#907 Questions about Creation out of Nothing

Dr. craig’s response

Your question, Trent, exposes an all-too-common misunderstanding, which therefore merits being addressed. When theists say, “We have never observed a case of something coming from nothing,” what they mean is that we have never observed a case of something’s coming into existence without a cause. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of some sort, either an efficient cause or a material cause or both. They are obviously not talking about observing a case of an absolute beginning of being without any prior being. As you note, that truism would hardly support the point they are trying to make! Rather, they mean that in every case of something’s beginning to exist, we observe that it has some sort of cause. That supplies very powerful inductive evidence for the causal principle.

Now as for your comment, Al, you’re absolutely correct that “absolute nothingness is a manifest impossibility,” since God is a metaphysically necessary being whose non-existence is impossible. But God’s creating “something out of absolutely nothing” does not imply that absolutely nothing exists, for God is the efficient cause of creation. In the case of creatio ex nihilo, it is, indeed, implied that the act of creation, while having an efficient cause (God), has no material cause. But you should not equate a material cause with a physical cause. A material cause is anything, physical or non-physical, out of which something is made. And the Christian doctrine of creation holds that there is nothing out of which creation is made. Specifically, the doctrine repudiates the pantheistic or panentheistic idea that the world was created out of God’s own substance. The world was not created out of anything. This is the teaching of Hebrews 11.3, which, translated literally, states that the world “was created by the Word of God, so that what is seen came to be not out of things that appear.” It does not state or imply that “God created the visible/physical universe out of invisible/spiritual realities,” a statement that is contrary to creatio ex nihilo.

I am obviously not saying that God “reach[ed] into a ‘bag’ of ‘absolutely nothing’ to create the universe.” Rather I’m saying that God did not reach into any bag for anything out of which to create the universe. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo should be neither abandoned nor amended.