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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

Belief

Books

Culture

Film & TV

7 July 2025

5 min read

Waiting for George: why I am yearning for an ending in Game of Thrones

Why does it matter so much that the series is unfinished?

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

Two people sit at a table strewen with old books lit by candle light.

Looking for the next chapter.

HBO.

Should you start something if you can’t be sure it’s going to finish? More specifically, should I read A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin? It’s book five in the Game of Thrones series. The author is 76. Fans have been waiting fourteen years for book six, The Winds of Winter. And many are doubting the book will ever arrive, let alone book seven, A Dream of Spring. If current trends continue, HS2 will be completed faster than the Game of Thrones book series.

There are plenty of other reasons not to read A Dance with Dragons. I’ve seen the adaptation for HBO which hit our screens in 2011. The plots have been already spoiled. I already know what’s going to happen.

Yet over the last couple of years, I’ve read the first four books in the series and enjoyed them. A Storm of Swords, the third book in the series, was stunning, even though the plot had been thoroughly spoiled. I already knew about the Red Wedding, and the fate of King Joffrey and what happened to Jamie Lannister’s hand. Nonetheless, A Storm of Swords was enthralling and relentless. Just when I thought my jaw could not drop any further, it would drop again. The fact that A Dance with Dragons has already been on TV is not a consideration.

A stronger reason against reading A Dance with Dragons is this: book four in the series, A Feast for Crows is, frankly, for the birds. Following on from the scintillating Storm of Swords, George RR Martin decided to focus on all of the least interesting characters who wander around Westeros desperately seeking a plot. But A Dance with Dragons, I’m told, returns to the best characters, like Tyrion Lannister, Varys and John Snow. What’s not to like?

Here’s what: I end up being captivated by the world of Westeros all over again and left in the lurch. It could happen. In fact, I would expect it to happen. I might find myself primed and ready for the sixth book in the series, The Winds of Winter, which may never come. It’s been fourteen years. Say it comes next year. Book seven may takes another five. He’ll be 82. He might not make it. Heck, I’ll be 56. I might not make it!

George RR Martin is aware of this fan fury. He often refers to it in interviews or on his blog. In 2019 he wrote:

“…if I don’t have THE WINDS OF WINTER in hand when I arrive in New Zealand for worldcon, you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done.”

The lake has been prepared, George. You’ll need to do better than ‘direwolves ate my homework.’ Martin explains he’s been working on related projects which now includes opening a pub called Milk of the Poppy. He doesn’t work the bar or change the barrels but fans now suspect that Martin is avoiding finishing the books on purpose. Why?

Some say he knows he can’t finish the book because he’s an existentialist. After all, he wrote the books to show the sprawling messiness of the real world by using the anarchy of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. For George RR Martin, life is not full of heroes and villains like Gandalf and Saruman. He has a point. The most interesting characters in Lord of the Rings are Gollum and Boromir.

Game of Thrones is an intentionally complex mess of compromise and chaos. There are no good guys, except John Snow. And there are no real villains except King Joffrey. And Cersei, Melisandre, Little Finger, The Mountain and, wow, that’s already quite a long list, isn’t it?

The moral complexity was highlighted by the end of the TV series, which had to invent its own finale, as none was provided by the author. Many fans were appalled at the last series, outraged that the resolution was jarringly neat. Others were just happy there was an ending – which made that first group of fans even angrier.

Here’s the real question. Why does it matter? So the series is unfinished. Big deal.

You know what else is unfinished? Your life. And the lives of everyone around us. We live with not knowing how our story will end. We are finite beings. We are born. We live with the limitations.

And then the biggest limitation of all hits us: death. So why not just enjoy the moment? If we enjoyed the characters and the stories, what’s the problem? Storm of Swords was incredible. Maybe A Dance with Dragons will be brilliant too. Can’t I just enjoy that and move on?

No. We yearn for an ending. Life is not one perpetual cliffhanger. Let us not confuse limited knowledge with suspense. The fact is that we are eternal beings. The Lord has set eternity in our hearts. Even the characters of Westeros believe in something beyond themselves – although all the talk of the old gods and the new is entirely unconvincing. I don’t really believe they believe in those gods.

But they do believe in something outside of themselves. In Game of Thrones, a few good men are prepared to die with honour. Some awful men die in agony. Others are wrestling with doing the right thing when all around seem not to care. Some characters are yearning for home; some vindication; others love and acceptance.

Our desire for an ending merely matches the desires of the characters that George RR Martin has created. They are so lifelike precisely because they believe in providence, fate, destiny or some divine standard to which they are held to account. In that, George RR Martin has made characters in God’s image, not his own.

What I do know is this: my favourite character in Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister, would read A Dance with Dragons, curious to know what happens next. And that’s good enough for me. I’m in.

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