God did not create the world out of nothing

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CHRISTINE77

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According to a course I just took, God did not create the world ex nihilo

"1:1 IN THE beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

1:2 Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. "

There was an unformed and void earth, with darkness and waters, before God started creating light and so forth. According to this course, evil existed before God created, in the form of darkness and waters and chaos. Therefore, when God created light and said it was good, God actually was creating goodness.

Anyone care to argue about this, and how did the ex nihilo idea originate?
 
CHRISTINE77 said:
According to a course I just took, God did not create the world ex nihilo

"1:1 IN THE beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

1:2 Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. "

There was an unformed and void earth, with darkness and waters, before God started creating light and so forth. According to this course, evil existed before God created, in the form of darkness and waters and chaos. Therefore, when God created light and said it was good, God actually was creating goodness.

Anyone care to argue about this, and how did the ex nihilo idea originate?
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The fact that the earth was ‘unformed and void’ (ie not having the structure that we see) upon first being created does not mean God did not create it, and create it out of nothing!

A formless lump of cake batter, even though it is not yet formed into the structure of a cake, is still something created by the chef, and not pre-existing the chef.
 
CHRISTINE77 said:
According to a course I just took, God did not create the world ex nihilo

"1:1 IN THE beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

1:2 Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. "

There was an unformed and void earth, with darkness and waters, before God started creating light and so forth. According to this course, evil existed before God created, in the form of darkness and waters and chaos. Therefore, when God created light and said it was good, God actually was creating goodness.

Anyone care to argue about this, and how did the ex nihilo idea originate?
Click to expand...
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. :gopray:
 
Look, He created Heaven and Earth at first, which obviously means that the Earth was there when it was unformed and void, but 'was still there.

Creation is a holy mystery, and HE created all this out of nothingness. Only the Almighty could do such a thing. There are people who want to deny this and misuse and misquote scientifical theory, or use atheistic scientific theories.

Science explains the hows, and science is a wonderful thing, but not everything can be explained by science!
 
Gen 1:1 tells us that God created the Heaven and the Earth, but there is no mention of Him using any existing material. Throughout the creation narrative, we see many times when God spoke and what He spoke came into existence. In Col 1:16-17 we read, “For by Him all things were created, [both] in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities-- all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” (NAS), Note that verse 17 tells us that “He is before all things”. Seems clear to me that God created everything out of nothing.

What kind of class is this that would create doubt in the God breathed Scriptures?
 
Cachonga said:
Gen 1:1 tells us that God created the Heaven and the Earth, but there is no mention of Him using any existing material. Throughout the creation narrative, we see many times when God spoke and what He spoke came into existence. In Col 1:16-17 we read, “For by Him all things were created, [both] in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities-- all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” (NAS), Note that verse 17 tells us that “He is before all things”. Seems clear to me that God created everything out of nothing.

What kind of class is this that would create doubt in the God breathed Scriptures?
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And to follow on this point, in the Hebrew, two different words are used in Genesis for the action of God’s creating–in verse 1, 1, “bara” (bet-resh-aleph) means, literally, “to create,” in the sense of to create out of nothing. Following that, whenever you see “made,” (verse 7 and thereafter), it comes from the root “asah” (ayin-sin-daleth), and has more of a sense of to do or make, as in to make out of something which is already there, to act upon some thing which already is.

That said, we have to keep in mind that Genesis is depicting primordial history, and so to talk about things in terms of moments of time doesn’t always exactly line up or sound sensible to us, since we are finite beings in time. God is not bound by time, and so when it says “in the beginning,” we would take this to mean from the time that time began to be, from the time that God began to create. But in no way does this passage seem to indicate other than an ex nihilo creation, with subsequent action of God to form what he had made.

-ACEGC
 
Wasn’t there Gods’ word first? Not sure but if I remember correctly there was his word before there was anything else.
 
504Katrin said:
Wasn’t there Gods’ word first? Not sure but if I remember correctly there was his word before there was anything else.
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Genesis 1, 1: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…

John 1, 1-3: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made, that was made.

John is using parallelism with Genesis, and combining with it the typically Greek usage of the Word (logos). Some Greek philosophers wrote of a divine logos which ordered the universe, and John appropriates this language to talk about how the Second Person of the Trinity was present in the beginning and it was through Him all things were created (although John would not have had as developed an awareness of Trinitarian theology, since that wasn’t hashed out completely until much later).

-ACEGC
 
If I recall correctly, science has not found anything in the universe older than about 13 billion years (yeah, I know that sounds like a looong time, but not compared to eternity). That would imply that it wasn’t “always” here and had to be created. If there was nothing to begin with, and something later, then the something must have had to be created from nothing.
 
edward_george said:
Genesis 1, 1: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…

John 1, 1-3: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made, that was made.

John is using parallelism with Genesis, and combining with it the typically Greek usage of the Word (logos). Some Greek philosophers wrote of a divine logos which ordered the universe, and John appropriates this language to talk about how the Second Person of the Trinity was present in the beginning and it was through Him all things were created (although John would not have had as developed an awareness of Trinitarian theology, since that wasn’t hashed out completely until much later).

-ACEGC
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oh o.k. thanks. I guess I got things mixed up or something
 
Well according to Gary Rendsburg of Rudger University, jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=131&Itemid=5 , God did NOT create the world out of nothing. The first sentence : " in the beginning God created Heaven and Earth" is just a lead in to the rest of the chapter, which shows HOW God created Heaven and Earth.

Here is a quote from his course on Genesis:

I. The first thing we notice about Genesis 1 is that, contrary to what most people might assume or believe, the world is not created ex nihilo, that is, “out of nothing.” Instead, the earth begins as a mass of preexistent matter, with four of the five key words listed in verse 2 (unformed, void, darkness, deep) symbolic of chaos and evil (only the wind is not of that ilk).
A. God’s role is to bring order and goodness into this chaotic and evil world.
B. He does so by creating light, which he sees as good, in verses 3–4 (henceforth, everything that God creates will be good, as the refrain repeats throughout chapter 1), and by separating the light from the darkness, that is, the good from the evil, in verse 4 (the first of several separations that occur in the creation story).
C. As such, the beginning of the story seeks to explain the question of evil in the world. This is a theological issue that all religions must answer.
  1. For the polytheisms of the ancient world, there was a simple answer because there were plenty of gods to go around, and some of these were evil gods capable of inflicting great harm on humans.
  2. For Israel, by contrast, this was a major problem, because only one God is worshipped, and that god, by definition, is a good God. Thus, this story gets God “off the hook,” as it were, for the existence of evil in the world. He cannot be blamed, because evil is preexistent. God brought only goodness into the world.
  3. We hasten to add that this is the answer to the problem of evil forthcoming from the pen of the author of Genesis 1. Other biblical authors, such as the prophet Second Isaiah, will have different answers.
 
CHRISTINE77 said:
According to a course I just took, God did not create the world ex nihilo

"1:1 IN THE beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

1:2 Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. "

There was an unformed and void earth, with darkness and waters, before God started creating light and so forth. According to this course, evil existed before God created, in the form of darkness and waters and chaos. Therefore, when God created light and said it was good, God actually was creating goodness.

Anyone care to argue about this, and how did the ex nihilo idea originate?
Click to expand...
one word philosophy

more complex, based on our understanding of philosophy God can ONLY create the world out of nothing, why look at the world is anything you see eternal infinite unchanging and the like, no. The simple fact that is when we view the world nothing is eternal and everything is finite. As far as finite things go everything that is finite has a beginning and if something has a begging it is very likely and actually certain that there will be nothing at one point in the past and future. If there was nothing at one point in the past, then nothing can exist. The only way we can explain our existence is if there is something that isn’t finite and is infinite. He must at one point in the history of the cosmos create things out of nothing. So God creates the world out of nothing

See Aquinas
 
one other thing don’t take Genesis as a scientific account of the creation of the world, just because it says the earth was a formless wasteland doesn’t mean it really was like that. I believe and I think most of the church believes that Genesis is making many more theological points, making connections to other ancient writings of the time to make their own points about God and his Creation.
 
catholictiger said:
one word philosophy

more complex, based on our understanding of philosophy God can ONLY create the world out of nothing, why look at the world is anything you see eternal infinite unchanging and the like, no. The simple fact that is when we view the world nothing is eternal and everything is finite. As far as finite things go everything that is finite has a beginning and if something has a begging it is very likely and actually certain that there will be nothing at one point in the past and future. If there was nothing at one point in the past, then nothing can exist. The only way we can explain our existence is if there is something that isn’t finite and is infinite. He must at one point in the history of the cosmos create things out of nothing. So God creates the world out of nothing

See Aquinas
Click to expand...
In any case, the Bible doesn’t say that God created the world out of nothing. The Catholic Church fathers came up with this explantion. And it’s a good argument.
 
edward_george said:
And to follow on this point, in the Hebrew, two different words are used in Genesis for the action of God’s creating–in verse 1, 1, “bara” (bet-resh-aleph) means, literally, “to create,” in the sense of to create out of nothing. Following that, whenever you see “made,” (verse 7 and thereafter), it comes from the root “asah” (ayin-sin-daleth), and has more of a sense of to do or make, as in to make out of something which is already there, to act upon some thing which already is.

That said, we have to keep in mind that Genesis is depicting primordial history, and so to talk about things in terms of moments of time doesn’t always exactly line up or sound sensible to us, since we are finite beings in time. God is not bound by time, and so when it says “in the beginning,” we would take this to mean from the time that time began to be, from the time that God began to create. But in no way does this passage seem to indicate other than an ex nihilo creation, with subsequent action of God to form what he had made.

-ACEGC
Click to expand...
The important point to keep in mind is that the creation account get’s it right as far as the sequence of events. Also it was written to explain the creation to whom???
Would you have gone and said it the beginning there was nothing and from a point energy and matter and the universe with all it’s physic laws and constants were created 13.7 Billion years ago?
Guess not, but the sequence is correct first the universe was created then the suns light separating the light matter was created and eventually the earth was created etc etc.
 
catholictiger said:
one other thing don’t take Genesis as a scientific account of the creation of the world, just because it says the earth was a formless wasteland doesn’t mean it really was like that. I believe and I think most of the church believes that Genesis is making many more theological points, making connections to other ancient writings of the time to make their own points about God and his Creation.
Click to expand...
Yes I absolutely agree with you. The creation account makes a lot of theological points. One of them is that God is absolutely good, and that everything He created is good. Howeverr, many people think Genesis 1 says God created the world out of nothing, which it doesn’t.
 
JerryZ said:
The important point to keep in mind is that the creation account get’s it right as far as the sequence of events. Also it was written to explain the creation to whom???
Would you have gone and said it the beginning there was nothing and from a point energy and matter and the universe with all it’s physic laws and constants were created 13.7 Billion years ago?
Guess not, but the sequence is correct first the universe was created then the suns light separating the light matter was created and eventually the earth was created etc etc.
Click to expand...
However there are two creation accounts in the Bible, and they are in different order!

The first story progresses from vegetation to animals to humans, while the second story begins with humankind (only male, though), then comes the vegetation (in the form of the Garden of Eden), and finally, comes the animal kingdom. In the first story, male and female are created at once (1:26), while in the second story, male alone is created first, with female following later.
 
oh my goodness! So I cuoldn’t stop thinking about his first words “In the beginning”. So the Torah starts with “In the beginning”. Which is kind of, well, strange maybe. The Torah should be infinite as God is infinite and the Torah is Gods’ word. So…thinking about these things I was checking on the very last words in the Torah. And guess what the very last word of the Torah is? It’s “Israel”. Wow. This is too much for me.
 
so, the beginning is “In the beginning” and it ends with “Israel”.
 
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