FAIR is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing well-documented answers to criticisms of the doctrine, practice, and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo)
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Contents
Criticism
Mainstream Christianity teaches that God created the universe from nothing (ex nihilo), while Mormons teach that God organized the universe from pre-existing matter. The LDS God is therefore claimed to be "less powerful" than the God of mainstream Christianity, or "unBiblical."
Source(s) of the Criticism
Response
This idea “began to be adumbrated in Christian circles shortly before Galens time. The first Christian thinker to articulate the rudiments of a doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was the Gnostic theologian Basilides, who flourished in the second quarter of the second century. Basilides worked out an elaborate cosmogony as he sought to think through the implications of Christian teaching in light of the platonic cosmogony. He rejected the analogy of the human maker, the craftsman who carves a piece of wood, as an anthropomorphism that severely limited the power of God. God, unlike mortals, created the world out of ‘non-existing’ matter. He first brought matter into being through the creation of ‘seeds’, and it is this created stuff that is fashioned, according to His will, into the cosmos.” [note]
Conclusion
A summary of the argument against the criticism.
Endnotes
- [note] Gerhard May, Schopfung aus dem nichts, die entstehung der Legre von der Creatio ex nihilo, pg. 63-85, as quoted in 'The Christians as the Romans saw Them, Robert Wilken, pg. 88-89
Further reading
FAIR wiki articles
- Links to related articles in the wiki
FAIR web site
- FAIR Topical Guide: Creatio ex nihilo
External links
- Keith Norman, "Ex Nihilo: The Development of the Doctrines of God and Creation in Early Christianity," Brigham Young University Studies 17 no. 3 (1977), 291–318. [NEED off-site] (needs URL / links)
- Blake T. Ostler, "Bridging the Gulf (Review of How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation)," FARMS Review of Books 11/2 (1999): 103–177. off-site
- Blake T. Ostler, "Out of Nothing: A History of Creation ex Nihilo in Early Christian Thought (review of Review of Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, "Craftsman or Creator? An Examination of the Mormon Doctrine of Creation and a Defense of Creatio ex nihilo," in The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement, edited by Beckwith, Mosser, and Owen)," FARMS Review 17/2 (2005): 253–320. off-site
Printed material
- Bernhard W. Anderson, From Creation to New Creation: Old Testament Perspectives (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 30.
- Edwin Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity (Gloucester: Smith, 1970), 194–198.