Creatio ex nihilo: its Jewish and Christian foundations

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Creatio ex nihilo is a central teaching in Jewish, Christian and Muslim thought – in fact, the only teaching that the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides thought that all three traditions shared. It affirms that God, from no compulsion or necessity, created the world out of nothing – really nothing – no pre-existent matter, space or time. It is not the same thing as the ‘Big Bang theory’ with which it is often confused and which might roughly be defined as ‘the creation of everything at the beginning of time’. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, thought that God could have created, ex nihilo , an everlasting world – that is, a world without beginning or end – although Aquinas believed, on the basis of Scripture, that the world in fact had a beginning. The heart of the doctrine is the dependence of ‘all that is’ (for the sake of convenience I will say ‘the world’) on God or, more specifically, on God's free choice to create and to sustain, which comes to the same thing. Were God to cease holding the world in being for a moment it would not be. The fact that Aquinas could consider the doctrine to be logically compatible with two different accounts of world origins demonstrates that creatio ex nihilo is not a cosmological or scientific hypothesis (as is the ‘Big Bang theory’).