How to Resist Robert Neville’s Creatio Ex Nihilo Argument

Introduction

Robert Neville’s Philosophical Theology is, in my opinion, an intellectual masterwork.¹ It is worthy of comparison with the systematic works of the great philosophical theologians of any era. Let that serve as sufficient praise.

My aim here is to explain one of the key arguments in the first volume of the trilogy, with a view to showing how to resist it. I refer to the powerful argument that Neville offers on behalf of ultimate reality as an ontological act of creation from nothing. This approach is perfectly suited to the reluctant philosophical theologian who, if forced to read Neville, is primarily interested in avoiding unwanted implications of his ex nihilo argument.

Neville first presented this argument in ninety-two pages of conceptually tight, cleverly comparative, relentlessly speculative philosophical argumentation in God the Creator, in 1968.² Over the years the argument has become simplified and purified, until in part 3 of Ultimates (Philosophical Theology, volume 1), he presents its essence, uncluttered and unadorned. It is an argument both forceful and elegant, which makes it difficult to resist without arbitrariness. Arbitrariness here refers to the metaphysician’s specter, the adding of conceptual epicycles to save face while evading the actual intellectual force of an argument.

Background

Creation from nothing is usually associated with Saint Augustine (354–430 ce), and before him with Theophilus of Antioch (died 181 ce) and one or two other ancient Christian thinkers. The idea was to portray the world as utterly dependent, ontologically speaking, on its divine ground. There would be no Platonic demiurge for Augustine, no taming and fashioning of preexisting chaotic matter stuff into the world we know. Everything must have been created, by God, from nothing. And everything includes space and time as well as substance, and change as well as value and form.

Augustine may have owed some of his conviction about the utter dependence of the world on God to the influential Neoplatonist Plotinus (204/5– 270 ce), whose emanation theory of creation eliminated preexisting matter stuff (Plotinus 2007).³ This chaotic stuff seems obviously present in the Genesis account of creation. For example, Genesis 1:1 refers to a preexisting chaos that was formed in creation, though some Christian theologians, such as Augustine and Calvin, somehow reinterpreted this as supportive of ex nihilo creation. This verse inspired middle Platonists such as Philo (20 bce–50 ce) to declare that the demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus is the Logos, the very hand of the Jewish God, while the Platonic forms are God’s very ideas, made evident in creation.⁴ But Augustine thought that preexisting chaos would necessarily limit God’s authority, so vigorously rejecting preexisting anything was the only way to affirm God’s supreme power and the world’s supreme goodness.⁵

This is how creation ex nihilo was born, and nothing fundamental changed in the way it was conceived until 1968. There were a few wrinkles, of course. For example, people naturally worried that there might be an infinite regress of ontological dependencies. If things in the world are ontologically dependent on one another, and the world is ontologically dependent on God, what is God ontologically dependent on? The answer was easy to construct. God is an exception to the worldly pattern where everything depends on other things: God is self-caused in a way nothing else is. God’s aseity thus comes to the rescue and blocks the infinite regress. Creation is a pure expression of the divine character, and the chain of ontological dependencies stops with God.

It is fair to ask, though, whether this is really creation from nothing. Isn’t it creation from God’s being and character, creatio a deo? After all, it is God’s very nature that determines the nature of creation. Well, that’s a fine point. Nobody in the western theistic traditions ever wanted to exaggerate the idea of creation from nothing to such an extreme that the world no longer reflects the nature of its creator divinity. Not until 1968 at any rate.

Inspired by his...