Creatio ex nihilo

[Asriel]

God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing: “creatio ex nihilo”.

I was at peace with that until I happened to talk with a Hindu, who said No, God created everything from His will and His power, and that as a consequence we are actually part of God because God’s creation is an extension of Himself.

Now I’m confused. He’s got a point, but it doesn’t feel quite right, and I don’t know how to answer him. Something’s amiss in his depiction, but what?

 

[DavidFilmer]

I was at peace with that until I happened to talk with a Hindu, who said No, God created everything from His will and His power, and that as a consequence we are actually part of God because God’s creation is an extension of Himself.

Well, from a human perspective, we have the power to create. I can create a painting, or a sculpture, or a building. But these creations are not a part of me.

As a human, I have but one power to create something that is actually a part of me - namely the act of procreation itself. My children are a part of me, but my various works, although they reflect my talents and interests, are not part of my actual being (but are, rather, the result)

 

[excubitor]

God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing: “creatio ex nihilo”.

I was at peace with that until I happened to talk with a Hindu, who said No, God created everything from His will and His power, and that as a consequence we are actually part of God because God’s creation is an extension of Himself.

Now I’m confused. He’s got a point, but it doesn’t feel quite right, and I don’t know how to answer him. Something’s amiss in his depiction, but what?

Well I think that the nothing referred to here is like saying that God created heavens and earth using no physical substance in other words, no physical tools or raw materials were used in the creation.

The point is to make a distinction between man and God. When man makes something he uses tools and crafts a building or furniture out of raw materials. But God when he made the heavens and earth crafted them not with physical tools or implements and not out of raw materials, but out of nothing. So this is what makes God a creator of things whereas man is a maker of things.

So the hindu is correct that God made everything out of his will and his power. The scriptures teach that he SPOKE and when he uttered the WORD the heavens and earth came into existence. So the universe is certainly an expression of God’s power, indeed it is held together continually by Gods power. He is really not quite understanding what ex nihilo means.

But be wary of the hindu. Once he convinces you of this point he will then try to distort your belief by introducing some bizarre Eastern philosophy. Its impossible to know what kind of creation story he might spin. There is no uniform theology in hinduism, each sect has its own pantheon of Gods. In fact hinduism is not even really a religion because there is no organised belief whatsoever.

I would not bother talking to a Hindu. One of the tricks of Eastern philosophy is to say things with an aura of wisdom and revelation of mystery. But when you actually apply your reason to it, it becomes quickly apparent that it is all meaningless gobbledegook. They merely confuse others and confuse themselves in the process. Ironically it is the one can speak with the most contorted confusion and yet who appears the least affected by his confusion which is the one who is regarded as the enlightened guru.

Your comment " I was at peace until I spoke to a Hindu" says it all. Easy solution. Don’t talk to any Hindu’s, at least not about religion or philosophy anyway.

 

[Verbum]

Hi Asriel,

God, in his perfection, can neither lose nor gain anything. So the creation cannot be an “extension” of God.

However, the model for God’s creation can only be God. What else could be? So everything that is created is a reflection of God. We have existence. God is existence. All creatures are good. God is goodness itself. The same goes for beauty or any quality you might think of.

What do you think?

Verbum

 

[Asriel]

I guess the difficulty I’m having with this is as follows: God is eternal. He always was, is and will be. Before He spoke creation into being, only He was (“I AM WHO AM”). So anything coming into existence has its direct source in God. Not only did He fashion everything, but He brought everything into existence from Himself. So since only He was, what He created has its direct source and cause in Him, be it physical or spiritual. How can God create something that is not part of Him, since He is all there is?

As excubitor says, “So the universe is certainly an expression of God’s power”. Why would it be wrong to state “So the universe is certainly God’s power”, i.e., part of God? How could it not be part of God?

Verbum, your statement “God, in his perfection, can neither lose nor gain anything” would seem to fall right into this Hindu’s hands. What the Hindu is implying is that we are a part of God (what I think he’s actually leading up to is the bolder heresy that we are God). It’s a common theme to elevate man to godhood, a la the so-called “liberation theology,” but exactly at what step is this flat-out wrong? There’s some subtle error here leading to a contradiction, but it escapes me…

 

[Ghosty]

When we say that God created everything out of nothing, we’re referring to material composition in the broadest sense (which includes spiritual components as well). This means that there was no material that God shaped into something else, like clay being shaped into a pot. The power and will of God is not “stuff” that can be shaped into this or that, so this Hindu’s argument does not address the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

It does NOT mean that no notion of things existed in God’s mind before God made them. The universe was an eternal idea in God’s “mind”, for example, so we are made from that in a certain sense (“through Him all things were made”, referring to the Logos/Son, is a direct expression of this). This doesn’t mean that God’s mind enters into our composition, any more than my mind is part of the “essence” of a book that I write. The story is given form from my idea, and my idea is present in the book, but an idea can be transfered from a mind into something else. This is also true of power, as my power to write is transfered into the form of a book, without my essence entering into the composition of the book (the book, once written, remains a distinct being from myself despite coming about from my idea and power).

This, incidentally, goes towards what we mean when we say that God is present in everything: God is not part of the composition of these things, but God’s power and idea sustains them constantly. God is constantly willing us and thinking us into being, since we have no permanent underlying material that composes us (we are “made of nothing”). We are like light that vanishes when the electricity to the bulb turns off; God’s power must constantly flow for us to exist, but we are as distinct from God as the light is from the bulb itself.

Hope that helps!

 

[cassini]

God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing: “creatio ex nihilo”.

I was at peace with that until I happened to talk with a Hindu, who said No, God created everything from His will and His power, and that as a consequence we are actually part of God because God’s creation is an extension of Himself.

Now I’m confused. He’s got a point, but it doesn’t feel quite right, and I don’t know how to answer him. Something’s amiss in his depiction, but what?

Asriel. what your Hindu is offering you is the heresy of Pantheism. It is just another of Satan’s tricks, confusing the truth about God and His creation.

‘For all the gods of the nations are things of naught [devils],
but the LORD made the heavens.’ (Psalm 95:5)

Of crucial importance is to know and believe God exists outside of the creation. Everything outside of God is a creature. This includes the angels, good and bad (devils and demons) the universe and all that is in it. Finally God created human beings in His image and likeness.

Right from the Fall of man, the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, Satan has been busy trying to eliminate God as a PERSON distinct from His creation. Pantheism is one of these heresies.

The most successful of all these heresies came about as a result of the Copernican heresy, framing minds towards an acceptance of heliocentricism and once that was achieved, the substitution of the personal Creator with a god of forces, the precursor to Agnosticism and Atheism. .

‘But he [the antichrist] shall worship the god Maozim [god of forces] in his place;
a god whom his fathers knew not.’ — (Dan. 11:38)

This is by far the most widespread of all the heresies that spawned a rejection of God as Person separate from His creation. This one, begun within Christendom, now has millions of adherents and grows all the time. It accounts for the majority of scientists today for example.

The day the literal interpretation of Genesis was rejected was the day man loosed the ‘god’ of forces on mankind.

Finally Asriel, be unconfused. Read Genesis, the word of God. Ignore those who tell you it is metaphor for they unwittingly do the work of the Devil. The Scriptures were written for you and I, not for PhDs or those scientists who think they know better what God wanted to tell us. In Genesis we read of a personal God who out of eternity created the world, a world He will some day bring to an end, taking those who believed in Him as Father, Son and Holy Ghost into heaven with Him, and those who preferred to reject Him as Person for matter or forces, well they go somewhere else.

 

[rcjones]

We pretend like we know what we know. Sometimes it is helpful to challenge that with a model that flips things on its head.

What if what we think of as mass is nothing and what we think of as nothing is mass. Then the smallest particle is not a particle at all, but a discontinuity in a crystal. Energy running through the crystal will create these discontinuities as the energy can displace the lattice structure. All larger particle are just geometric patterns of discontinuities within the lattice. This model forces all of the properties of physics into the aether or the lattice structure, and you have a unified field theory when the math is worked out.

In this way, we are still nothing.

Heb 1:3 Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;

As the crystal seeks it’s lowest energy state it forces the discontinuities toward each other. This is gravity. A discontinuity that places tension on the lattice at one end and compression at the other will attempt to align itself with other such discontinuities to get to the lowest energy. This is magnetism. With enough energy a new discontinuity pops into existence. This is energy transformed to matter.

This is not a doctrine. Merely a model based on what the scriptures teach. If God were ‘like’ the crystal (please don’t accuse me of pantheism, this is just allegory) we now have a picture of the physical universe couple with with more esoteric statements like being ‘in Christ’, etc.

The purpose of the model is just to challenge what we think we know with a plausible alternative at the most fundamental level to demonstrate the frailty of scientific truth.

Is there evidence for this alternate theory of everything? Yes. Waves speed up when they go from a less dense material to a more dense material. Light speeds up when it goes from anything into a vacuum. This is evidence that the vacuum is more dense than the other material. In the lab, light is slowed down by cooling a vacuum. How can you cool nothing? Einstein’s theory says that space stretches. What is space? Nothing. How can nothing stretch?

The fact is that we were created out of nothing. This model is based upon the fact .

Ro 3:4 God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar;

 

[thenobes]

Cassini makes good points, but what the Hindu proposes contains a grave problem for natural reason itself. For if true, then God Himself would have to contain evil, since man, and also the world, would be an extension of Him. Thus good could not be logically opposed to evil, as they are of the same Source.

I believe some Hindi resolve this problem by saying good and evil are illusions. I cannot buy this.

peace
steve

 

[Asriel]

Ghosty’s analogy got through to me! As a writer, say, I can create a character using nothing more concrete than my thoughts and my will, and yet that character is not me. It may be in my image and likeness, but it is not me. In like manner God can create us via His will in His image and likeness without us being Him or even part of Him. Very interesting way to look at it!

The logical contradiction that thenobes brings up is a good one. And you’re right: The Hindu would say everything is Maya, or illusion. When I asked him once how Hinduism deals with sin, the core issue in Christianity that separates us from God, he said, “It’s all good.” Murder? Rape? “All good.” Pedophilia? Homosexuality? “Yup, it’s all good.” Ethnic cleansing? “Yup.” I do pray for him…

Thanks to all for a most enlightening discussion!