The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

Today the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is regarded as the linchpin of Christianity, the truth on which theism stands or falls. So it is interesting to note how slowly and uncertainly this idea emerged. It was entirely alien to Greek philosophy. It would have seemed absurd to Aristotle to imagine the timeless God who was wholly absorbed in ceaseless contemplation of itself suddenly deciding to create the cosmos. Creation out of nothing represented a fundamental change in the Christian understanding of both God and the world. There was no longer a chain of being emanating eternally from God to the material universe, no longer an intermediate realm of spiritual beings that transmitted the divine energy to the nether regions. Instead, God had called every single creature from an abysmal and unimaginable nothingness and could at any moment withdraw his sustaining hand. Creation ex nihilo tore the universe away from God. The physical world could not tell us anything about the divine, because it had not emanated naturally from God, as the philosophers had imagined, but was made out of nothing. It was, therefore, of an entirely different nature (ontos) from the substance of the living God. A “natural theology” that argued from our rational observation of the world to God was no longer possible, because the new doctrine made it clear that, left to ourselves, we could know nothing at all about God.