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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

Awe and wonder

Comment

Holidays/vacations

Monastic life

Psychology

9 July 2025

5 min read

You can find the awesome in the everyday not just on holiday

The sources of awe are not scarce, but we do overlook them

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Awesome in Singapore.

Swaroop Satheesh on Unsplash.

Are you starting to think about holidays? Have you heard yourself trotting forth the old clichés?

“We’re looking forward to getting away from it all.”

“We’re planning something special to take us out of ourselves.”

“Well, it might not be that relaxing with the *kids/dogs/relatives* – but a change is as good as a rest!”

Even if going for the budget-friendly ‘staycation’ this year, there is something about stepping out of our everyday busyness and chores that we find distinctly appealing. We hope that a change of routine, if not a change of place, will afford us some kind of renewal. On holiday we are freed to move to the edges of our lives, even if we can’t escape them entirely, and gain the view from the terrace over the box-hedge-maze of all things quotidian.

But would it help us to visit that terrace a bit more often? This has long been the recommendation of scientists, poets and prophets alike. Most recently, a 2025 study from Yale University researched experiences of “awe” in the everyday. They recruited Long Covid patients and instructed them over a three-month period to slow down several times a day, paying attention to something that they valued or found amazing, whilst breathing and noticing any tangible responses or reactions in their body. The researchers called this process “awe”: Attention, Wait and Exhale. Amongst the participants in the study, the practice of AWE induced a measurable improvement in mental health.

Of course, there have always been people who pause multiple times per day to turn their thoughts away from the mundane. In the Sixth Century, an Italian monk known as Benedict devised a “rule” for those living the monastic life, wherein brothers were required to pause for prayer eight times in every 24 hours – including in the middle of the night! This connected the members of the order not only with God but also with each other. Even if a brother found himself temporarily outside the cloister, going on a journey or working with the poor in the wider community, he was still expected to “join” his community in prayer at the regular hours, stopping whatever he was doing to pray in solidarity.

There are still Benedictine orders today, and others who seek to “pray the hours” based on brother Benedict’s rule. But for most of us, our lives are far from this monastic ideal of community and regularity, even if we do practise the Christian faith. Within a busy schedule, stopping once or twice per day to pray can be a challenge, let alone eight times and regardless of convenience! No matter how much the scientists tell us that it will lift our spirits and do us good, such timefulness is the medicine that the modern life denies. But perhaps this is where the poets can supply deficiencies?

In her great work, Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes—
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

It’s a brilliant reminder that sources of awe are not scarce, even if we are prone to overlooking them. In speaking of “he who sees” Browning suggests that there are some people who see the world in a way that anticipates moments of wonder, and that such people are willing to “take off their shoes”. This is an allusion to the story of Moses in the Bible, who, when he encounters the miraculous mystery of the burning bush in the desert, is commanded by God to take off his shoes because the ordinary desert has now become sacred and holy ground – a place of awesome encounter.

Perhaps we should take our cue from brother Benedict, and simply stop and kneel where we are, by the side of the path, in amongst the box-hedge.

This type of atunement is available to any of us, no matter how full the schedule. Even as I write – and you read – this article right now, any of us might pause to take in our surroundings and be able to find something to value and find amazing, a little bit of heaven crammed into earth. It might be a large thing, like the view from the window, or small thing, like the curling steam rising from a cup of coffee on the desk. Anything can become meaningful if we choose to observe its meaning; anywhere can become holy ground if we make it a place of encounter with all that is awe-inspiring and that transcends our daily lives.

What stops us, I wonder? Is it that for me writing this article, and for you reading it, this is just another task that we feel we must finish so that we can hurry along to finishing something else? We must keep pressing on, threading our way through the box-hedge-maze today, because the time for visiting the terrace is not now, it’s later – in a few weeks’ time, when the schools break up and we can finally “get away from it all”.

Perhaps we should take our cue from brother Benedict, and simply stop and kneel where we are, by the side of the path, in amongst the box-hedge. If we look closely, we might even notice that it is made up of a thousand million tiny leaves, each with its own little leafy life to live, each patterned with tiny, intricate veins. Beautiful, and for no obvious reason. Most people will never notice this – but we have seen it now. In the middle of all things quotidian, here is a common bush, and it is afire with God. There is nothing to stop us noticing this, and when we have done so, we can get up, take off our shoes, and continue to walk.

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