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Awe and wonder

Belief

Creed

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.

Explainer

Creed

Film & TV

Politics

Truth and Trust

13 November 2025

6 min read

The BBC and the quest for Truth

Space for neutrality is shrinking; two French philosophers explain why

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

BBC.

Watching American news always feels very different from the British version. Changing channels from CNN to Fox News feels like you're switching to a different universe altogether, as on each one you're getting a very different interpretation of events. The BBC has always been thought to rise above this. In the UK and beyond, through the World Service, the Beeb has, until recently, been viewed as an oasis of impartial, authoritative reporting in a world of propaganda and state-run media.

Now, allegations of bias, with evidence that BBC editors doctored a speech of Donald Trump to make it sound worse than it was, one-sided coverage of transgender issues, and perceived anti-Israel prejudice, have led to doubts about the truthfulness of BBC reporting, and the resignations of the Director General Tim Davie and its CEO, Deborah Turness.

It does seem that the BBC has fallen into an echo chamber, reflecting the generally liberal, metropolitan left-leaning ethos of the chattering classes. And that is a problem, especially for a taxpayer-funded corporation. At the same time, it is much harder for media companies these days to be neutral. Once upon a time, there was perhaps a broad space for impartiality and a general trust that institutions like the BBC could be trusted to tell the truth. Trying to be politically and culturally balanced these days, however, is like trying to walk along an ever narrowing mountain arête with an increasingly slim path of independence, while the steep and sheer slopes of the culture wars beckon on either side. The idea of a media platform maintaining strict neutrality is becoming harder and harder to sustain these days.

In Britain, that narrow arête has become smaller and smaller, with the BBC perceived as falling on one side of the debate, and GB News emerging to offer a perspective from the other, offering different assessments on what's going on, increasingly mirroring their American counterparts.

Now there is a reason why this space for neutrality is narrowing, rooted in cultural and philosophical developments over the past 50 years or more.

Foucault’s challenge

In the 1970s and early 80s, French philosopher Michel Foucault taught a whole generation of students - and his ideas became embedded in universities across the world - that claims to truth were in essence assertions of power. Foucault had been a Marxist, believing that power had to be wrested away from the hands of the ruling classes and placed in the hands of the proletariat. After the Paris student riots of the late 1960s, he changed his mind and started to believe that power is never concentrated in one place. It flows in multiple directions in any human relationship or institution. In such interactions, all kinds of power dynamics are at play, and you need to be very watchful to notice how they work. Power produces ‘truth’ - in other words a justification for its existence - and such ‘truth’ produces power, in that this ‘truth’ reinforces the power relations it was designed to justify. He often claimed not to be making a moral judgement – in fact moral judgments were irrelevant: “My point”, he said, “is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.” If all truth is power, then nothing is neutral. Everything is dangerous. You can’t trust anyone.

The result is that there is really no such thing as a neutral, absolute truth. All claims to truth come from a particular perspective on things. There is no ‘view from nowhere’ that stands above all our limited perspectives, and therefore the idea of finding ultimate absolute truth is fruitless.

Foucault’s target was the idea inherited from the Enlightenment that we could find truth through impartial rational inquiry. So for him, the idea that something like the BBC was an arbiter of neutral, rational truth was a mirage all along. The irony is that if the BBC has drifted into a left-leaning echo chamber, it has wandered into space deeply influenced by Foucault’s ideas – ideas which by definition make its claim to any kind of neutrality increasingly difficult to sustain.

The prevalence of these ideas explains why it is harder and harder for news outlets to remain neutral, or claim to offer the truth of things.

Pascal’s perspective

So what does Christian theology say to this? At one point in his Pensées, another French philosopher, Blaise Pascal (unlike Foucault, a Christian one from the seventeenth century), says to the Foucault-type sceptic of his own day:

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”

In other words, it's impossible to be a total sceptic about truth. Even the most progressive philosopher puts the kettle on and expects it to boil. He wakes in the morning expecting the sun to rise. There is such a thing as capital-T Truth and an order to the world that we didn’t create, and can be relied upon. We simply have to receive it and be grateful for it.

So far, so conservative. Yet Pascal then casts doubt on our ability to know that truth absolutely:

“Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed, that truth lies beyond our reach and is an unattainable quarry, that it is not to be found here on earth, but really belongs in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Pascal agrees with Foucault, that absolute truth is unattainable to us here, at least if we think we can find it by some process of impartial human reason. Only God knows the truth. Our perspectives are inevitably limited and the only way we can know the ultimate truth is if it is revealed to us.

Which points to the heart of what a Christian believes about truth - that ultimately it is not so much rational and propositional but personal. Jesus does not say ‘here is the truth’, or ‘this is the truth’, but ‘I am the truth’.

Truth, in other words, is not just something you read on a page. It is not the product of brainy people sitting in a room analysing the data. Data always has to be interpreted and that's when fallible, inevitable and unspoken human prejudice creeps in. Truth is personal. You see it in a life – most perfectly in the life of Jesus. And if it is to be found here and now, it comes out of a life that has learned to be like Jesus, truthful in all kinds of simple personal interactions, honest even when it's inconvenient, generous even when you have little to give.

Truth, in Christian understanding, is a quality of life. It is not something that can be expected to arise from some august body of clever people – the Royal Society or the BBC. The BBC, like ITN, GB News, CNN, and Fox – and like the rest of us - will always be biased - and maybe it’s better to acknowledge that than try to hide it. To have a limited take on things is part of the human condition.

The only way we can rise above that to the ‘truth that comes from above’ as the Bible calls it, a truth which is “pure, peaceable, gentle, full of mercy, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” is the spiritual path of inner growth, through prayer, the practice of goodness and compassion.

Truth is not something we possess but something we grow towards. When the BBC – or any corporation for that matter - embraces the spiritual path of yearning for the ‘truth that comes from above’, then we might get nearer to trusting it again.

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