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23 May 2023

6 min read

Creating out of nothing

Considering authorship, Barnabas Aspray unpacks what the creeds mean by ‘creator’ - the source of all reality.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A notebook is open at two blank pages. a pen rests across the page.s.

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

In my last article, I said that God is not an object in space-time. He is part of the fabric of reality, like the number 2. He is transcendent, as if he inhabited a fourth dimension that we could not see and yet surrounds us, just as a two-dimensional creature could not see or conceive us even if we could see them.

However, many transcendent beings could exist, like many numbers exist. But they would not be what the Nicene Creed means by the word ‘God’. The Creed also states that God is radically unique and that he created everything. To see what that means we need an analogy.

Author of the world

The Harry Potter books were written by J.K. Rowling. In them she describes a fantasy world, where wizards and witches can cast magical spells and perform supernatural feats with their power. The most powerful evil wizard is Lord Voldemort, who is the main bad guy in the whole Harry Potter series.

But is Lord Voldemort more powerful than J.K. Rowling? Could he ever defeat her in a one-on-one battle?

Everyone can see immediately that the answer is ‘no’. But why not? Rowling is just an ordinary person without any magical powers, and Voldemort is one of the most powerful wizards in the Harry Potter world.

The reason Voldemort could never defeat Rowling has to do with the unique kind of relationship they have. It’s not simply that Rowling is more powerful than Voldemort. The truth is more absolute than that. Voldemort doesn’t have any power of his own that Rowling didn’t give him in the first place. Rowling doesn’t really belong to the Harry Potter world at all, even though it belongs to her.

In other words, Rowling has the status of creator in relation to the Harry Potter world. She decides everything about how that world works. She is nowhere to be found in it, yet she is present in a special way to every part of it, and every part of it depends on her for its very existence.

There is one way in which Rowling could enter the Harry Potter world: if she were to write a story in which she herself was one of the characters, walking about and interacting with the others. That character would be both created and uncreated at the same time, in the world yet not belonging to it. This might help us understand how Jesus could be both God and human at the same time.

There are two limits to this analogy. One is that Rowling is not an absolute creator. She uses elements from her own world and ours to create the Harry Potter world: colours, gravity, light, time, space, etc. She did not create ex nihilo (out of nothing). The other limit is that the creatures in Harry Potter do not have free will. They can only ever do what Rowling decides that they do.

The Christian Doctrine of Creation

The above analogy helps make one point clear. To say that God is the creator does not mean that God kickstarted the world and then left it to go its own way. An author of a novel doesn’t only write its first line. The world couldn’t possibly go its own way for a microsecond without God continuing to ‘write’ it. The Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo has nothing to do with whether evolution occurred, or whether Genesis chapter 1 should be taken ‘literally’. It is far more fundamental than that. It says that there is no particle, no law of physics or nature, no moment in time, that is not 100% dependent on God for its very existence. In other words, the Christian God doesn’t live within our understanding of reality at all. He is the source of reality, the existence behind all other existence, far more concrete and real than anything else – spiritual or physical – ever could be.

This does not count as a proof for God’s existence, but (just like the last article), it does affect how arguments about God’s existence should be made. Nobody should ever think that they need to provide ‘evidence’ that God exists, as if God were an object in space-time who could be measured or observed. It doesn’t make sense to demand evidence for the existence of the source of existence. What would count as evidence? Let’s return to the Harry Potter analogy for a moment. No one could ever find out more about Rowling than she chooses to reveal about herself. If Harry Potter were to find a magic spell that enabled him to talk to her, this would only be because Rowling had created such a spell in the first place. The only thing Harry could ever figure out without Rowling’s help is that he did not create himself or the world he lives in. Either nobody did, or someone else did, who Harry might want to call the ‘unknown God’.

Nor does it make sense to ask who created God, a question that sometimes occurs to children. Either there is an infinite regress of causality, so that every source has another source behind it and so on forever, or there is something we may accurately call the ‘first’ because it is the absolute source of everything. As the previous article showed, there are two kinds of real: (1) contingent objects that may or may not have existed, like you, me, or any object we encounter in the Universe, (2) necessary principles without which we can’t imagine anything, like numbers and logic. For Christians, God belongs in the second category, so he doesn’t need to be created any more than the number 2 needs to be created.

FAQs

Does the Bible really teach creation ex nihilo?

The point of this article is to explain what the writers of the Nicene Creed meant they said that God is the ‘creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible’. Like the Trinity, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is not explicit in the Bible (if it was, why bother writing the Creed?). There are some people who interpret the Bible in ways that contradict the Creed, because it is possible to interpret the Bible (like any text) numerous ways, and no interpretation can be proven beyond question. But the writers of the Creed believed that creation ex nihilo arises from prayerful reflection on the implications of the whole Bible’s message. If you’re interested in the biblical case for and against creation ex nihilo, check out the following resources:

Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020);

Thomas Jay Oord, ed., Theologies of Creation: Creatio Ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals (Routledge, 2014);

Nathan J. Chambers, Reconsidering Creation Ex Nihilo in Genesis 1 (Penn State University Press, 2021);

Gary Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl, eds., Creation Ex Nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018);

Janet Soskice, ed. “Creation ‘ex Nihilo’ and Modern Theology.” Special Issue, Modern Theology 29, no. 2 (April 2013).

Susannah Ticciati, ‘Anachronism or Illumination? Genesis 1 and Creation Ex Nihilo’, Anglican Theological Review 99, no. 4 (September 2017): 691–712

What about Satan? Isn’t he the opposite of God?

No, Satan is not the opposite of God, just as Voldemort is not the opposite of J.K. Rowling. Satan is a creature like us, part of the Universe and dependent on God for his existence. The archangel Gabriel might be a more appropriate ‘opposite’ to Satan. The only opposite of God is nothingness, which is the same as saying that nothing is the opposite of God. As to why God continues to give power to Satan knowing he will use it for evil, that is a topic for a future article on the problem of evil. Keep watching this site and you’ll find it soon.

Nigeria’s terror survivors share their stories

This violence is not gruesome fiction, it’s reality.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A Nigerian man looks up towards the camera, behind him is dusty ground

Manga survived an attempted beheading.

Open Doors.

This article contains distressing content.

Something is happening. And nobody is talking about it.

Nigeria, the big and beautiful ‘Giant of Africa’, is becoming a place of increasing terror for the hundred million Christians who call it home. Since 2000, 62,000 people have been killed for having a Christian faith. Eight-thousand people were killed in 2023 alone. These staggering numbers mean that more Christians are being killed in Nigeria than in every other country combined.

The violence is as extreme as it gets. And yet, very few of us know that it’s happening.

When it comes to the Nigerian government and media, the relentlessly brutal attacks are seemingly hidden in plain sight; undeniable and yet somehow unstoppable. While, in the UK, we appear to be entirely unaware. This violence is out of sight, and therefore largely out of mind. The reasons why are admittedly complex, as outlined by Chris Wadibia. Nevertheless, the violence being carried out toward the Nigerian people, particularly those living in the Northern states, surely deserves our attention.

Earlier this year, I took a trip to Northern Nigeria. While I was there, I got to know a group of people who had endured unimaginable trauma, largely because of their Christian faith. Every day, they would bravely tell their stories – who they were and what they had experienced. Every day, I looked into the faces of children who had lost parents, parents who had lost children, husbands who had lost wives, and wives who had lost husbands. All of a sudden, the bewildering statistics were people before me – people who were having to live with the images of their loved ones being ‘butchered’ before their very eyes. Their villages being burnt down. Their lives being turned upside down by militants with assault rifles and machetes.

The only reference I had for stories such as the ones I was hearing were apocalyptic movies. But these things happened. They happened to the people sitting across from me. This violence is not the stuff of gruesome fiction, it’s the stuff of reality.

As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety...

I met one woman, she was incredibly gentle and kind, and told her story with a composure that’s hard to fathom. She was working on her land along with her husband and mother-in-law, a totally run-of-the-mill day. They were so engrossed with the task at hand, they didn’t notice that their village was being attacked by armed ‘Fulani’ militants (the majority of the violence being carried out in Northern Nigeria is at the hands of Islamic extremist groups such as Fulani militants, Boko Haram and ISWAP - Islamic State in West African Province). She looked up to find herself face-to-face with two attackers and despite their command for her to surrender to them, she ran, as did her husband and mother-in-law. While she was running, she could hear bullets flying past her head and the screams of her mother-in-law. Making it to a neighbouring village, she gathered help and eventually went back to find her husband and mother-in-law. Both of whom were stabbed and killed that day.

The Fulani militants now have control over her village, and she told us how she’s been praying that she would be able to forgive these men for what they’d done, as she is now forced to live alongside them. And so, she felt proud because she had recently been able to respond to one of the men as they greeted her.

There was another woman, she was strong and defiantly compassionate. Her story is laced with horror. She studied at a university – the discrimination she experienced there meant that a course that was supposed to be four years long, took her eight years to complete. In 2014, Boko Haram attacked the university – while she was trying to escape, her friend was shot and ‘hacked at’ while he refused to deny his Christian faith. She recalls how his last words were ‘I’m happy. I’ve saved lives today. And I have Jesus’.

He died and she continued to run. As she was running, she came across a woman who has hiding herself because she was giving birth to twins. This mother handed the babies to her and begged her to get them to safety, as she did so, she heard the mother being shot behind her.

She ran those twins to Cameroon, leaving them in safety, and now lives in a rural Nigerian village where she teaches the local children. Her Christian identity is no secret, and so faces continual danger. Her crops were burnt to the ground and destroyed, twice. And the villagers have tried, repeatedly, to get her to leave. One night, she came face to face with young men with bats and machetes who threatened her life – she told them – ‘you can’t scare me. I have seen the Lord’.

And they left. Remarkably, that village is still her home.

One heart-wrenchingly-young girl told us how, while she sleeping – she was awoken by her father who told her that they needed to run, they were under attack. She ran, hand in hand with her father, while her mother carried her younger brother. While they were fleeing, her dad was shot and killed. Her mother pried her hand out of her father’s and buried both her and her brother in sand, instructing them to stay hidden. The next day, they found that their house, their crops, their entire village had been burnt down.

This is what is happening. This is what we are not seeing.

While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.

Since my return, I have met with a man who bears the physical scars of his trauma. He thought his house was being pillaged by armed robbers - it was only when they led him, his brother and his father outside, made them kneel with their hands tied behind their backs, and demanded that they denounce their Christian faith that he realised he was being attacked by Boko Haram. It was a regular evening, he was putting together a lesson plan for his class the following day, and now he was kneeling before an executioner. His father refused their demand, and they beheaded him. His brother also refused, and they took a blade to him, too. Then it was his turn, and while his mind was filled with thoughts of death and how much this was about to hurt, he also prayed that these men would be forgiven for what they were doing. Taking after Jesus, who forgave his executioners mid-execution, this man continued to pray as he felt the blade in his neck.

Left to bleed to death, miraculously, both him and his brother survived. Now, his scar tells an astonishing story.

This epidemic of violence seems to reside under our radar. It’s not quite catching our eye, is it? And, as a result, is not quite receiving the force of our outrage nor benefiting from the depths of our compassion. So many of the people that I met expressed a feeling of being neglected – like they’re suffering in deafening silence. While we are not seeing this violence, they are not seeing an end to it.

What’s happening in Nigeria is a crisis, one that we must acknowledge.