On Ex Nihilo

"...one will not find an explicit statement... in the Bible ...that matter was created by God from nothing..." http://tektonics.org/af/exnihilo.html

Genesis 1:1-2 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

"This passage brews a storm of controversy over a single word that is rendered here as 'created': the Hebrew word bara. Does it indicate ex nihilo creation?" (ibid.)

NOTE: Why does the Torah not state the doctrine of creation ex nihilo explicitly? Because, when talking about this, creation itself can never be the primary subject. When talking about creation only God, the Creator can be the primary subject. Creation cannot be in the foreground and God in the background. People, thinking from their own point of view may try to do this, but the Bible will never do this. The Bible begins with God and from God's point of view. Of course this is only possible for us to follow by means of literary suggestion, but at the same time, if we follow it we are not starting from our own point of view.

What happens if we do start from our own point of view? Various things may happen but in the end our conclusions will contain the limitations of our own point of view and our understanding and learning will not be able to transcend these limitations. Our minds, however we expand them, will never be able to develop beyond the parameters of their original structural premises.

2 Maccabees 7:28 I beseech thee, my son, look upon the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God made them of things that were not; and so was mankind made likewise.

But is it really possible for us to start to learn about creation from God's point of view and not from our own point of view? Even as just-born infants when we hear and listen, just as when we see, do we not have an innate point of view or experiential reference point of awareness? If we are not God but other-than-God, then how can we ever begin to learn anything from God's point of view? With this question we come to face the problem or question of creation ex nihilo not objectively (as we tried to do by starting from our own point of view) but subjectively. If God alone is the 'something' and we are the 'nothing' in relation to God, can we learn anything from God's point of view, even from writings that purport to be from God?

If our answer will be yes, then we are beginning with faith in the power of the words of the Torah to accomplish a victory over the gulf between God's existence and our non-existence in relation to God that is akin to the victory that is claimed by the Torah's account of the original victory of God's word over the absence of creation. More than this, we will be attributing our faith in the recorded words of the Torah to the divine power of those words themselves to produce our faith in them. For we are not talking about starting from our own point of view but from God's point of view.

Thus when we read, "In the beginning God..." we take by faith as a given, on the authority of these words of the Torah, that God already existed in the beginning, and therefore had always existed. How truly we actually believe this claim of the Torah and how the original Hebrew words actually read are two other subjects that we need to explore, but our exploration of either or both of these subjects will not change this basic principle that the Torah is recording an account of the process of creation with the Creator, and the pre-existence of the Creator as a given, so that we must accept the authority of the Torah completely or not accept it at all. Nevertheless, though this is the choice we are given, in our human nature we do not make the choice we are given but try to both believe and not believe the Torah's claim.

This is illustrated by the fact that we try to think about the question of creation from our own point of view. Dualism and atheism ultimately end by outright denying the Torah's claim. But sincere efforts to establish the doctrine of creation ex nihilo starting from our own point of view (with ourselves as the implicit given) demonstrate the ambiguity of our response to the claim of the Torah that God alone can be the given and God's point of view alone the starting point of understanding and learning. For by seeking from our own point of view to establish the doctrine of creation ex nihilo objectively we are seeking to overcome our resistance to the claim of the Torah. We are attempting to accomplish an action that nullifies itself, and in doing so nullifies, in principle, our own point of view. Thus we are trying to nullify ourselves in principle in order to help ourselves be able to listen to the word of God. This is an exercise that may or may not be useful.

Because the human response is ambiguous at best to God's claim in the Torah to all authority of thought and learning, it becomes apparent that bringing humans into a full acceptance of and faith in the authority of the word of God requires God to go through a process of some length. Beginning, then, with whatever measure of faith in its claim of authority for all thought and learning it finds, by beginning from God's point of view,  the Torah continues...

To begin with God, and with God alone, as given is to state gracefully and without argument that God did not create out of anything pre-existent, and then, without having another thought for this question, to go on to the question of how God, who was all in all, came to share existence with that which was, and is, other than God. In Hebrew, in the first verse of Bereshith (Genesis), we can read of the 'et' את of the heavens and the 'et' את of the earth, which, if it were translatable as more than a direct object marker might say, "the 'with' of the heavens and the 'with' of the earth." This allows us some room to ask the question specifically, if God was alone and there was nothing 'with' God, then where in relation to God was that which was not God created?

Asking this question we are led by its legitimacy toward accepting the validity of reading the Hebrew, 'et' את, as meaning "with" (in a metaphysical sense) and not as only being an object marker in this verse. God, who was alone, had to create a "withness" in relation to himself, a metaphysical space, for the heavens and the earth before he could create their material or spiritual manifestation. This leads us toward acceptance of the teachings of the Ari, the great Middle-Ages Kabbalist, on this subject. We find in the teachings of the Ari the concept of the tzimztum, the metaphysical space of the relative absence of the presence of God that God created first in order to create the universe.

We can think together with the Ari of this tzimztum, this space created by God for creation, as circle or a sphere, from our point of view, the 'et' את of the earth, the boundaries in which the earth and the heavens are created, which are defined only by God and the 'place' or 'boundary' of the full presence of God, where God remains alone and creation does not exist. So then, in Isaiah 40:22 we see a progression from the earth at the center, or lowest point, of the created space up through the created heavens, progressively coming closer and closer to the 'edge' of creation and to the fullness of the presence of God.

It is he that sits upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in. (Isaiah 40:22)

Having begun to read Bereshith (Genesis) 1:1 as talking about the creation of the 'withness' which allowed for the unfolding in creation of the heavens and the earth, we have begun to prepare ourselves to go on to learn something about the primordial water that the Torah refers to as given through the creation of the 'et' את of the heavens and the 'et' את of the earth.