it is not just atheists who think creation without it coming from anything is foolish
The Bible
Creating is like making but is not making. It means that once the answer to does anything exist was NO! Then thanks to God the universe appeared. Making is using something to make something else.
It seems that far from saying God made the universe just pop into being from no prior material or energy, the book of Genesis rejects it in favour of God fashioning the universe. It speaks of making or fashioning.
Christian philosopher and theology expert, Thomas Jay Oord and the Bible scholar Jon D Levenson are among many who think the doctrine of creation is not in the Bible. God made all things out of a chaotic mess. It would be a major thing if a scripture on the subject of the origin of all things, namely Genesis, left out the doctrine of creation if it is true. The doctrine is the basis of what modern Christianity is all about. No Catholic doctrine makes any sense anyway but it makes less without the assumption that God made all things out of nothing. For example, if God cannot make something out of nothing then there is no way he can manage for Jesus to be fully man and fully God or manage Jesus to become food and drink without the latter seeming to have changed.
Oord argued that creation needs to be scrapped from Christian theology
because of the following spectrum of problems.
Theoretical problem: One cannot conceive absolute nothingness.
That is not relevant. And we can. Just imagine
there not being anything at all.
Biblical problem: Scripture – in Genesis, 2 Peter, and elsewhere – suggests
creation from something (water, deep, chaos, etc.), not creation from absolutely
nothing. Colossians 1:16 says that God made the
universe out of raw materials. It says nothing of anything coming
from nothing. The only thing in the Bible is yesh m'yesh which refers to
something being made from something else.
Historical problem: The Gnostics Basilides and Valentinus first proposed
creatio ex nihilo on the basis of assuming that creation was inherently evil and
that God does not act in history. Early Christian theologians adopted the idea
to affirm the kind of absolute divine power that many Christians now reject.
Empirical problem: We have no evidence that our universe originally came into
being from absolutely nothing.
Creation at an instant problem: We have no evidence in the history of the
universe after the big bang that entities can emerge instantaneously from
absolute nothingness. As the earliest philosophers noted, out of nothing comes
nothing (ex nihilo, nihil fit).
Solitary power problem: Creatio ex nihilo assumes that a powerful God once
acted alone. But power, as a social concept, only becomes meaningful in relation
to others. !!!
Errant revelation problem: The God with the capacity to create something from
absolutely nothing would apparently have the power to guarantee an unambiguous
and inerrant message of salvation (e.g, inerrant Bible). An unambiguously clear
and inerrant divine revelation does not exist.
Evil problem: If God once had the power to create from absolutely nothing,
God essentially retains that power. But a God of love with this capacity appears
culpable for failing to prevent genuine evil. He
agrees with atheists that a God who creates from nothing must be to blame for
evil.
Empire Problem: The kind of divine power implied in creatio ex nihilo supports a theology of empire, based upon unilateral force and control of others. This is odd. It is not God's fault if creation gives him all that power.
Mormons
The Mormons say that matter existed for all eternity and never came into being for it always existed. It agrees with the logical doctrine that if something exists it cannot be put into existence or out out of existence. It is just there. Most religionists believed the same thing - the religions that have creation from nothing are small in number in comparison.
Contradiction
If creation out of nothing is nonsense then it is pure contradiction.
A contradiction between God and creation means that when a Christian talks about God or creation they are using words that have meaning in a meaningless way. They are not really believers in God or creation but believers in rubbish.
Now if that is a contradiction then another contradiction arises from it. The idea that God has nothing to do with evil supposes that he is all good and nothing comes into being except that which is good because he is the source of all. Evil then is understood as the wrong use of good and is not a thing or power. It is a lack. If creation is untrue then God is to blame for evil for designing the universe in a way that often does harm. He has made human beings flawed.
A contradiction between God and evil means that when a Christian talks about God or evil they are using words that have meaning in a meaningless way. They are not really believers in God or evil but believers in rubbish.
