"...the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was... And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and
we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell;
And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them;
God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said:
These I will make my rulers... "
Creatio ex nihilo (Latin for "creation out of nothing") is the doctrine that matter is not eternal but had to be created by some divine creative act. It is an answer to the question of how the universe came to exist. It received its first explicit articulation by Theophilus of Antioch in a work of his known as To Autolycus in a chapter titled Absurd Opinions of the Philosophers Concerning God. John Philoponus was its most prominent defender,
Creatio ex materia refers to the idea that matter has always existed and that the modern cosmos is a reformation of pre-existing, primordial matter.
In ancient near eastern cosmology, the universe is formed ex materia from eternal formless matter,[3] namely the dark and still primordial ocean of chaos.[4]
In Sumerian myth this cosmic ocean is personified as the goddess Nammu "who gave birth to heaven and earth" and had existed forever;[5]
In the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, pre-existent chaos is made up of fresh-water Apsu and salt-water Tiamat, and from Tiamat the god Marduk created Heaven and Earth;[6]
In Egyptian creation myths a pre-existent watery chaos personified as the god Nun and associated with darkness, gave birth to the primeval hill (or in some versions a primeval lotus flower, or in others a celestial cow);[7]
The Genesis creation narrative opens with the Hebrew phrase bereshit bara elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'aretz, which can be interpreted in at least three ways:
As a statement that the cosmos had an absolute beginning (In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth).
As a statement describing the condition of the world when God began creating (When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was untamed and shapeless).
As background information (When in the beginning The Head God [re shit] brought forth the council of the gods [el oh im], they created the heavens and the earth, the earth being untamed and shapeless, they said, Let there be light!).[9]
Though option 1 has been the historic and predominant view, it has been suggested since the Middle Ages that it cannot be the preferred translation based on strictly linguistic and exegetical grounds.
Episode #26- A Cosmic Kingdom
Episode #30- The Grand Primordial Singularity
Episode #27- Universes Beyond Universes