Question:

How could God create this material world out of nothing?   We know nothing comes from nothing.  Did God turn the energy of His words into matter?   Kindly, explain this to me.   Thanks.

Answer:

What a great question! I am afraid that this is one of those questions which will forever be beyond human ability to answer with certainty.  How can something be created from nothing? As human beings, living in a finite world, constrained by both time and space, and also subject to the law of conservation of mass/energy, we are probably incapable of comprehending how this could be done, never mind actually being able to carrying it out. I believe that the answer to this question will perpetually remain a mystery. Perhaps when we meet God in heaven we will have the ability to understand how he can make something out of nothing.   In the gospels we have a record of Jesus making loaves and fishes out of nothing, so the fact that God can do this is already established. 

When Moses asked the LORD who to say had sent him, God answer YHWH which means “I AM”. One of God’s qualities is self-existence. I have often gotten a similar question to yours, which is “Who created God?” There is no “logical” answer to this. God is the uncaused causer. That is his nature. Similarly with your question. How can God, who, as far as we know, is not a physical being, create physical “stuff” from non-“stuff”? My answer is that I do not know.  I believe that in his creation, God did not merely turn energy into stuff/matter because, at least according to physicists, matter is just another form of energy (I assume you have heard of E = mc^2). According to the big bang model, the initial creation was a creation of energy, and the energy was transformed into matter.   Are God’s words energy?  I should probably be cautious in my statements as they require speculation, but I do not think that God’s word is energy, at least in the physics definition, because energy is a created thing–equivalent to mass (again, at least according to physicists). Maybe God’s “words” are a kind of non-physical energy, but what would that mean?…..

I am sorry, but we will almost certainly have to leave this as a mystery. God, by his nature, is and God, by his nature, creates.   Why or how God is or God creates is almost certainly beyond our ability to know.  However, let me give a possibly-slightly-useful analogy using a human example. There is a sense that humans are like God in that we can turn nothing into something. I believe this is part of what it means to say that we are created in the image of God. We, like God, have the ability to conceive of a thing and turn it into something. We can think of an idea, such as a painting or a building or a piece of music in our heads and turn that idea/thought into reality using the tools at our disposal. We can pray and, through faith, with the help of the Holy Spirit our prayer becomes reality. Is this a helpful analogy for how God creates something in his mind and it comes into being? I will let you decide that one.

John Oakes