Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo - In depth

How did we get here? Well certainly not from extraterrestials and certainly not from a slow, miraculous rise from a prehistoric pea soup given a few trillion years or so - who's counting?

To refer to Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason, there must be sufficient reason why something is instead of is not for it to be, otherwise it would have been otherwise. So, humanity exists for sufficient reason, not by accident or deviousness (as the Gnostics teach) or caprice or even by deliberation by a Creator.

Now there are only three ultimate logical possibilities for the origin of man, if you will excuse my Latin: creatio ex nihilo, creatio ex materia, and creatio ex deo.

The Abrahamic view is creatio ex nihilo whereby God decided to create man "out of nothing" at some point in time (or at the beginning of what then became time since time is part and parcel of the said creation). This view is extremely flawed and troublesome. For if God created out of nothing then the universe is inherently dualistic - God and Nothing. You see, Nothing would then be elevated to a something "outside" of God where God does some paint by number and makes all these deliberations about what He wills and not wills. What IS is not necessarily logical, it just is because God's Will chose it to be so.

However, God could have decided to create us with little, one-eyed, green bodies and planted us on Mars if he chose to, according to this view. What IS is not necessarily so and so it is impossible to work our way back from observing the universe and observing ourselves since Truth becomes ultimately arbitrary when beginning with creatio ex nihilo. It's just a crazy, imaginative paint-by-number, which next time may look very different perhaps. There is no inherent purpose or meaning to anything because the manifestation does not proceed from the essence of underlying eternal concepts, but from God's Will.

So we then wind up with a capricious and scary God that should be feared - which is exactly the result in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim worldview. Perish the thought. This view reduces the concept of God considerably because all of creation is in its essence outside of God, God's immanence notwithstanding. This is unacceptable because, referring to Anselm's Ontological Argument, it is impossible for me to have a concept of God greater than the reality.

The second major problem with creatio ex nihilo it that it stipulates an indefatigable chasm between God and Man because God is everything and Man is nothing, for out of "nothing" he came. Now if this were so then there would be no possible interface between God and Man, no possibility of communication or understanding. It would be as if all the functionality of God is private to God and man is another class altogether in which there is no possibility of interfacing with God.

Furthermore, it would render all moral law, meaning, purpose, and history nil and void because what can come from nothing and for what worth is nothing? Why would God really be concerned about nothing? He could just create another nothing and replace us. Or He could ignore us because we would be of no effect to him. Any value given to man by God would be ultimately arbitrary on God's part.

Now creatio ex materia is the favored view of the current zeitgeist, the predominant secular view of the West since the 17th century. This view is quickly eradicating even the ex nihilo view. This, of course, is the view that man was created (or evolved) out of pre-existent material. Although the wording of "creation" is often dropped, it is still one of the only 3 possible explanations for "How did we get here?"

This view does not necessarily exclude a God but it inevitably does as the view is taken to its logical conclusion. Thus the Judeo-Christian view degenerated into the Deist view and the Deist view has degenerated into the rampant and pernicious atheism of today, both philosophical and functional atheism for one can be "religious" but be functionally an atheist.

The creatio ex materia view suffers from the same problems as the ex nihilo view. For any moral law, meaning, purpose, or value is suspect, arbitrary, and artificial when the ultimate source of all things is nothing more than atoms. Thus we wind up with Relativism, Reductionism, and especially Absurdism - exactly the zeitgeist of the West today. Everything becomes absurd and meaningless because - after all - we are just a sack of water and carbon.

Finally, we examine the creatio ex deo view, the least known and popular of all the views but the only one that both makes logical sense and maintains the dignity, purpose, and meaning of Man. This is the view that Man was created out of the very substance of God - that there is no actual essential difference between God and Man.

Neoplatonists view creation more as an emanation. For, just as the Sun radiates itself to all creatures equally and without caprice, without loss, diminution, or effort, so too does God, as the center of the universe, and the ground of all that exists and doesn't exist radiate out of Itself all manifestation. Notice that the speed of light is a constant - it never fluctuates. This is God - a constant behind the world, at the center of the world, and above the world. And yet the world is God - in a manner of speaking. My personal view on this which I am still developing is that God inversed Itself and so Man is essentially the inverse of God. For just as light implies darkness so too does God imply Man.

Now New Agers fail to grasp the depth of these concepts because they lack rigorous thinking. I am not really saying anything different than the beautiful verse of John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Insert an "l" into "Word" and you have an Emanationist, creatio ex deo view.

So, if creation is ex deo then we are necessarily eternal in our very essence and not even God can change this.