artistic view of creationism
(larger image)

¹ In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ² The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

³ And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day (Genesis 1:1-5 ESV).

Arguments in Favor

Scientific views

Scriptural Views

• Genesis 1:1-2 - In the beginning when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void..
• Proverbs 8:22-24 “Jehovah himself produced me as the beginning of his way, the earliest of his achievements of long ago. 23 From time indefinite I was installed, from the start, from times earlier than the earth. 24 When there were no watery deeps I was brought forth as with labor pains, when there were no springs heavily charged with water.
• Psalm 33:6 - By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.
• John 1:3 - Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
• Romans 4:17 - .. the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.
• 1 Corinthians 1:28 - He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are,
• Hebrews 11:3 - By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

The Evidence in Cosmology

• Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
• The universe had a beginning. Virtually all cosmologists agree that the universe had a beginning.
• Therefore, the universe has a cause. Astronomer Robert Jastrow says, "The chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply, at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy."^[1]

An opinion held by some Orthodox Jewish scholars is that the Book of Genesis contains a mystical interaction between God and all of creation. A familiar name of God for Christians, "Alpha (Α, α) and Omega (Ω ω)", comes from the idea of God being the cause of all creation. The Hebrew equivalent of the letter "alpha" is "aleph", both letters being the equivalent to the letter 'A'. Therefore, since God alone represents the letter 'A', the next letter in the alphabet, 'B', or "bet" obviously is situated after the letter 'A'. Because then, the Torah begins with the letter 'B', in the word "bereshit" - or, in the beginning - some have posited the idea that we can conclude that God existed before the Torah, but that the Torah was the next thing to exist in the universe, and that this relationship between God and the Torah supports the theory of ex nihilo, due to the fact that the letter 'A' is situated before the letter 'B' in the alphabet.

Islam

Arguments Against

xThomas Jay Oordxx argues that Christians should abandon the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Oord points to the work of biblical scholars, such as Jon D. Levenson, who acknowledge that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is not present in the first book of the canon.

Early Jewish and Christian theologians and philosophers, including Philo of Alexandria, Justin, Athenagoras, Hermogenes, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and, later, John Scotus Erigena also found no good reason to affirm the creation-out-of-nothing hypothesis. Philo, for instance, postulated a pre-existent matter alongside God.

For an examination of how the doctrine arose originally in Gnosticism and then was adopted by early Church leaders to shore up doctrines of divine determinism, see Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Thought. trans. A. S. (Worrall. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994).

Process theologians argue that God has always been related to some “world” or another. Oord speculates that God created our particular universe billions of years ago from primordial chaos. This chaos did not predate God, however, for God would have created the chaotic elements as well.

Critics also claim that rejecting 'creatio ex nihilo' provides the opportunity to affirm that God has everlastingly created and related with some realm of nondivine actualities or another. According to this alternative God-world theory, no nondivine thing exists without the creative activity of God, and nothing can terminate God’s necessary existence.

While the idea of God everlastingly relating with creatures may seem strange because of its novelty, even its opponents in Christian history – like Thomas Aquinas – admitted it as a logical possibility.

Another scientific argument against creatio ex nihilo is made by Sjoerd Bonting. A viable alternative is offered by physicists Paul Steinhardt (Princeton University) and Neil Turok (Cambridge University). Their proposal is based upon the ancient idea that space and time have always existed in some form. Using developments in superstring theory, Steinhardt and Turok suggest that the Big Bang of our universe is a bridge to a pre-existing universe, and that creation undergoes an eternal succession of universes, with possibly trillions of years of evolution in each. Gravity and the transition from Big Crunch to Big Bang characterize an everlasting succession of universes. This argument, however, still fails to explain how such a system of successive universes could have come into being.

Computer science

Social architecture

There is a yang form of social architecture where you prescribe and design more of what you want to see. There is a yin form of social architecture where you allow more the structure to be built by the participants. Open space technology and world cafe are more yin forms. Edwarding is a an relatively yin form of social architecture.

Notes

• Siegfried, Francis (1908). "Creation". The Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2008-09-30. "Probably the idea of creation never entered the human mind apart from Revelation. Though some of the pagan philosophers attained to a relatively high conception of God as the supreme ruler of the world, they seem never to have drawn the next logical inference of His being the absolute cause of all finite existence. [..] The descendants of Sem and Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob, preserved the idea of creation clear and pure; and from the opening verse of Genesis to the closing book of the Old Testament the doctrine of creation runs unmistakably outlined and absolutely undefiled by any extraneous element. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In this, the first, sentence of the Bible we see the fountain-head of the stream which is carried over to the new order by the declaration of the mother of the Machabees: "Son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them: and consider that God made them out of nothing" (2 Maccabees 7:28). One has only to compare the Mosaic account of the creative work with that recently discovered on the clay tablets unearthed from the ruins of Babylon to discern the immense difference between the unadulterated revealed tradition and the puerile story of the cosmogony corrupted by polytheistic myths. Between the Hebrew and the Chaldean account there is just sufficient similarity to warrant the supposition that both are versions of some antecedent record or tradition; but no one can avoid the conviction that the Biblical account represents the pure, even if incomplete, truth, while the Babylonian story is both legendary and fragmentary (Smith, "Chaldean Account of Genesis", New York, 1875)."
• Ra, Summum Bonum Amen [1975] (2004). "Chapter 2", SUMMUM: Sealed Except to the Open Mind (HTML), Salt Lake City: Summum. Retrieved on 2006-12-15.
• Doctrine and Covenants 93:29; Doctrine and Covenants 131:7-8; Abraham 3:24
• Creatio ex nihilo - FAIRMormon
• Creation in Colossians 1:16 - FAIRMormon

Suggested reading

• Thomas Jay Oord, Science of Love: The Wisdom of Well-Being (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005), especially chapter 2.
• Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994; New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
• Sjoerd L. Bonting, Chaos Theology: A Revised Creation Theology [Ottawa: Novalis, 2002].
• James Edward Hutchingson, Pandemoneum Tremendum: Chaos and Mystery in the Life of God [Pilgrim, 2000].
• David Ray Griffin, "Creation out of Chaos and The Problem of Evil," in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, 2nd ed., Stephen T. Davis, ed., [Atlanta: John Knox, 1999].
• Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming [Routledge, 2003].
• Michael E. Lodahl "Creation out of Nothing? Or is Next to Nothing Enough?" in Thy Nature and Name is Love, Bryan Stone and Thomas Jay Oord, eds. Nashville, TN: Kingswood, 2002
• Gerd Thiessen, "The Shadow of the Gallilean" [scm, 1979].