Ex Nihilism: Getting to the Beginning

Aristotelian metaphysics provides some insight into how many people conceive of God. Aristotle taught that if something happened, then something else must have made it happen. We follow the reasoning back until we reach the ultimate, the primordial Something: God, the Unmoved Mover that started everything else in motion. Now, Aristotle thought that matter was already there, but the Gnostics, though they couldn't deny the simplicity of Aristotle's logic hundreds of years later, insisted that matter itself would have to be a happening that required a beginning. For the Gnostics, Aristotle's Unmoved Mover was the Monad: the One, the beginning who was the beginning alone, creating all the universe from nothing—the ex nihilo creation.

There may be things that are appealing about the explanation of creation ex nihilo, or creation out of nothing, following Gnostic logic. By the end of the second century, the appeal of this reasoning had made inroads within Christian theologies, inroads which have grown now somewhat ubiquitous in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theologies. In the face of so many who espouse this belief, I state that I don't see why it must be the only way to view God's creative power, as some claim. For me, it presents more problems.

If we assume that God created all things out of nothing, omnipotently, we likely assume He has unlimited creative powers. We also assume that He created it with some purpose: most link their belief in God with some form of afterlife, usually a heaven and hell . We go to heaven to glorify God forever and to hell to be punished forever. I will not talk in depth about my problems with that statement now, but I will say, if God intended us to go to Heaven forever, why did He not just create us already there? Why bother suffering? If He could create anything logically imaginable (no married bachelors or other illogical conundrums), He could have created us with the memory or experience or development or righteousness or whatever we needed from the very beginning to bypass all the hurt. Whatever may be beneficial from suffering and evil could be avoided by a logical, omnipotent ex nihilo creator. Whatever learning we would need could be programmed into us, like kung fu being programmed into Keanu Reeves' matrixed brain.

The problem with this Gnostic view of ex nihilo is that it makes God the ultimate perpetrator instead of the ultimate source of goodness. If we can create things ex nihilo, why bother with means? Ever? If all we were created for in this life is some ends, but that ends could have already been made from the beginning, for me, life seems to lose some of the purpose that is discovered through belief in God. God could have made me already in heaven, but didn't. This move undermines His love.

Therefore, I reject the notion of ex nihilo creation by absolute omnipotence, and I do so on philosophical, scientific, scriptural, and spiritual grounds. This only serves as my explanation as to why I choose to believe as I do, and is not intended to discount those who believe in boundless ex nihilo creation.

Momentarily leaving the realm of philosophical arguments, I turn to scientific laws. I believe in the law of conservation of matter. In relatively unscientific terms, this law says that matter is not created or destroyed. In other words, I believe that matter is eternal—it has always been around. For the scientifically oriented reader, I assure them that matter, energy, strings, branes—or whatever stuff the fabric of the cosmos is really made up of, deep down inside—that stuff is what I'm referring to; there has always been stuff around. Stuff will always be around. (Define "always"? Read Stephen Hawking: he opens up possibilities that are fascinating.) Regardless, there is room for my belief based on scientific grounds.

Some readers may insist that their holy writ suggests that God unequivocally created everything out of nothing. I will presume that my readership is likely most familiar with the Judeo-Christian creation. As a note to the reader, I will not be arguing at this time for any stances on the authority, symbolism, fallibility, or humanity of holy writ: for my purposes here, I will assume that the Pentateuchal description of creation is credible enough to be discussed to our advantage.

As I understand the Hebrew text that recorded the account, the word throughout the creative account usually interpreted as "create" comes from the Hebrew word "bārā'" which means to fashion, to shape, to organize, etc. In other words, God organized things from a chaotic or entropic state to fit His needs. So, without diving into the other symbolism and wording in that record, I find plenty of room to allow for my belief on scriptural grounds. I feel I am vindicated in the Judeo-Christian text; however I recognize that there passages in the Quran which I cannot exegete.

On spiritual grounds all I can write is that the experiences that I have had with God allow room for such a theory. I do not claim absolute truth, for I cannot claim at this point how the world came to be, but I do claim it being a valid option, spiritually.

So, if we believe that the universe was created from already existing something, it opens up a number of possibilities: maybe the universe was all wound up into a Planck-length spot, and maybe God initiated a massive dispensation of the stuff, an exodus, if I may wax allusive. Or maybe He knew of the explosion and used what He needed for His purposes. Or maybe hyperdimensionality provides an alternative entrance for matter which God facilitated. For me, there are numerous possibilities, enriched by science, philosophy, scripture, and personal experience.

The possibility that I hold on to about God's creation is that He organized all (or at least some significant portion) of the flying debris that now composes the universe into something to suit His purposes. Now this cannot be proven or disproven by science, but the more I study science, the more I learn about possible tools that God may have used.

Now, my point with this post was not to explain why not believing in ex nihilo creation helps solve the logical problem of evil. That will come soon. Rather, my point was, observing that most who believe in God seem to take the stance of ex nihilo creation, that someone such as I who does not believe in this Gnostic calculation may still have valid beliefs. I submit that, if we remove some of the restraints on God's attributes that even great thinkers have imposed, we may find innumerable possibilities of the existence of God unfolding.

Now, I have used observations from various fields to suggest that my belief system is rational. No matter how rational, how scientific, or how cogent our argument, we can’t let that undermine the truth that the only way to know something that cannot be proven by science is through God. May we continue to use our intellect, studying the sciences and educating ourselves, remembering that the knowledge we can acquire here is a pale shadow of the knowledge that is available from a benevolent God.

And a short post-script, I would like to state that I find no contradictions between God and science. I will likely have more posts on this statement, because it seems to be troublesome for a good number of investigators on the topic of God. I have read a number of people's views on the matter, coming from varying belief systems, some obviously closed-minded, fixated on their eloquent point of view: for example, some of the authors of the recent John Templeton Foundation essays on the question "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" Though I will not be arguing for the compatibility of God and science here, I restate: I don't find the God I believe in to be in anyway incompatible with science.

That said, I have heard of other views of God that seem to me to be incompatible with science. But even with that statement, I believe that people with such notions of God can still be educated: perhaps they are satisfied with some explanations that do not satisfy me. I try to use my brain as logically and as thoroughly as I can. No matter the belief system, I need to encourage my intellectual and spiritual pursuit and the intellectual and spiritual pursuit of others: let them worship, study, or dwell upon how, where, or what they may. I would only expect to receive the same. Together we can thrive.

I will likely write similar statements again and again, because I believe that searching for understanding is one of the most valuable pursuits we can have in this life, regardless of belief system. More comments about God and science will come later.

Historical Roots and Weeds

At the outset, I acknowledge that my viewpoints do not necessarily represent some readers' conceptions of God. My point is not to discount differing religious opinions, but to share what I have come to understand in my pursuit of truth. At the same time, I want to assure the reader that many of the theological points that I will share hereafter are not my own concoctions. I am not just trying to calculate a God that fits what I want; rather, in this blog I will set forth the theology I have found best suits what I understand and have experienced of God.

I am a big fan of Plato and Aristotle. But being a big fan of them, I have no duty to espouse everything they taught. Much of the Western thought tradition sinks its roots into Platonic and Aristotelian thought, and without it, we would not have the scientific and social progress of our time. However, no matter how brilliant Plato and Aristotle were, assuming without question that their logical postulations can perfectly depict God would be, in my mind, a risky proposition.

From what we can tell, Plato was somewhat dissatisfied with the depictions of the Greek gods, perhaps cuing from his teacher, Socrates, who was tried and killed for allegedly leading away youth with his disbelief in the popular mythological understanding of the gods. Plato felt that God should be the infinite goodness, all positive attributes in their perfected forms, in stark contrast to the clumsy, blundering, moody, deceivable deities of the popular mythology. His student Aristotle and other neo-Platonists philosophers pushed the idea further, teaching that the greatest possible being would be immovable and unaffectable. Aristotle thought of God as an Unmoved Mover: one who creates and changes all, but cannot be changed or made subject to anything—to intellect or emotions, like love, pity, sadness, etc— and so completely other-worldly that He cannot be known or comprehended. We can follow these ideas through intellectual tradition, albeit with a few tweaks in semantics, to a God described as being abstract, absolute, transcendent, immanent, unknowable, without body, parts, or passions. As a response, the Gnostic philosophers were brewing opposing thoughts, with alternative views to creation, to contrast the abstracts of metaphysics.

Many early Christians, such as Origen, a devout Platonic Christian, and Augustine, a student of Greek philosophy and the most prominent early Christian theologian, espoused many of these philosophies, including those regarding God's attributes. Augustine showed not only his approval of Greek metaphysics but also his view of its compatibility with Christianity when he said in his True Religion, “If these men [Greek philosophers] could have had this life over again with us…They would have become Christians, with the change of a few words and statements.”

Much of Western religious text comes from these thought traditions, as manifested incrementally by the formation of creeds and the dominance of stalwart theologians (such as Anselm and Aquinas) whose views reflected these philosophies. These same philosophies have become a part of many of the arguments for and against God and, from what I can tell, have also mingled with other non-Christian religious belief systems.

I respect those who uphold such tenants, but I humbly submit that such attribution to God brings irresolvable questions for me. There are many that refer to part, but not all, of the Neo-Platonic philosophical description of God or to the Gnostic responses. I recognize that there are many who say that God loves but is still immovable and unknowable. I readily recognize that many believers in God have rejected the idea that He feels no emotion and therefore doesn’t love them in the sense that we think of loving, but they still see the need to hold on to other Neo-Platonic attributes. However, I don’t find the need to restrict my understanding of God’s attributes within Neo-platonic ideas espoused by theologians that followed suit, but rather I harness my understanding of God more often from spiritual processes, some of which are outlined in previous posts. I submit that this understanding of God, which I attempt to describe with this blog, is philosophically cogent, theologically sound, and pragmatically meaningful.

At this time, the reader will note that I am addressing the Judeo-Christian branch of theology, for it is under that umbrella that I classify myself. Searching in Judeo-Christian texts of God, I personally have found little to enforce the idea that God fits the descriptions of the purely Neo-Platonic or purely gnostic mindsets. One scholar of post-Biblical history and theology, George Foot Moore asserts that "Palestinian Judaism was innocent...of an abstract or transcendent or any other sort of a philosophical idea of god." And a historian-theologian of Christianity J.N.D. Kelly writes, "There is an extraordinary contrast, for example, between the versions of the Church's teaching given by the second-century Apostolic Fathers and by an accomplished fifth-century theologian like Cyril of Alexandria." Even the great Christian scholar Edwin Hatch observed, in a work that is considered a classic on the topic, that "a large part of what are sometimes called Christian doctrines, and many usages which have prevailed and continue to prevail in the Christian Church, are in reality Greek theories and Greek usages changed in form and colour by the influence of primitive Christianity, but in their essence Greek still." Even more fascinating is the paradox that arises from the trial of Galileo: he was put on trial not for contradicting the Bible, but for contradicting Aristotle—we know that the intellectual roots of our sciences, Greek philosophers, had flaws that we were able to recognize and uproot. These statements, among many others, suggest to me that there is a possibility that some depictions of God rooted in Neo-Platonic or Gnostic thought might be laden with human intervention and error. Though Greek philosophies provide us with the intellectual framework to pursue science (finding personally that science cannot prove or deny God), I don’t find it necessary to use their theological framework to pursue God.

For open-mindedness, I choose not to restrict the possibilities of God by forcing His attributes to be something (incomprehensible, unknowable, immovable) outside of what I have experienced. I, personally, must place the Neo-Platonic and gnostic depictions of God back on the shelf, with all respect, nevertheless accepting the grand sum of Greek philosophers’ contributions, knowing that without those philosophers our society wouldn’t have the intellectual foundation to pursue science as we now pursue. The God I and others trust is knowable, and as I have stated before, actively loving, and if God is those things, for me it could signify that other attributes of God from the philosophical tradition of Aristotle might be in error. Indeed Tertullian, an early Christian leader, taught, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?…Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition!” The irony is that Tertullian wanted so little to do with Neo-Platonism, that he espoused thoughts of the opposing Gnosticism. Indeed with the further investment of these abstracted thoughts, Chadwick records that one early Christian monk cried out, upon being instructed that God had not the personal nature which he had previously believed “Woe is me! They have taken my God away from me, . . . and I know not whom to adore or to address.”

Able to free myself of the restraints placed on God by espousing all of the Neo-Platonic and Gnostic thought traditions, I am able to see more clearly some of the complications, and the major one for me I will likely address in my next post. I have left a traditional framework, and I intend to construct another with subsequent posts.

This discussion is foundational to understanding what has been, for me, a way to resolve the Logical Problem of Evil. To me it seems that removing those philosophical restrictions I’ve mentioned above relieves much of the problem. This is not to say that there aren't other solutions to the Logical Problem of Evil. C.S. Lewis wrote an excellent book called The Problem of Pain in which he argues many of the points I would eventually like to make far better than I could. There are also a number of defenses of the Logical Problem of Evil that I have come across. I suppose that many authors who have taken on the logical problem of evil argue that my approach of distancing myself from Neo-Platonic and Gnostic thought is unnecessary. But with the questions that I have, for me, it makes all the difference.