Creation Ex Nihilo Philosophy Essay Introduction. Mercy.
COPAN: CREATIO EX NIHILO 79 Is the traditional Christian belief in creatio ex nihilo, God's creation of the universe out of nothing, one that is inherent to biblical doctrine or one that is simply compatible with it? Is creatio ex nihilo nothing more than a defensive theological reaction to Gnosticism?In theology, ex nihilo creation states that there was a beginning to the universe (including therefore, to each person's existence), and anything that has a beginning has a cause. This idea of a required beginning appears to contradict the proposed creator who existed without a beginning.Creatio ex Nihilo: Matter, Creation, and the Body in Classical and Christian Philosophy Through Aquinas Abstract Creatio ex nihilo marked a major redefinition of the material cosmos by the Christian apologists of the late second century, Tatian and Theophilus of Antioch.
The earth was without form and void.” The point of this second rendition is to emphasize a crucial issue that God created out of nothing (ex nihilo). Other ancient Near Eastern creation stories (from Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example) assume that their gods worked with material that already existed.According to Mormonism, creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) is not to be found in the Bible and is untrue: God created the universe out of matter that pre-existed, and ex nihilo creation is a invention of the apostasized post-Apostolic church.
In this paper we leave aside the fascinating philosophical questions raised by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which I have sought to address elsewhere (5), in order to focus upon the relevance of contemporary science, in particular, astrophysics and, still more specifically, physical cosmogony, to creation ex nihilo.
