Excerpt from Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler of “Who Made God?”
If God and nothing else existed prior to the creation of the world, the universe came into existence from nothing. But isn’t it absurd to say that something can come from nothing? It is absurd to say that nothing caused something, because nothing does not exist and has no power to do anything. But it is not absurd to say that someone (God) brought the universe into existence from non-existence. Nothing cannot make something, but someone (God) can make something out of nothing.
In fact, if the universe had a beginning, then there was no universe and then there was – after God created it. This is what is meant by creation “out of nothing” (Latin ex nihilo). It does not mean that God took a “handful of nothing” and made something out of it, as though “nothing” were something out of which he made the world. There was God and simply nothing else. Then God brought something else into existence that had not existed to that point.
Or to put it another way, creation “out of nothing” simply means that God did not create out of something else that which already existed alongside Himself, as in certain forms of dualism in which there are two eternal substances of entities. This is really ex materia, that is out of some preexisting matter outside of God the Greek philosopher Plato held this view.
Neither did God create the world out of Himself (ex Deo). That is, God did not take part of Himself and make the world out of it. In fact, the orthodox God has no parts. He is a simple whole that is absolutely one. Thus there is no way God could have taken part of Himself and made the world. God is infinite and the world is finite. And no amount of finite parts can make an infinite, since no matter how many parts or pieces one has, there could always be one more. But there cannot be more than an infinite. Hence, no amount of parts would ever equal an infinite (ex materia).
The world came from God but is not of God. He was its cause but not its substance. It came into existence by Him, but it is not made of Him. However, if the world was not created out of God (ex Deo) or out of something (ex materia) existing alongside God, it must have been created out of nothing (ex nihilo). There is no other alternative. God made something that before He made it, did not exist, either in Him or in anything else.
The only place the world “existed” before God made it was as an idea in God’s mind. Just as a painter has an idea of his painting in his mind before he paints it, so God had an idea of the world before He made it. In this sense, the world preexisted in God’s mind as an idea before he brought it into existence.
