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23 May 2023

6 min read

Creating out of nothing

Considering authorship, Barnabas Aspray unpacks what the creeds mean by ‘creator’ - the source of all reality.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A notebook is open at two blank pages. a pen rests across the page.s.

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

In my last article, I said that God is not an object in space-time. He is part of the fabric of reality, like the number 2. He is transcendent, as if he inhabited a fourth dimension that we could not see and yet surrounds us, just as a two-dimensional creature could not see or conceive us even if we could see them.

However, many transcendent beings could exist, like many numbers exist. But they would not be what the Nicene Creed means by the word ‘God’. The Creed also states that God is radically unique and that he created everything. To see what that means we need an analogy.

Author of the world

The Harry Potter books were written by J.K. Rowling. In them she describes a fantasy world, where wizards and witches can cast magical spells and perform supernatural feats with their power. The most powerful evil wizard is Lord Voldemort, who is the main bad guy in the whole Harry Potter series.

But is Lord Voldemort more powerful than J.K. Rowling? Could he ever defeat her in a one-on-one battle?

Everyone can see immediately that the answer is ‘no’. But why not? Rowling is just an ordinary person without any magical powers, and Voldemort is one of the most powerful wizards in the Harry Potter world.

The reason Voldemort could never defeat Rowling has to do with the unique kind of relationship they have. It’s not simply that Rowling is more powerful than Voldemort. The truth is more absolute than that. Voldemort doesn’t have any power of his own that Rowling didn’t give him in the first place. Rowling doesn’t really belong to the Harry Potter world at all, even though it belongs to her.

In other words, Rowling has the status of creator in relation to the Harry Potter world. She decides everything about how that world works. She is nowhere to be found in it, yet she is present in a special way to every part of it, and every part of it depends on her for its very existence.

There is one way in which Rowling could enter the Harry Potter world: if she were to write a story in which she herself was one of the characters, walking about and interacting with the others. That character would be both created and uncreated at the same time, in the world yet not belonging to it. This might help us understand how Jesus could be both God and human at the same time.

There are two limits to this analogy. One is that Rowling is not an absolute creator. She uses elements from her own world and ours to create the Harry Potter world: colours, gravity, light, time, space, etc. She did not create ex nihilo (out of nothing). The other limit is that the creatures in Harry Potter do not have free will. They can only ever do what Rowling decides that they do.

The Christian Doctrine of Creation

The above analogy helps make one point clear. To say that God is the creator does not mean that God kickstarted the world and then left it to go its own way. An author of a novel doesn’t only write its first line. The world couldn’t possibly go its own way for a microsecond without God continuing to ‘write’ it. The Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo has nothing to do with whether evolution occurred, or whether Genesis chapter 1 should be taken ‘literally’. It is far more fundamental than that. It says that there is no particle, no law of physics or nature, no moment in time, that is not 100% dependent on God for its very existence. In other words, the Christian God doesn’t live within our understanding of reality at all. He is the source of reality, the existence behind all other existence, far more concrete and real than anything else – spiritual or physical – ever could be.

This does not count as a proof for God’s existence, but (just like the last article), it does affect how arguments about God’s existence should be made. Nobody should ever think that they need to provide ‘evidence’ that God exists, as if God were an object in space-time who could be measured or observed. It doesn’t make sense to demand evidence for the existence of the source of existence. What would count as evidence? Let’s return to the Harry Potter analogy for a moment. No one could ever find out more about Rowling than she chooses to reveal about herself. If Harry Potter were to find a magic spell that enabled him to talk to her, this would only be because Rowling had created such a spell in the first place. The only thing Harry could ever figure out without Rowling’s help is that he did not create himself or the world he lives in. Either nobody did, or someone else did, who Harry might want to call the ‘unknown God’.

Nor does it make sense to ask who created God, a question that sometimes occurs to children. Either there is an infinite regress of causality, so that every source has another source behind it and so on forever, or there is something we may accurately call the ‘first’ because it is the absolute source of everything. As the previous article showed, there are two kinds of real: (1) contingent objects that may or may not have existed, like you, me, or any object we encounter in the Universe, (2) necessary principles without which we can’t imagine anything, like numbers and logic. For Christians, God belongs in the second category, so he doesn’t need to be created any more than the number 2 needs to be created.

FAQs

Does the Bible really teach creation ex nihilo?

The point of this article is to explain what the writers of the Nicene Creed meant they said that God is the ‘creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible’. Like the Trinity, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is not explicit in the Bible (if it was, why bother writing the Creed?). There are some people who interpret the Bible in ways that contradict the Creed, because it is possible to interpret the Bible (like any text) numerous ways, and no interpretation can be proven beyond question. But the writers of the Creed believed that creation ex nihilo arises from prayerful reflection on the implications of the whole Bible’s message. If you’re interested in the biblical case for and against creation ex nihilo, check out the following resources:

Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020);

Thomas Jay Oord, ed., Theologies of Creation: Creatio Ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals (Routledge, 2014);

Nathan J. Chambers, Reconsidering Creation Ex Nihilo in Genesis 1 (Penn State University Press, 2021);

Gary Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl, eds., Creation Ex Nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018);

Janet Soskice, ed. “Creation ‘ex Nihilo’ and Modern Theology.” Special Issue, Modern Theology 29, no. 2 (April 2013).

Susannah Ticciati, ‘Anachronism or Illumination? Genesis 1 and Creation Ex Nihilo’, Anglican Theological Review 99, no. 4 (September 2017): 691–712

What about Satan? Isn’t he the opposite of God?

No, Satan is not the opposite of God, just as Voldemort is not the opposite of J.K. Rowling. Satan is a creature like us, part of the Universe and dependent on God for his existence. The archangel Gabriel might be a more appropriate ‘opposite’ to Satan. The only opposite of God is nothingness, which is the same as saying that nothing is the opposite of God. As to why God continues to give power to Satan knowing he will use it for evil, that is a topic for a future article on the problem of evil. Keep watching this site and you’ll find it soon.

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Education

21 November 2025

1 min read

When universities turn their back on understanding

Axing Nottingham’s single-honours theology degree signals more than a funding issue

Arabella Moore-Smith

Arabella Moore-Smith is studying Religion, Culture and Ethics at the University of Nottingham.

A campus sign spells out Nottingham in large letters

University of Nottingham.

Two weeks ago, the University of Nottingham announced it is to axe its single-honours Undergraduate degree in Theology and Religious Studies. While the joint honours with Philosophy and Religion, Culture and Ethics remain, the fact that Theology is discounted as a subject worth keeping to study in its own right is concerning. In a world that is becoming increasingly more divided, unoptimistic and confusing, the study of Theology provides deep levels of understanding to our world, increasing hope and providing a way forward. I fail to see how the University of Nottingham can remain a respected university without offering the opportunity to study such understanding.

Studying religion and theology has been central to my personal development. I’ll never forget sitting in a classroom when it felt as if the world was opening up to me. I could understand people’s views on the afterlife halfway across the world, while simultaneously also understanding my classmates, and what they thought of these beliefs.

GCSE and A-Level Religious Education went on to show me that it is one of the few subjects that illuminates all aspects of humanity. The study of religion and theology covers literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, anthropology…; the list goes on.

Often Philosophy and Theology are pitted against one another, but during my studies I discovered that the writings of Aristotle and Plato overlap with early Christian thinking, revealing to me that we are far more united in our history and beliefs than we assume. The philosophers’ discursive forms revealed not only something about the divine but also the human; the way that we argue, think, and reason. Thus, theology at its core aims to understand people, while also aiming to understand the divine; and this, I think, requires a level of fearlessness and honesty that other subjects cannot always provide.

This intrigue led me to Nottingham to study theology at degree level, and as I come to the end of my studies I know I will leave with more questions about our world and spirituality than I have answers. In particular, my life at university has provided me with the opportunity to interact with so many different types of people, and so, despite my personal faith, I know that the world shows us so many fractions of the divine in ways that aren’t quite clear. This is the beauty of studying theology; it encourages us to live in the uncomfortable. This is something that I think leads to us wanting to understand one another better.

While the cutting of theology at Nottingham shows a funding problem, this is part of a wider issue; crisis is visible all across our world. Israel-Palestine violence continues; the recent vote to release the Epstein files reveals layers of deceit in multiple leaders, and the recent murder of Charlie Kirk plummeted MAGA into a more extreme Christian nationalism. But the reporting on these kinds of stories, while important, has knock-on effects, especially for young people.

In July 2025, Unicef reported that Gen Z consume news more than any other type of content, 6 in 10 of our generation reporting to feel overwhelmed. My age group’s over-exposure to the news drives us somewhat towards a desire for change, although this determination can lead to overwhelm. I have certainly felt this myself. But this is exactly where the study of theology can provide a light within deceit and despair.

The studying of ancient holy texts and religious practices teaches me the nuances of human nature; we are sometimes good, sometimes bad. We also do not always communicate effectively. Mistranslations within texts lead to misunderstandings of the Bible, and for some people who read the Bible literally, their understanding of the Bible is their reality. Yet at the same time, by assuming that there is a God, theology seeks to understand how this indicates our need for a divine being to underpin these misunderstandings. Studying theology encourages higher tolerance levels for others’ beliefs.

While the council at the University of Nottingham may argue that it is continuing its other religion degrees, the removal of single honours theology hints at something deeper than financial issues. It shows a lack of effort to understand the value that religion has on our society today. The Israel-Palestine war, for example, is underpinned by identity and religion, and cannot be understood without sufficient education on Jewish and Palestinian history. The decision that Religious Education will be added into the new national curriculum (ironically announced the day before Nottingham’s announcement of course cuts) is a step in the right direction for the encouragement of religious education in UK schools, but without Russell Group universities like Nottingham providing a Theology degree, I am concerned for the future of religious understanding in our society.

Let’s save Theology at the University of Nottingham. Please sign our petition.

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