I always like both, which is of course impossible, like reality.
- “According to Aristotle the founder of the Ionic physical philosophy, and therefore the founder of Greek philosophy, was Thales of Miletos. According to Diogenes Laertios, Thales was born in the first year of the thirty-fifth Olympiad (640 B.C.), and his death occurred in the fifty-eighth Olympiad (548-545 B.C.). He attained note as a scientific thinker and was regarded as the founder of Greek philosophy because he discarded mythical explanations of things, and asserted that a physical element, water, was the first principle of all things. There are various stories of his travels, and in connection with accounts of his travels in Egypt he is credited with introducing into Greece the knowledge of geometry. Tradition also claims that he was a statesman, and as a practical thinker he is classed as one of the seven wise men.” Source: I. Thales.
- “Arist. de Coelo ii. 13; 294 a 28. Some say that the earth rests on water. We have ascertained that the oldest statement of this character is the one accredited to Thales the Milesian, to the effect that it rests on water, floating like a piece of wood or something else of that sort.”
- I was acquainted (on-line) with a man (now deceased) who could and did explain that the water that Thales spoke of was nothing more or less than the fundamental stuff which all physical things in the universe consist of.
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I found this which suggests that the Greeks too did not believe in creation ex-nihilo:
The Greek creation story does not feature creation ex nihilo
(out of nothing); instead, it describes a cosmos emerging from a primordial state of Chaos. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Chaos is the initial void from which figures like Gaia (Earth) and Eros (Desire) eventually emerge and organize the cosmos.
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Primordial state: The Greek creation myth begins with Chaos, a void or undifferentiated something, not with the absence of all matter.
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Emergence of deities: From this initial state, the first gods like Earth and Eros appear, and a process of ordering and procreation begins.
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Contrast with ex nihilo: This differs from the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which posits that a creator god makes the universe from absolutely nothing.
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And here is the Babylonian Creation Story. It too does not involve creation ex-nihilo. So, the Jewish Creation Story agrees with the Greek, Babylonian, and Mayan creation stories that the gods used existing material to create the universe.
The Babylonian creation story from the Enuma Elish was not ex nihilo
(out of nothing); instead, the god Marduk created the world by shaping it from the body of the defeated primordial goddess Tiamat. This is a key difference from creation stories that posit a god creating from nothing, as the Babylonian myth involved the god imposing order on pre-existing chaos and the remains of a primordial deity.
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From chaos to order: The story begins with a primordial watery chaos of freshwater (Apsu) and saltwater (Tiamat). The world is not created from absolute nothingness but is instead the result of Marduk defeating Tiamat and using her corpse to form the heavens and the earth.
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Creation by shaping, not conjuring: This process is one of shaping and forming, similar to a potter shaping clay, rather than the divine act of bringing something into existence from non-existence.
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Ex nihilo** vs. creation from existing matter:** Ex nihilo creation implies that matter itself is not eternal and is brought into existence by a creator. In contrast, the Babylonian myth is an example of creation from pre-existing matter or chaos, which is a common theme in ancient creation myths.
And centuries before the Greeks, there was India. They kept it simple too. Simplest. No unnecessary entities like nothing. The culture that gave us zero. Which ain’t nuthin’ either.
I didn’t know this before but the explicit mention of the concept of creation ex-nihilo did not appear in Judeo-Christianity until shortly before Jesus during the Maccabean period:
The concept of creation ex nihilo first appears explicitly in the non-canonical Jewish text 2 Maccabees 7:28 (written between the 2nd and 1st century BCE), though its interpretation is debated. Early Christian writers like Tatian and Irenaeus in the 2nd century CE are among the first to clearly articulate it, building on earlier Jewish and Greek philosophical ideas, and it became a core tenet of Christian theology around 200 CE, says Encyclopedia.pub.
Now that is interesting. Thank you. Philosophically and scientifically, nothing is too much.
It’s pure, blind faith: you’ve made a conclusion that is contrary to known cosmology.
That misreads the text – the tohu wabohu clause describes the first conditions of what God made. It’s an assertion contrary to the standard ANE idea of pre-existing material.
Contrary to, from the empirical how?
Seriously?
You’ve gone Hindu on your physics, replacing reason with another religion.
AI: The original Hebrew of Genesis 1 does not explicitly suggest creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”). Instead, the text describes God bringing order to a pre-existing state of “formless and void” chaos, known as tohu wa-bohu.
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Pre-existing chaos: Genesis 1:2 describes the earth as being “formless and void” and covered in darkness and a watery abyss (the tehom) before creation begins in earnest.
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Ordering, not creating from nothing: The narrative portrays God as a cosmic organizer, imposing order and structure on the existing chaotic matter rather than creating the material itself from absolute nothingness.
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Comparison to other ancient Near Eastern myths: This view of a creator ordering chaos is common in other ancient Near Eastern creation stories and does not align with a strict ex nihilo interpretation.
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Later development of the doctrine: The doctrine of creation ex nihilo developed later in Jewish and Christian thought, becoming a more prominent theological concept in the centuries following Genesis.
You are correct in that Genesis 1:2 does not start from ex nihilo.
Genesis 1:1 has been interpreted as a starting phrase to the following creation/ordering/temple building story. It could be interpreted so that it also includes creation ex nihilo.
Although Genesis 1 would not start from nothing, the basic teaching in biblical scriptures is that God is the Creator. That includes creation of everything.
Genesis is not a science or history textbook, so expecting modern-style history or science is unrealistic and unfounded. Genesis tells such messages about God and the relationship between God and humans that were necessary or useful to increase the understanding of the (original) receivers about God.
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What, because something is simpler than nothing plus something? Unless you’re Roman Catholic of course.
If you say so.
There are two possibilities:
- The Judeo-Christian God revealed this truth progressively. The writers of Genesis did not know the full truth. The creation story they told was culturally accommodated. The author of the Gospel of John and Paul understood the full truth.
- It is all a man-made fiction; the end product shaped by pagan Greek philosophy.
Jesus was of His Suicide by Sinners, just as Suicide by Police of some Criminals who aim their weapon at the police and force them to shoot them. Jesus also showed Us the the Whole Crowd can be wrong as a jury, in turn “We The People” can all be wrong also. We Sinners disregard Our Conscience as the Psalm 40:8 indicates “Thy Law is Written on Our Hearts, I delight to do they Will”. Many are influenced by other Disregarding Sinners and join the Crowd. This is the Eternal existence of Us Humans and We pray We are granted the eternal life in Paradise as the Thief on the Cross With Jesus.
“No it’s a statement of reason from science. Knowledge based. Reason alone suffices actually. Uniformitarianism. There’s a proper philosophy for you. Whatever we know, science, is average, mesoscopic. Wherever you are, in the eternal infinity of nature, you’re in the middle, half way. ‘Knowing’ anything else is unreason.
There never was a first moment. Never was a once upon a time. The cause of time is unchanging existence. Strongest uniformitarianism. Therefore from eternity. That’s your blind spot. Masked with the illusion, delusion of improbability. A meaningless concept in the face of our certain and mediocre existence. The ‘chances’ of any configuration of matter now from eternity is the reciprocal of infinity: meaningless. The impossible happens all the time, every time.”
Despite strong competition from fringe creation science, Apistos is pretty convincing as a contender for the most unscientific and illogical faith. In that competition, “new atheism” has the advantage of being unthinking opposition to something rather than uncritically trying to support something, and so more likely to claim mere insults as grand logical arguments. Foolish faith in the reliability of popular militant atheism thus leads to such anomalies as the rather curious argument that saying that “The impossible happens all the time, every time” proves that some things are impossible.
True uniformitarianism is the principle that the laws of nature are consistent through time and space. But it must be subject to the data, to verify what actually are unchanging laws and what does change. Of course, there are also situations where something does not change within the limited consideration of a particular question, but does change beyond that. Why are laws of nature unchanging? Theologically, the fact that they were created by an unchanging God provides a good reason. Empirically, basic laws do not change as far as we can tell. But that cannot prove that the laws aren’t different somewhere that we haven’t or cannot look, nor does it show that the laws won’t change tomorrow – such scenarios turn up in sci fi, as a possible context for pondering further.
The idea that what we are looking at is average is not uniformitarianism, but rather the so-called “Copernican principle”, which is actually a variant on the gambler’s fallacy. If the distribution of data is close enough to normal, then a randomly selected example is likely to be close to average in those features. But if you look at 100 different features in a randomly selected example, there’s a decent chance that some of them will be outside the 95% confidence interval. Each individual human is unique in certain ways, and unusual in more, for example, though also close to average in many ways. The claim that there are surely loads of habitable planets because Earth can’t possibly be exceptional, or that our universe must be unsurprising out of the multiverse, are common examples of this fallacy. Back in the mid-1990’s, Science published a letter to the editor claiming that a weakness of statistics was that one could not avoid the logic of “a randomly selected human is very unlikely to be the Pope, therefore the Pope is very likely to not be human”. But in reality the fact that a randomly selected human is very unlikely to be the Pope makes it very unlikely that the Pope was a randomly selected example; nothing further can be concluded from that data. Our universe is not a randomly selected example; we cannot say if it is average or if there even are other universes.
But Apistos’s faith in such bad arguments leads to the even more extreme error of claiming that everything is average. That would greatly speed up my grading of tests and papers, but it is ridiculously contrary to available data (e.g., the actual test scores of someone on the forum are not average.). The average atom in the universe is hydrogen, therefore Apistos, supposedly a carbon-based lifeform, does not exist because all atoms are hydrogen. Atheism does not exist because the average human is some sort of theist. This is the naively incompetent philosophy typical of militant “new atheism”.
Of course, there are plenty of more reasonable atheistic positions out there; pretending that a bad example can be labeled as typical and ignoring the actual diversity is another popular error in militant atheism’s caricatures of religion and in religious caricatures of atheism. Similar bad uniformitarianism, though not carried to such fanciful extremes of faith in one’s own preferences, is a common young-earth ploy. It is appallingly common for young earthers to claim that uniformitarianism is bad and then immediately make uniformitarian arguments. Persisting in promoting bad uniformitarian arguments in the face of the data can have serious consequences, particularly when they relate to social policy (e.g., Marx), but the reality is that all understanding of the past requires uniformitarian assumptions. We can’t just assume that anything we want to not change didn’t change and anything that we want to change did, while honestly claiming to be logical and scientific.
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Excellent fallacious rhetoric. A positively satirical straw man. Bravo.
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