Creatio ex nihilo (ii)

November 16, 2013 at 5:32 pm (Uncategorized)

Creation ex nihilo means only that God did not create physical states from physical states. But from what did he create them? Here we have two possible responses, either that the question misses the point (or is otherwise incoherent) or that God created from his own substance.

1.) Maybe we mean this: to speak of causing something “from which” we are speaking in the order of material causes, i.e. things that persevere through changes. In this sense, what we mean is that there is some thing that perseveres through a change which itself came to be, but not from some subject. Some subject was just there without arising from some previous subject. If we go looking for some previous state or disposition of the material, it is simply not there. Taken in this sense, what we mean is that (a.) there is something that counts as the first material cause and (b.) God is creating it. I say “is creating” because this cause, by definition, does not have a material substrate that keeps it in existence. If it did, then it would have a prior material cause and thus not be first.

2.) This action of the divinity is unintelligible except as a coming forth or procession from God himself. As we’ve just seen, divine action plays the role that matter plays in material things, that is, it’s endurance accounts for the endurance of the material thing throughout its changes. In this sense, God serves as the matter of created things. This involves two things in the cosmos: on the one hand those things that, being of minimum actuality, are still first in the order of material causes, sc. the chemical elements, or at least the most basic of these, or at least of the physical reality out of which these most basic elements arise. On the other hand, it involves the reality that, though natural, cannot be the term of a physical change, namely the human soul.

These primary realities are eternal, since God serves as their matter. The first is eternal by way of motion to continually increasing disorder in a way that continually generates time, pouring forth indefinitely and towards no term. Considered of itself, it is a potency without a corresponding act. The second is eternal by being an unchangeable this to the greatest extent that can be allowed to a natural being – it is a person, or at least the fount of a person, to the greatest extent that nature allows.

Creation is thus not some –poof- of all things into the black void, but the divine decision to place his substance under two physical realities: the first material cause or causes and the individual human soul. God does not create, say, rabbits or uranium, even though they would completely cease to exist without his action, and even though he intends the universe to have both. The precise nodes of creation are those first elements or proto-elements and the souls of persons.