phrase inna la-musi'un clearly foreshadows the modern notion of the "expanding universe" - that is, the fact that the cosmos, though finite in extent, is continuously expanding in space.

Scientific views

According to James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, creation ex nihilo is possible from the Hartle-Hawking state.

Arguments against

Some have argued that this concept cannot be deduced from the Hebrew and that the Book of Genesis, chapter 1, speaks of God "making" or "fashioning" the universe. However, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812) disputed these arguments in section II of his book titled "Tanya."

Thomas Jay Oord, a Christian philosopher and theologian, argues that Christians should abandon the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Oord points to the work of biblical scholars, such as Jon D. Levenson, who argue that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo does not appear in Genesis. Oord speculates that God created our particular universe billions of years ago from primordial chaos. This chaos did not predate God, however, for God would have created the chaotic elements as well. Oord shows that God can create all things without creating from absolute nothingness.

Oord offers nine succinct objections to creatio ex nihilo:

1. Theoretical problem: absolute nothingness cannot be conceived.

2. Biblical problem: Scripture – in Genesis, 2 Peter, and elsewhere – suggests creation from something (water, deep, chaos, etc.), not creation from absolutely nothing.

3. Historical problem: Creatio ex nihilo was first proposed by Gnostics – Basilides and Valentinus – who assumed that creation was inherently evil and that God does not act in history. It was adopted by early Christian theologians to affirm the kind of absolute divine power that many Christians now reject.

4. Empirical problem: We have no evidence that our universe originally came into being from absolutely nothing.

5. Creation at an instant problem: We have no evidence in the history of the universe after the big bang that entities can emerge instantaneously from absolute nothingness. As the earliest philosophers noted, out of nothing comes nothing (ex nihilo, nihil fit).

6. Solitary power problem: Creatio ex nihilo assumes that a powerful God once acted alone. But power is a social concept only meaningful in relation to others.

7. Errant revelation problem: The God with the capacity to create something from absolutely nothing would apparently have the power to guarantee an unambiguous and inerrant message of salvation (e.g, inerrant Bible). An unambiguously clear and inerrant divine revelation does not exist.

8. Evil problem: If God once had the power to create from absolutely nothing, God essentially retains that power. But a God of love with this capacity is culpable for failing to prevent genuine evil.

9. Empire Problem: The kind of divine power implied in creatio ex nihilo supports a theology of empire, which is based upon unilateral force and control of others.

A few early Jewish and Christian theologians and philosophers, including Philo, Justin, Athenagoras, Hermogenes, Clement of Alexandria, and, later, Johannes Scotus Eriugena have made statements that seem to indicate that they do not hold to the concept of the creation-out-of-nothing. Philo, for instance, postulated a pre-existent matter alongside God.

Process theologians argue that God has always been related to some “world” or another.

The doctrine may, as the quotation from Maccabees illustrate, have arisen to explain the creative action of a God who is usually referred to in male terms, a patriarchal God even. Males do not gestate living things in the way normally capable of observation, so it had to be explained in a different sense.

Critics also claim that rejecting 'creatio ex nihilo' provides the opportunity to affirm that God has everlastingly created and related with some realm of nondivine actualities or another. According to this alternative God-world theory, no nondivine thing exists without the creative activity of God, and nothing can terminate God’s necessary existence.

Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement dismissed creation ex nihilo, and introduced revelation that specifically countered this concept. Some Mormon sects, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, teach that matter is both eternal and infinite and that it can be neither created nor destroyed. Latter-day Saint apologists have commented on Colossians 1:16 that the "Greek text does not teach ex nihilo, but creation out of pre-existing raw materials, since the verb ktidzo 'carried an architectural connotation...as in to build or establish a city....Thus, the verb presupposes the presence of already existing material.'

While the idea of God everlastingly relating with creatures may seem strange because of its novelty, even its opponents in Christian history – like Thomas Aquinas – admitted it as a logical possibility.

Physicists Paul Steinhardt (Princeton University) and Neil Turok (Cambridge University) offer an alternative. Their proposal is based upon the ancient idea that space and time have always existed in some form. Using developments in string theory, Steinhardt and Turok suggest that the Big Bang of our universe is a bridge to a pre-existing universe, and that creation undergoes an eternal succession of universes, with possibly trillions of years of evolution in each. Gravity and the transition from Big Crunch to Big Bang characterize an everlasting succession of universes. However, this view does not take into account the impossibilities of infinite regression.

Computer science

Some computing environments use the tag ex nihilo to describe various techniques for creating data structures or objects. In prototype-based programming languages, an object is created "ex nihilo" if it does not use another object as its prototype.

Military organization

A unit raised ex nihilo is one which was created without the use of significant components from other units. Thus, when a unit that is composed entirely of personnel who had been transferred as individuals from other units it is said to have been raised ex nihilo. Alternatives to this method, which is also known as "cutting a unit from whole cloth", are expanding a skeleton (cadre) unit, assembling a large unit from components taken from other units, and the splitting of an existing unit into two or more skeleton units which are subsequently filled out with additional personnel. In German, this last-named method is called 'calving' (das Kalben). In French, it is called 'doubling' (dédoublement), but only, as the name suggests, when two new units are formed on the framework of one old one.