As a follow up to my recent post on the “ultimate mystery,” I want to touch on another mystery pertaining to God and the cosmos.
One of the distinctive aspects of an orthodox Christian doctrine of creation is that of divine creation ex nihilo—the notion that God created the cosmos “out of nothing.” That is, God did not use any pre-existing materials to make the world. This sharply contrasts with many Eastern cosmologies as well as that of the ancient Greeks. Plato, for example, though a theist, regarded matter as co-eternal with God. Similarly with Aristotle. According to him, God was necessary to explain change in the world but not the existence of the world itself.
The biblical picture of divine creation is that God spoke every aspect of the cosmos into existence. The first century A.D. Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria might have been the first to formalized this into the concept of creation ex nihilo. The first Christian thinker to articulate the doctrine was Theophilus of Antioch a century later. By the time Augustine affirmed the doctrine a few centuries after that, the concept of creation ex nihilo was becoming a firmly established pillar of church doctrine.
It is easy to see why early Christian scholars so readily embraced this idea, as the alternative view, creation ex materia (the notion that matter is eternal and divine creation is simply a reforming of this primordial material) does seem to conflict with the Genesis creation account and the general biblical portrait of God as alone eternal.
But here is an interesting question as regards divine creation—and I suppose it is as much of a quandary for the ex materia as it is for the ex nihilo view: where did God derive his ideas for creating the things he made—planets, stars, plants, animals, insects, etc.? The easy—and not very useful—answer is that God simply thought of these things out of his own infinite imagination. But how? Without any pre-existing things to prompt or inspire creative possibilities, what could have been the basis of the content of God’s creative choices?
Whenever human beings create we always do so with existing resources, things we have seen, heard, read, or otherwise experienced. So none of what we make is creative in the ultimate sense. Even our most “original” works are somehow derivative. So how does a mind come up with ideas purely and simply? We have no category for such a thing.
This is actually the hardest thing to comprehend about divine creation ex nihilo. It is not the act of creation ex nihilo—which I take to be essentially the sharing of ideas with other minds—so much as the devising of the ideas to share. It is this conceptual first step that boggles my mind. How did God conceive of the idea of a dog or a tree or even biological systems in the first place? This invites the question, out of what divine stuff did God conceive of these original ideas? Here we see the temptation to entertain some kind of Platonism which posits the eternal existence of certain ideas or forms. But, alas, such a view encounters the same problems that plague creation ex materia, as it affirms things that are co-eternal with God.
Another option would be to say that there are eternal ideas but they are not external to God but in God. This alternative essentially places the Platonic field of forms within the divine mind. But this option faces other difficulties, such as making sense of why just certain ideas are fundamental to the divine mind and not others (when, after all, there is presumably no reason to think that the idea of, say, a dog or tree is a necessary aspect of the divine mind). Here one might be tempted to avoid this problem by supposing that all possible ideas are eternally in the divine mind. But this faces the problematic implication that the mind of God is eternally loaded not only with rich and wonderful ideas but also with frivolous and random ideas from feces and pimples to hideously ugly potential plants and animals.
In any case, these are vexing questions, and I welcome any suggestions for potentially promising theories. Oh, and for more ruminations on the metaphysics of the divine mind, check out the book Four Views on Christian Metaphysics, a volume to which I contributed the chapter on idealism.
Wild. This issue had never occurred to me. Suppose we go with the option that God’s eternal ideas are internal to his nature. That seems most promising (and orthodox). I wonder if you could distinguish basic creative ideas from derivative ones, where the former are ideas from which objects are built, e.,g., color and form, and the later are collections of those ideas, i.e., regular stuff. In that case, only the basic ideas are eternally in God’s mind, but not the derivative ones. This seems to avoid the pimples problem. But, still, why think the basic creative ideas are eternal? Well, here’s a stab at it. Perhaps the members of the Trinity have been sharing creative narratives from all time. It’s simply part of what makes them a divine community. Together, they construct creative stories (albeit ones that we experience as reality) using basic eternal ideas as raw material. I’ve probably made it plenty clear that I’m not a metaphysician, but those are some initial thoughts. Thanks for the post!
Good stuff, Ryan. I especially like the appeal to Trinitarian theology, which, in any case, is somehow relevant here. The basic/derivative ideas distinction seems helpful at first blush, but it still begs the question–somewhat related, but distinct from your own question–why are just THESE ideas basic?
Have you read “Creator” by Peter Leithart? He takes quite a bit of influence from Robert Jenson, whose explorations of idealism and aesthetics in “Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics” brought back a lot of fond memories of the classes I took with you.
Not sure how intellectually satisfying I find it, but Leithart’s approach is essentially that the Bible doesn’t know a god apart from the Creator God, that in the beginning God is creator of heaven and earth, and that discussing any god who has not created is discussing a god who is not God. He attempts to work this out through trinitarian theology such that God is not dependent on creation. Anyway, not sure if it removes the mystery here or simply relocates it, but thought it might provide an interesting alternative starting point for working it out.
Hope you and your family are well. God bless.