Creatio ex nihilo

Creatio ex nihilo (Latin: 'creation out of nothing') or nihilogony is the doctrine that matter is not eternal but had to be created by some divine creative act.

Bunnin and Yu (2008) state:

The doctrine of creation ex nihlo maintains that matter is not eternal and that no matter existed prior to the divine creative act at the initial moment of the cosmic process.

It is a theistic answer to the question of how the universe came to exist. It is in contrast to creatio ex materia and foundationalism (creation from matter resulting from logical aseity, also known as Resultante ex Aseitate Logica, but modern foundationalism is cosmological with improvements from the 17th-century viewpoint that are sometimes framed in terms of the dictum ex nihilo nihil fit or 'nothing comes from nothing', meaning all things were formed ex materia—that is, from pre-existing things).

Sources

• Bunnin, Nicholas; Yu, Jiyuan (2008). The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. Blackwells. ISBN 9780470997215. Archived from the original on 2023-08-15. Retrieved 2020-05-17. 

Further reading

• Creatio ex nihilo, Wikipedia