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Genesis 1:1 is perhaps the most terse statement ever made on the issue of origins. Here we see that “in the beginning” (time), God created heaven (space) and the earth (matter). Time, matter, and space all came into existence suddenly and simultaneously at the command of God. The full extent of this act is reiterated in other passages. Psalm 146:6 proclaims that God, “made heaven, and earth, the sea and all that therein is.” In other words, everything that exists was created by God. John 1:3 explicitly says, “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Are you picking up what I’m putting down? God made literally everything. We might rearrange things into new ways, like building a castle out of sand, but God made the things.
But what was there before anything? What existed before God made all the things? Creationists sometimes use the fancy, Latin term, Creatio ex nihilo. When translated, this simply means, “Creation out of nothing.” God has always existed, of course, but before He made anything, there was nothing.
The term “nothing” is self explanatory - “no thing.” Not only was there no matter, there was no space and no time. There was nothing! It’s a concept that is hard to grasp, I admit. How can there be no space? It sort of makes my head hurt just thinking about it. Aristotle is alleged to have said, “nothing is what rocks dream about.” That’s about as succinct a definition as I’ve ever heard. However, even this very clever definition doesn’t quite work because it starts by saying, “nothing is….” Philosophers have struggled defining nothing because when you attempt to describe nothing, you start making it sound like it’s something.
Now, I would never claim to be in the same league as Aristotle, Plato, or even Vizzini, so I’m not going to claim to have THE definition of what nothing is (er,... isn’t?). I’m just going to say that we all sort of have an idea of what nothing means. Right? Maybe not.
In the debate on origins, evolutionists consistently lie about what they mean when they say the universe came from nothing. Let me give you an example used by the late Stephen Hawking:
Because gravity shapes space and time, it allows space time to be locally stable but globally unstable. On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
Do you see what I mean? He said, “Because there is a law like gravity…” Am I wrong but isn’t gravity something? How can the universe create itself from nothing if there is already something like gravity?!
But Hawking isn’t alone when he redefines nothing to include something. It is the normal practice of virtually every evolutionist. When they say “nothing,” they always mean “something.” Always! It’s yet another example of evolutionists redefining words in the same way they redefine “evolution,” “science,” “theory,” or even “faith.” (I’ve written about this before, here). It’s equivocation at its worst.
King Crocoduck is a militant evolutionist that I’ve written about before. Some years back, he made a video series on YouTube explaining how he believed creationists were arrogant. Nevermind the irony in his premise, in his first video, he attempted to address the problem of the universe coming from nothing. Here’s how he described it:
It is useful to define what “nothing” is. While the philosophical definition might be easy to come up with, we’re dealing with the physical world. So our definition of nothing has to be concordant with physical reality. If you have a system to remove all the matter and all the energy, you’ve essentially removed everything that physically exists…. What you’re left with is a vacuum, which is as close to the philosophical definition of nothing as you can get.
King Crocoduck is cheating. He isn’t starting with nothing; he’s starting with a vacuum. Time still exists in a vacuum. Space, physical laws, and even energy still exist in a vacuum. The only thing really missing from a vacuum is matter so there’s a whole lot of things in KC’s definition of nothing! But he doesn’t stop there. He rattles on for about 3 minutes describing the supposed events surrounding the alleged Big Bang, and how energy became hydrogen atoms, which became stars, blah, blah, blah. Then he concludes his fanciful story with this very telling admission:
“So, in summary, all matter comes from energy and energy – in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics – is eternal.”
Think about what KC has said. According to him, “nothing” includes space, time, physical laws, and all the energy in the universe!! It isn’t at all what you, I, or any sane person would consider nothing. It reminds me of the comedian, Steve Martin's, investment strategy: “OK, you start with $1,000,000....”
In one sense, it’s encouraging that they do this. It tells me that - deep down - they really know that you can’t start with nothing and get everything. As a matter of fact, you can’t start with nothing and get anything - not even a single electron. So, instead, the “scientific” atheists invent exotic theories to explain to the lay public how everything can come from nothing, knowing all along that they don’t really mean “nothing.”
But I expect unbelievers to lie. To me, what is more sad, is that people who claim to be Christians, will still believe in evolution. These compromisers willingly believe the lies spoken by people who proudly admit they exclude God from their theories. It doesn’t make any sense.
In a previous series on my blog, I addressed 10 points made in a video by a Christian YouTuber called, Inspiring Philosophy. It was attempting to use Scriptures to claim there were biblical problems for young earth creationists. One criticism was over the use of the Hebrew word, bara (בָּרָא, Strong's word 1254). Read this transcript excerpted from the video:
Number 2 is not so much a passage but the use of a Hebrew word, bara. Many young earth creationists believe this word refers to God creating out of nothing and it is used frequently throughout Genesis 1. But looking at how the word is used outside of Genesis 1, implies bara doesn't necessarily mean creation out of nothing. It might not even refer to material creation at all. John Walton has done a full semantic analysis on the word and he points out the word never necessarily means creation out of nothing and there are several times it cannot mean that at all.
Inspiring Philosophy wants to give the impression that God didn't speak everything into existence but, rather, that He shaped and formed an already existing earth. This begs the question: where did the formless, shapeless earth come from? Unless IP is invoking an infinite regress, then at some point in the past, there had to be a creation out of nothing. The video seems to leave open the possibility that Elohim is not the Creator of the universe. IP only portrays God as continuously shaping already existing matter but never seems to definitively attribute the creation of matter to God. This is one of the reasons I think theistic evolution borders on heresy!
For whatever reason, evolutionists think it’s more “scientific” to believe nothing created everything than to believe God created everything. I say it’s foolishness. To make me believe their theory, they would first have to show me how nothing could create anything. Next they would have to convince me that nothing creating everything is more reasonable than believing God made everything. Good luck with that.
Natural laws are properties of the universe. We use them to describe how the universe behaves. But, if natural laws are properties of the universe, we can't really use them to explain the origin of the universe. Logically speaking, it’s impossible for something to create itself; rather, everything that begins to exist is caused by something outside of itself. To invoke natural laws as some natural explanation for the universe, is like saying nature created nature, which is absurd. So the cause of the universe must be something outside of the universe, something “supernatural” by definition.
Unbelievers are in denial about the religious nature of their beliefs about origins. They are trying to posit a creator with similar attributes that we normally associate with God - like King Crocoduck saying energy is eternal. In other words, they want us to believe there is a supernatural, eternal, uncaused cause for the universe – but it's still not God! They call this cause, “nothing” but they really mean something. Evolutionists are lying about nothing!!
