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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.

Article

Creed

Politics

Suffering

Trauma

11 August 2025

6 min read

Dear Kemi, about that lost faith

Who stands with us when we suffer?

Graham Tomlin

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

Kemi Badenoch.

ARC.

Dear Kemi (if I may)

Lost faith is usually a sad tale. And you have told us how you lost yours. I hear your grandfather was a Methodist minister, and so as a young girl, you would pray, seeing answers from time to time for longer hair, good grades and the like. But when you heard the story of Elizabeth Fritzl, whose father Josef kept her captive underground for 24 years, repeatedly raping her, you began to ask why God did not answer Elizabeth’s prayers for release. And so you gave up on God.

Now I have real sympathy for you. I have struggled with this too. The Josef Fritzl story and the suffering he inflicted on his daughter is truly horrific. None of us find the problem of evil easy. In fact, I have never yet met a Christian who thinks they have solved it. Yet the remarkable fact is that many of us believe in God anyway. And it’s not because we haven’t thought deeply about it. Many people start with a simple faith in a God who answers prayers, and yet one day, they come across what seems like an anomaly – that some prayers don’t seem to find an answer.

Of course, you’re not the first to have stumbled upon the problem of unanswered prayer. For centuries, Christians have pondered deeply the strange persistence of evil in the world, from St Irenaeus to St Augustine, to Thomas Aquinas, to any number of modern theologians.

They all knew that not all prayers get answered – yet even more, they knew that this is not a marginal thing for Christians, it actually lies at the very heart of our faith.

On the top of every spire, on every altar of a church, around many Christian necks, is a cross. It recalls the excruciating death of an executed innocent man. It is the universally recognised symbol of Christianity, as recognisable as the Islamic crescent or the Jewish Star of David.

Christianity centres on this remarkable claim: that God allowed his Son Jesus to die a cruel and tortured death, and did not respond to his agonised prayer: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” All he got was silence. Nothing.

So unanswered prayer is not something that lurks at the margins of Christian faith as a guilty secret. It lies at the very heart of it.

And yet I still believe. Why?

Why does God not intervene to stop the suffering of the world? Why did not God not stop the holocaust? Why does he not stop the suffering of the people of Gaza? Or the Israeli hostages? Or people who suffer from debilitating depression? Or long-term mental illness?

The answer is I don’t know. And why should I? For all I know, God might stop all kinds of things from happening – by definition I don’t know about thing that don’t come to pass. Yet I have to assume that God does not intervene to stop the vast majority of the suffering we inflict on each other. The best I can say is that he seems to allow us to have our own way, giving us the courtesy of accountability for our own actions. As a conservative politician, keen to stress personal responsibility, you should know that more than anyone.

Josef Fritzl was the cause of his daughter’s suffering, not God. Fritzl was himself the child of an alcoholic father who abandoned him when he was four-year-old and a manipulative and abusive mother who brought him up thereafter. Not that this excuses his crimes for a moment, but he was part of a chain of sin and suffering handed on from one generation to another that stretched back through his parents, their parents, back to the very beginning of human history and beyond. Evil and suffering are part of our world. Christianity knows about evil all too well.

All this might hint at an answer, yet it still doesn’t satisfy. It still doesn’t reduce the suffering. Trying to explain it doesn’t make it any easier to endure it. In fact, if what we Christians say about evil is true, we cannot explain it because evil literally makes no sense. It is the absence of sense, the absence of meaning. It has no point, because it is literally pointless.

The real reason we Christians continue to believe is not that we have a neat answer to it, nor because we haven’t thought about it, but because we know that, paradoxical as it may sound, God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, knows what it is to pray for something and not get an answer. He has been there too. Somehow, mysteriously, he stands with Elizabeth Fritzl, with Israeli hostages, with Palestinians hungry for peace and food, and with us when we cry out and apparently get no answer. In those moments, we are not, in the end, alone.

And yet, there is more. Despite that fact that we cannot explain the tangled, dark mysteries of evil in the human heart, we have been captivated by a story that tells us it has been overcome. Yes, Jesus died. Yes, he felt abandoned by God his Father. Yet the way the story turned out, the evil done to him was not the last word. God overturned the worst that the human race could do, when the most remarkable thing happened - his cold, abused, bloodied and battered body stirred once more into life. Yet this was not a return to this weary life all over again, back into the maelstrom of suffering and pain that we know it to be, but through the other side into a form of life beyond the grave that cannot be destroyed. Jesus was not ultimately abandoned, even if he, like us, like Elizabeth Fritzl, felt like it at the time.

This is what we get – not a neat answer – for that we will have to wait – but the gift of hope that it will not always be like this, that the Resurrection of Jesus is a foretaste of the Resurrection of all things one day.

And what about what you called your ‘stupid’ little prayers about hair and boyfriends? Why did they get answered and others didn’t? Again, I have no idea. It does seem that from time to time, God does something weird, brings some unexpected healing, things turning out miraculously better than expected, an unforeseen delight. Yet these are just hints, small signs of the great miracle, the Resurrection and the defeat of death. They are hints that even though God will not unravel the moral fabric of the world by intervening every time we do something wrong, occasionally we are given a small sign that he has not given up on the world and will one day flood it with his presence. They are signs to remind you, me, that all the good things we receive each day - food, sunshine, rain, air to breathe – are not accidents but come from a God who gave them to us out of love, and that evil is the anomaly, not goodness. We are left with a question – would we rather a world where that kind of surprising & delightful event never happened? Or one where it occasionally did?

The Resurrection is the ultimate reason we believe. Not because we can explain evil. But because it tells us we are not alone in our suffering. Because it tells us that evil is real, but in the end, will be banished to the pit from which it came. And because the alternative, when we think about that deeply enough – a world where monsters like Josef Fritzl get the last word – where hope is whistling in the dark and evil wins - is intolerable.

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