Creation Ex Nihilo

Creation ex nihilo is a phrase associated with Genesis 1's creation theology, referring to the specifics of the way God created matter.  "Ex nihilo" might linguistically mean "from nothing" in its common usage, but what does it mean conceptually?  There are two distinct intentions behind the phrase that are likely to be used.  Only one of them even corresponds to a concept that is logically possible, and yet it is the other that seems to be behind the words of plenty of Christians when they speak of an "ex nihilo" act of creation.  The two possible meanings can be easily contrasted in part because one of them is so irrational.

If someone means by the phrase that the Biblical deity or the uncaused cause, which are the same entity in Christian theology, brought the cosmos into existence without reshaping matter that already existed, the phrase is not philosophically problematic (or Biblically erroneous).  If someone means that God created the universe using literally nothing, including his own power, then the phrase is obviously self-contradictory because the concept behind it contradicts itself.  The unfortunate fact is that making this distinction on any level seems foreign to many Christians.

Popular references to "creation ex nihilo" by Christian theologians might never distinguish these two concepts at all.  This only perpetuates confusion or fallacious beliefs among people who are so intellectually helpless that they truly think they have to look to popular theologians to even contemplate the logicality of concepts.  Of course, even popular theologians seem to rarely bring this issue up.  The phrase, as is so often the case with other terms, can be used so ambiguously that there is no linguistic evidence that the speaker or writer is even aware of the distinction!  Many Christians seem content to never challenge the latter of these two options.

Genesis clearly describes a specific beginning point for matter, but it also clearly does not say that the creation of matter marked the beginning of all existence.  If it did, it would contradict itself by saying God used nothing to create when he must by necessity at least use his own abilities, and if it stated that nothing at all existed before creation, it would likewise contradict its own teaching that God preceded nature--as well as contradict reason by entailing that logical truths did not exist prior to the external world even though they cannot not exist.

Creation ex nihilo is both a philosophically and Biblically valid concept only when it is not used to wrongly affirm the idea that God used nothing at all in the act of creation.  In one sense, it would be clear to a rational, thoughtful reader of the Bible that since God is something, a being, it is misleading at best to say "nothing" made the universe.  There would be no insistence that God created using nothing, only that there was no use of matter that existed before the universe (which would be a logical impossibility as it is).  The thing is that many Christian and non-Christian readers of the Bible are not rational and are thus likely to commit basic errors like this.