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Paul and Ex Nihilo
- Thread starter Fool
- Start date
How does this verse get rid of ex nihilo? It's still saying God created everything.
it say from him and through him, it doesn't say it created from nothing.
ex nihilo claims it created from nothing. ex nihilo doesn't claim from itself, or through itself. ex nihilo claims that the heavens and earth were created apart from god, separate.
But that agrees with John 1:1, 2. All things were created through the Logos, which is God itself. Logos is God manifesting, or God creating, as that is a manifestation of the divine, from itself, into existence. Or, out of God, or "no-thing", but God itself.
Agreed but ex nihilo is not the same as no-thing. Nothing is more inline with having no existence, no being. where no-thing is more inline with not created, no form or not formed.
But ex-nihilo simply says God created everything out of nothing. That's what John 1:1, 2 is saying, and Romans 11 is mirroring that same conceptualization. How do either of those negate an ex-nihilo creation out of nothing?
everything is created from God's being. Exodus 3:14.
Jews and 1 century Christiananity didn't believe in ex nihilo. It was made up afterwards
That's how I've always understood ex nihilo. From God's being. Is there something I've misunderstood?
It seems as if you believe you already know the answer to what you ask. And while there are many who would agree with you, there is compelling evidence that the concept of creatio ex nihilo was already present in Jewish circles by at least the first century (not to mention in the origins of Christian thought) and possibly at least indirectly present in the "traditional" theological interpretation of Genesis (there is a somewhat decent and certainly detailed dissertation on the interpretation of Genesis 1:1 I recall reading a few years ago I will try to locate). I think this is definitely pushing things and far more likely to be an anachronistic than an implied reading, but the same is not necessarily true in the case of Paul or the Johannine corpus.
The Anointed
Well-Known Member
Out of nothing comes nothing.
god's being is not nothing. god's being has no form and appears empty/void. those are two different things
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yet the bible doesn't agree with it. genesis 1:2. there was god, there was spirit, and there was this liquid. then creation arises from those three interconnected things.
to be formless, void, doesn't = nothing. it means god, god's spirit, and the waters were formless, uncreated. ex nihilo is a farce
God didn't create Spirit, nor the waters.
The ex-nihilo argument is simply saying that God did not create from pre-existent matter, as opposed to taking matter which was already there and fashioning it in some way. From the Wiki article on this:
"Creatio ex nihilo, in contrast to ex nihilo nihil fit, is the idea that matter is not eternal but was created by God at the initial cosmic moment."
God's being is not matter-based. To say God created out of nothing, means matter did not exist prior to creation. Matter was created, not eternal. To say God created everything out of God's being, is simply say that God created matter, as opposed to fashioning matter that was already there.
One can argue justifiably that the Genesis creation myth speaks of matter being already there, and that God simply fashioned all of it. But by the time of the NT being written questions about that were already taking place, did God create matter, or did matter exist eternally, like God? That's really what the debate is about.
I fail to see how that passage in Romans supports ex nihilo nihil fit as God's being is not matter-based, nor full of atoms and particles. Formless, means no form, which means no-matter. Matter is form.
the waters in genesis 1:2 were not created. they existed with god eternally. everything else, after that, was created.
before the 1st utterance, three things existed: 1. god, 2. spirit, 3. waters. everything that was created/formed comes from those 3 things
creation/formation begins at genesis 1:3
Right. But that verse in Romans does not speak about preexistent matter. Genesis appears to suggest that water already there. This would then say that water is eternal, and has no beginning.
So you have at least hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms as fundamental to the cosmos eternally. That is what you have to claim, if you are to read the Genesis myth as scientific. You have to have protons and neutrons and electrons, as well as quarks, and possibly strings existing eternally alongside God in order to have water as uncreated, as water is made up of all of those.
Do you believe this is true?
One last thought, where did this pre-existed water reside? Floating in space? Where did space come from? Where did the atoms come from?
standing waves in physics creates forms like the spirit moving on water. we know god spoke, or a sound involved something being created/formed. same idea with aum.
water could be anything capable of change, like a liquid, or something having plasticity.
This is more than a stretch of the imagination to try to make what Genesis says as some magical scientific knowledge. This is the pickle you get into reading into the texts. What the text is really about, is not a scientific explanation of standing waves in God's particle accelerator.
This is really what Genesis is about, if you care to uncover why it says what it does. It's not about teaching science. But about whose God is the real God? From an essay called Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance:
Read through the eyes of the people who wrote it, Genesis 1 would seem very different from the way most people today would tend to read it -- including both evolutionists who may dismiss it as a prescientific account of origins, and creationists who may try to defend it as the true science and literal history of origins. For most peoples in the ancient world the various regions of nature were divine. Sun, moon and stars were gods. There were sky gods and earth gods and water gods. There were gods of light and darkness, rivers and vegetation, animals and fertility. Though for us nature has been “demythologized” and “naturalized” -- in large part because of this very passage of Scripture -- for ancient Jewish faith a divinized nature posed a fundamental religious problem.
In addition, pharaohs, kings and heroes were often seen as sons of gods, or at least as special mediators between the divine and human spheres. The greatness and vaunted power and glory of the successive waves of empires that impinged on or conquered Israel (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia) posed an analogous problem of idolatry in the human sphere.
In the light of this historical context it becomes clearer what Genesis 1 is undertaking and accomplishing: a radical and sweeping affirmation of monotheism vis-à-vis polytheism, syncretism and idolatry. Each day of creation takes on two principal categories of divinity in the pantheons of the day, and declares that these are not gods at all, but creatures -- creations of the one true God who is the only one, without a second or third. Each day dismisses an additional cluster of deities, arranged in a cosmological and symmetrical order.
On the first day the gods of light and darkness are dismissed. On the second day, the gods of sky and sea. On the third day, earth gods and gods of vegetation. On the fourth day, sun, moon and star gods. The fifth and sixth days take away any associations with divinity from the animal kingdom. And finally human existence, too, is emptied of any intrinsic divinity -- while at the same time all human beings, from the greatest to the least, and not just pharaohs, kings and heroes, are granted a divine likeness and mediation.
On each day of creation another set of idols is smashed. These, O Israel, are no gods at all -- even the great gods and rulers of conquering superpowers. They are the creations of that transcendent One who is not to be confused with any piece of the furniture of the universe of creaturely habitation. The creation is good, it is very good, but it is not divine.
In addition, pharaohs, kings and heroes were often seen as sons of gods, or at least as special mediators between the divine and human spheres. The greatness and vaunted power and glory of the successive waves of empires that impinged on or conquered Israel (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia) posed an analogous problem of idolatry in the human sphere.
In the light of this historical context it becomes clearer what Genesis 1 is undertaking and accomplishing: a radical and sweeping affirmation of monotheism vis-à-vis polytheism, syncretism and idolatry. Each day of creation takes on two principal categories of divinity in the pantheons of the day, and declares that these are not gods at all, but creatures -- creations of the one true God who is the only one, without a second or third. Each day dismisses an additional cluster of deities, arranged in a cosmological and symmetrical order.
On the first day the gods of light and darkness are dismissed. On the second day, the gods of sky and sea. On the third day, earth gods and gods of vegetation. On the fourth day, sun, moon and star gods. The fifth and sixth days take away any associations with divinity from the animal kingdom. And finally human existence, too, is emptied of any intrinsic divinity -- while at the same time all human beings, from the greatest to the least, and not just pharaohs, kings and heroes, are granted a divine likeness and mediation.
On each day of creation another set of idols is smashed. These, O Israel, are no gods at all -- even the great gods and rulers of conquering superpowers. They are the creations of that transcendent One who is not to be confused with any piece of the furniture of the universe of creaturely habitation. The creation is good, it is very good, but it is not divine.
God is not nothing. Water is not nothing. Spirit is not nothing. All have being. they may not be matter in the sense of a solid but we know energy creates mass and from mass comes energy. einstein said they were the same thing. ex nihilo is a farce
so matter arises from energy.
god is identified as a being with spirit. this is not nothing. this is something energetic, potent
It is nothing in the sense of no-thing. A "thing" is an object that has form. A thing, is matterial. God is Spirit, which means no form. It is not a "thing".
Ex nihilio is about matter being created, specifically. God's being is not considered to be matter.
Unformed potential, is not matter. Form arises from Formlessness.
BTW, why did you ignore that entire explanation of why Genesis was written? Why are you ignoring that and trying to make it scientific, stretching the imagination beyond credibility saying things like standing waves looks like water, or something or another? Which makes more sense? Genesis is a magic science book? Or the myth is about the monotheistic God over all the other polytheistic gods?