To get this started:
One of the most critical issues is the notion of creation and how God creates, especially when it comes to creating humans.
The biggest difference I can see between Catholic concept of creation “ex nihilo” (from nothing) in contrast to the Mormon concept of creation “ex materia” (from pre-existing material/matter).
For Catholics the concept of something, anything, existing before God created it is heresy. Because God is Almighty He cannot, by definition, have something existing along side Himself which He did not create and maintain in existence.
I’m not sure how Mormons answer this, but I will leave it up to them to continue from here.
Hi CD,
For Mormons, all this talk about “almightiness” and “omnipotence” is a little beside the point. When we say God is “almighty” or “omnipotent,” we mean that God can do anything that is possible. (Even Catholics would say that God can’t do two things that are logically contradictory, etc.) So what is possible? Well, that depends on what the Universe is like. In our case, we believe the Universe consists of eternally existent matter and “intelligence,” which can’t be created or uncreated. So if we said that God created matter or intelligence out of nothing, that wouldn’t make any sense, because that’s not possible, given the way the Universe happens to be.
“But that’s blasphemous!” someone might object. “How could God really be God, if matter is as eternal as Him?” Understand that matter doesn’t DO anything by itself. It’s just there. How would just sitting there for eternity doing nothing make something Divine? It seems to me that it is perfectly legitimate to call someone “God” who can do anything that is possible in the Universe, on the other hand.
To my mind, then, it seems like we can leave behind all these hoity-toity philosophical issues. I mean, really, how would it be possible for a human mind to comprehend something like “omnipotence,” anyway?
Instead, why not take a more practical approach? Why not ask,
“What did the writers of the Bible actually mean when they said God created the Earth? Did they mean that it was created from absolute nothingness, or did they mean that God created the Cosmos out of pre-existent material?” Since both Catholics and Mormons accept the Bible as scripture, I think we would all be interested in seeing evidence for one interpretation or the other. (Note: When I say “evidence,” I do not mean “absolute proof.” I am ok with it if I present my evidence, and everyone doesn’t automatically jump on my bandwagon.) If we can figure out what the Biblical writers
actually meant, then that might settle the question of
what the Universe is really like.
Some Evidence for Creatio ex Materia
In his 1990 address to the British Society for Jewish Studies, the president of that society, Peter Hayman, said this.
“Nearly all recent studies on the origin of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo have come to the conclusion that this doctrine is not native to Judaism, is nowhere attested in the Hebrew Bible, and probably arose in Christianity in the second century C.E. in the course of its fierce battle with Gnosticism. The one scholar who continues to maintain that the doctrine is native to Judaism, namely Jonathan Goldstein, thinks that it first appears at the end of the first century C.E., but has recently conceded the weakness of his position in the course of debate with David Winston.”
(Peter Hayman, “Monotheism - A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?”, Journal of Jewish Studies 42 (1991), 1-15. See also Jonathan Goldstein, “The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo”, Journal of Jewish Studies 35 (1984), 127-135; Jonathan Goldstein, “Creation Ex Nihilo: Recantations and Restatements”, Journal of Jewish Studies f38 (1987), 187-194; David Winston, “Creation Ex Nihilo Revisited: A Reply to Jonathan Goldstein”, Journal of Jewish Studies 37 (1986), 88-91.)
This standard work on the subject of the origin of the
creatio ex nihilo doctrine is a book by the German scholar Gerhard May. (Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994; originally published as Schöpfung aus dem Nichts Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1978.) May’s main argument goes like this.
- Many passages in ancient literature explicitly teach creation from pre-existent material.
- Before the mid-second century A.D., there are a few passages that say God created from “nothing,” or from “that which did not exist,” but in almost all cases those same authors (including Philo the Jew) clearly implied or explicitly stated a belief in creation from pre-existing matter.
- What seems to have been going on, May said, was that when these ancient authors said “nothing,” they didn’t mean “absolute nothingness.” They just meant “nothing important,” or nothing with a principle of organization. Consider our own language. If someone asked me, “What are you doing?” I might answer, “Oh, nothing.” But I might be watching TV, or meditating, or at the very least breathing. The point is that people say “nothing” all the time when they don’t actually mean “absolute nothingness.” In fact, it has been pretty rare for cultures to have come up with the concept of “zero,” at all, so this should hardly be surprising.
- Given the cultural and linguistic context, how can we find out when people first started talking about creation out of absolute nothingness? May reasoned that an ancient author would have to be very explicit about the “absolute nothingness” part for anyone to understand what they were talking about. The first such passages only start popping up in the mid-second century A.D. Scholars differ about who the first one was, but candidates include the Gnostic teacher Basilides, the Christian philosopher Tatian, or St. Theophilus of Antioch. These guys were really, REALLY explicit about believing in creation from absolute nothingness.
- The reason for the development of this doctrine among Christians was the Gnostic teaching that matter is evil. What better way to counter them, than to say that God created it out of nothing? How could it be evil, then?
- The doctrine of creatio ex materia hung on for quite a while before it became general in Christianity. A couple early holdouts include St. Justin Martyr (mid-second century) and St. Clement of Alexandria.
“And we have been taught that He in the beginning did of His goodness, for man’s sake, create all things out of unformed matter . . . .” (St. Justin Martyr,
First Apology 10, in
The Ante-Nicene Fathers 1:165.)
“Out of a confused heap who didst create This ordered sphere, and from the shapeless mass Of matter didst the universe adorn . . . .” (St. Clement of Alexandria,
The Instructor 3:12, in
The Ante-Nicene Fathers 2:296.)
Around the turn of the third century, Tertullian expressed an explicit belief in creatio ex nihilo, but he allowed for the earlier usage where “nothing” didn’t mean “absolute nothingness.” (Obviously there were still “orthodox” Christians around who still adopted this usage.)
“The Creator’s works testify at once to His goodness, since they are good, as we have shown, and to His power, since they are mighty, and spring indeed out of nothing. And even if they were made out of some (previous) matter, as some will have it, they are even thus out of nothing, because they were not what they are.” (Tertullian,
Against Marcion 2:5, in
The Ante-Nicene Fathers 3:301.)
By the mid-third century, Origen (who also believed in
creatio ex nihilo) that there were still many Christians who believed in
creatio ex materia.
“And I cannot understand how so many distinguished men have been of [the] opinion that this matter . . . was uncreated, i.e., not formed by God Himself, who is the Creator of all things, but that its nature and power were the result of chance.” (Origen,
De Principiis 2:1:4, in
The Ante-Nicene Fathers 4:269, brackets in original.)
“Very many, indeed, are of opinion that the matter of which things are made is itself signified in the language used by Moses in the beginning of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth; and the earth was invisible, and not arranged:’ for by the words ‘invisible and not arranged’ Moses would seem to mean nothing else than shapeless matter.” (Origen,
De Principiis 4:1:33, in
The Ante-Nicene Fathers 4:379.
Next time I update this, I’ll get into some particular Biblical passages, but I thought I would start with this argument, because it supports the way Mormons interpret the words. It turns out that the Biblical scholars say that we interpret them the same way everyone did before the 2nd century A.D.
