Creatio ex nihilo
Based on Wikipedia: Creatio ex nihilo
In 2026, as humanity stands on the precipice of interplanetary expansion, the oldest question remains the most stubborn: where did it all come from? The answer depends entirely on which ancient library you consult. For centuries, the dominant narrative across much of the world was not that the universe sprang from nothing, but that it was sculpted from something eternal and formless. The doctrine known as creatio ex nihilo—Latin for "creation out of nothing"—is a relatively late arrival on the stage of human thought, yet it has become the bedrock of modern Western theology and cosmology. It is a radical departure from the ancient intuition that matter must have always existed, waiting to be shaped by a divine hand. To understand this shift is to trace the evolution of human consciousness itself, moving from a universe filled with chaotic, pre-existing forces to one where existence itself is a gift granted from absolute non-existence.
The concept is deceptively simple but philosophically explosive. Creatio ex nihilo asserts that matter is not eternal; it had no prior state, no primordial soup, no chaotic ocean waiting in the dark. Instead, all things were called into being by a divine creative act from a state of absolute nothingness. This stands in stark contrast to creatio ex materia, the older and more widespread belief that the cosmos is merely a reformation of pre-existing, eternal matter. The philosophical dictum underlying ex materia is ex nihilo nihil fit: "nothing comes from nothing." If this axiom holds true, then the universe could not have started from nothing; there must have been some raw material waiting to be ordered.
The Ancient Ocean of Chaos
To grasp how revolutionary creatio ex nihilo truly was, one must first walk through the cosmological landscapes of the ancient Near East. Here, the universe did not begin with a void. It began with water. In almost every ancient creation myth, the cosmos emerges from a dark, still, primordial ocean—a chaotic abyss that existed before time and space as we know them. This was not an empty nothingness; it was a something, albeit a formless and dangerous one.
In Sumerian mythology, this cosmic ocean is personified as the goddess Nammu, who "gave birth to heaven and earth." She had existed forever, an eternal mother from whom all things flowed. The Babylonians told a similar story in their epic Enūma Eliš. Here, pre-existent chaos is composed of freshwater Apsu and saltwater Tiamat. It is not that the gods created matter; rather, they are born from it. The god Marduk does not create the universe from nothing; he slays Tiamat, splits her body in two, and uses the halves to form the heavens and the earth. The material was already there; the act was one of division and organization, not absolute origination.
The Egyptians offered their own variations on this watery theme. In their creation myths, a pre-existent watery chaos personified as the god Nun, associated with darkness, gives birth to the primeval hill. Depending on the specific tradition, this emergence might be a lotus flower or even a celestial cow. The Greek traditions were no different. Whether citing Oceanus, the river that circles the Earth; Night (Nyx); or simply water itself as the ultimate origin, the Greeks too believed in an eternal substratum.
The implications of these myths are profound for how ancients viewed reality. If matter is eternal, then the divine power is limited to ordering it. The gods are artisans, not absolute creators. They work with a material that has its own independent existence and often its own will. This worldview places humanity in a universe that is fundamentally crowded, filled with ancient forces that must be negotiated, appeased, or fought.
The Genesis Ambiguity
Into this tapestry of eternal matter steps the Hebrew Bible, specifically the opening lines of Genesis. The traditional Christian reading has long held that the text unequivocally supports creatio ex nihilo. The phrase bereshit bara elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'aretz is translated as "In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth," implying an absolute start where nothing existed before.
However, the linguistic reality of the Hebrew text is far more ambiguous than the dogmatic certainty of later centuries suggests. Rabbinical commentators and experts in Hebrew have argued since the Middle Ages that this traditional interpretation cannot be preferred over others based on purely linguistic grounds. The phrase can just as easily be read as a statement describing the condition of the world when God began to create: "When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void..." Or it could be viewed as background information: "When, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the earth being formless..."
This second interpretation aligns Genesis closely with its ancient Near Eastern neighbors. It suggests that the author of Genesis may have been more concerned with a different form of creation: God giving form, order, and purpose to an abyss that was already there but lifeless and inoperative. In this reading, the "deep" (the tehom, linguistically related to Tiamat) is not created by God; it is simply present. The divine act is one of taming chaos, imposing structure on a pre-existing, purposeless void.
For ancient cultures, the origin of matter itself may not have been the burning question it became for modern thinkers. Their focus was often on why the world is the way it is, how to live within it, and how to maintain order against the encroaching chaos. The idea that God created the very fabric of reality out of nothing would have seemed foreign, perhaps even unnecessary, to a mind accustomed to a universe filled with eternal elements.
The Neoplatonic Turn and the African Exceptions
The shift toward creatio ex nihilo as a formal doctrine required new philosophical tools and a specific theological imperative. In the third century, Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, offered an alternative that would dominate pagan thought: emanationism. He argued that the cosmos was not created in a discrete act but was an eternal overflow or emanation from God, like light radiating from a sun. The universe was part of God, distinct yet derived directly from His essence.
This view was unacceptable to emerging monotheistic traditions. If the world is an emanation, then it shares in the divine nature, blurring the line between Creator and creation. It also implies that the world has always existed in some form, denying the possibility of a true beginning. Jewish philosophers, Church Fathers, and Muslim thinkers who followed them rejected emanationism in favor of a sharp distinction: God is One, and everything else is created by Him.
Yet, this theological battle was not universal across all human cultures. African traditional religions offer a fascinating counter-narrative that largely favors creatio ex materia. In Akan, Acholi, and Yoruba traditions, the concept of creation out of nothing is absent. The universe is often seen as an unfolding of existing realities. However, there are notable exceptions. Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu has pointed out that some African religions, such as those of the Shona, Nuer, and Banyarwanda, do affirm a notion akin to creatio ex nihilo.
Nowhere is this divergence more striking than in the Bakongo religion of Central Africa. The Bakongo people hold a cosmogony that bears an uncanny resemblance to modern scientific theories while maintaining deep spiritual roots. They believe that "the world in its beginning was empty; it was an mbûngi, an empty thing, a cavity, without visible life." This mbûngi (also called mwasi and mpampa) is symbolized as a circle of emptiness—a literal void.
From this nothingness, the creator god Nzambi, along with his female counterpart Nzambici, acted to bring forth existence. They created a spark of fire called kalûnga and summoned it inside the mbûngi. This fire grew into a great force of energy, creating a mass of fusion. When the mass became too hot, the heated force caused it to break apart, hurling projectiles outside the void. These projectiles became individual masses that scattered; when they cooled, planets formed, and life came to be. The Bakongo refer to this process as luku lwalamba Nzambi, or "God created and cooked dough." In this view, kalûnga is seen as the origin of life, or moyo wawo mu nza. Unlike many other African spiritualities that rely on pre-existing matter, the Bakongo belief system posits a true beginning from emptiness, making it compatible with creatio ex nihilo. They believe that life requires constant change and perpetual motion, and thus Nzambi is also referred to as Kalûnga, the god of change. Scholars have noted profound similarities between this ancient narrative and the Big Bang Theory, where energy condenses into matter from an initial singularity.
The Christian Articulation
While the Bakongo were articulating a creation from nothing in Central Africa, the doctrine was taking its most explicit shape in the Mediterranean world within early Christianity. It was here that creatio ex nihilo became a defining boundary of orthodoxy, defended against both pagan emanationism and Gnostic dualism. The Nicene Christian theologies would eventually hold to this doctrine as non-negotiable.
The first explicit articulation of the doctrine in Christian circles appears in the late 2nd Century with Theophilus of Antioch. Writing To Autolycus around 180 AD, he dedicated a chapter to the "Absurd Opinions of the Philosophers Concerning God." In it, he wrote:
As, therefore, in all these respects God is more powerful than man, so also in this; that out of things that are not He creates and has created things that are.
Theophilus's statement was nearly identical to a biblical passage from Romans 4:17, which describes God as the one who "calleth those things that be not, as though they were." This scriptural grounding allowed theologians to argue that creation was not merely an ordering of chaos but a sovereign act of bringing existence into being where there was none. By the 3rd century, this view was being actively discussed and defended in theological circles, marking a decisive break from the ancient consensus.
In late antiquity, John Philoponus emerged as the most prominent defender of the doctrine. He argued forcefully against the Aristotelian idea of an eternal universe, using logical arguments to show that if matter were eternal, it would imply an infinite past, which he deemed impossible. His work laid the intellectual groundwork for later Islamic and Christian scholastics who would refine the argument.
However, not all theologians were satisfied with this binary. Some proposed alternatives that attempted to bridge the gap between God and the world. One such idea was creatio ex ipse (creation from Godself), suggesting that the universe is similar in substance to God. Others clung to creatio ex materia, implying a degree of independence for the material world that did not rely entirely on God for its existence. These alternatives, however, never gained the traction of the ex nihilo doctrine within mainstream Christianity, which saw them as threats to God's absolute sovereignty and uniqueness.
The Modern Cosmological Argument
The legacy of creatio ex nihilo extends far beyond the ancient church fathers; it underpins some of the most robust modern arguments for the existence of God. In the realm of philosophy, the doctrine provides the foundation for the cosmological argument, particularly in its specific manifestation known as the Kalam cosmological argument.
The logic is straightforward: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause. This "cause" must be external to the universe, timeless, spaceless, and immaterial—attributes that align with the classical definition of God. If the universe did not begin from nothing but from eternal matter, this entire chain of reasoning collapses. The necessity for a first mover or a first cause vanishes if the material substrate has always existed.
This philosophical framework is particularly appealing to Christian and other theistic philosophers who seek to reconcile faith with modern scientific discoveries about the origin of the universe. The Big Bang theory, which posits that the universe had a definite beginning in time from an extremely hot, dense state, resonates deeply with the creatio ex nihilo narrative. It suggests a moment of absolute initiation where space and time themselves came into being, leaving no room for pre-existing matter.
Yet, this alignment is not without its complexities. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential figures in Christian theology, offered an allegorical interpretation of the six-day creation account in Genesis that nuanced the literalist reading. Writing in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, Augustine argued that the number seven was significant as a symbol of the perfection of God's creative work. He suggested that the first three days could not be considered perfect because the sun, the marker of time, was not created until the fourth day.
Furthermore, Augustine noted the silence regarding the night of the sixth day in the biblical account, finding it strange that such a detail would be omitted if the text were a literal description of temporal days. He contended that the notion of God resting on the seventh day was questionable, arguing that God is characterized by possessing all forms of wealth and being eternally unchangeable. For Augustine, a change in state between the sixth and seventh days—moving from active creation to rest—seemed illogical for an immutable deity. He emphasized the concept of divine immutability, suggesting that creation was not a temporal process but an instantaneous act of will, with the "days" serving as a pedagogical device for human understanding rather than a chronological record.
The Persistence of the Question
Today, as we stand in 2026, the debate over creatio ex nihilo continues to shape our understanding of reality. It is no longer just a theological dispute but a convergence point for physics, philosophy, and faith. The question remains: Did the universe emerge from an eternal sea of matter, waiting to be shaped? Or did it burst into existence from nothingness, a singular event that defies all prior logic?
The Bakongo story of kalûnga burning in the void offers a poetic bridge between ancient myth and modern science. The Christian doctrine of ex nihilo provides a metaphysical anchor for the concept of absolute beginning. And the Genesis ambiguity reminds us that our ancestors were not blind to the mystery; they simply saw it through different lenses.
In the end, creatio ex nihilo is more than a technical term in a theological dictionary. It is an assertion about the nature of existence itself. It declares that nothingness is the default state and that being is a gift. It challenges the human urge to find eternal causes for everything we see, suggesting instead that at the very bottom of reality, there is a silence that was broken by a voice. Whether one accepts this as literal truth or metaphorical wisdom, it remains one of the most powerful ideas in human history: that from nothing, something came to be, and that "something" includes us.
The doctrine stands as a testament to the belief that the universe is not an accident of eternal matter but a deliberate act of creation. It forces us to confront the fragility of our own existence and the magnitude of the power that brought it into being. In a world increasingly driven by materialism, where everything seems to be just rearranged atoms, creatio ex nihilo insists on a deeper origin story—one where the very possibility of matter was born from a will that transcends it all.
God...who quickeneth the dead; and calleth those things that are not, as those that are.
This ancient affirmation, penned by Paul and echoed by Theophilus over eighteen centuries ago, continues to resonate. It is a call to recognize that our existence is not self-sustaining but contingent, a momentary spark in a void that was once absolute. Whether through the lens of the Bakongo fire-spark, the Christian Creator's word, or the physicist's singularity, the story remains the same: we are here because something happened where there should have been nothing. And in that happening lies the greatest mystery of all.