An Argument for the Possibility of Creatio Ex Nihilo
The translation of Greek philosophical texts in the medieval Islamic world transformed religious thinking, destabilizing many beliefs previously thought to be indestructible. Theologians used these ancient philosophical works to transform, evolve, and revise traditional religious belief in light of Greek logic and physics. The transmission of these texts instigated serious doubt in many about the validity and authority of traditional religious beliefs where they clashed with ancient philosophical teachings. Maimonides, a highly-learned scholar in Judaism and ancient Greek teachings, specifically those of Aristotle and his followers, sought to synthesize the two broadly and ameliorate specific tensions in his seminal work, The Guide for the Perplexed. This work relied heavily on an Aristotelian view of the cosmos and other physics which have since been debunked by modern science. However, many of his argumentative methods, deductive analyses and proofs are still rational in a contemporary context, some via a translation to modern terms and others in their original form. This essay will explore one of these such arguments in detail, reconstructing its argumentative steps and analyzing it in the context of both medieval presumed rationality and contemporary rationality.
During Maimonides’ lifetime, there was a dispute between Aristotelianism and Judaism regarding the origins of the universe. The Aristotelians contended that the universe is eternal, a belief that they derived from their understanding of the development of substance according to a potentiality-actuality process. In this process, something has a potential to become something else, such as a seed’s potential to become a plant. The actual development of the former to the latter is a progression from a potential state to an actual one. The Aristotelians believed that everything in the universe acts according to this model, because if one traces back from a thing’s observed actuality to its potentiality, they find that there is always a potential material substance that causes the actual substance e.g. a plant is always preceded by a seed. If there must always be a material cause, the substance of the universe must be eternal because actuality can only develop from potentiality.
The creation from nothing, Creatio ex nihilo account in the Torah appears to stand in direction contradiction to this Aristotelian understanding of the eternity of cosmos. How can the universe have been created from nothing if all material things must be preceded by a potential thing? Maimonides dedicates an entire chapter of the Guide to explain how this is a misguided question that is based on an incorrect epistemological assumption. This “crucial assumption: [that] categories that apply to natural processes also apply to creation” (Seeskin 94), is an epistemological fallacy that Maimonides seeks to expose. His argument against this assumption is part of an effort to prove the possibility of creation from nothing, which he needs to prove because the Creatio ex nihilo account in the Torah is threatened by this dispute. He forms his argument and challenges the Aristotelians around a central question, “why should we think we can understand the origin of a thing by examining its present state and extrapolating backward?” (Seeskin 94). His argument distinguishes between Aristotle’s potentiality/actuality analysis of substance from the issue of substance generation though a set of rational, epistemological claims. His argument successfully resolves the apparent tension between the Aristotelian view of the cosmos and the Creatio ex nihilo account in the Torah through a highly logical, evidence-based form of argumentation whose presumed rationality carries over into a contemporary context.[1]
Maimonides begins his argument against the use of the potentiality/actuality paradigm to understand the generation of the universe with the claim that an existing thing in its final state has different properties from those it possessed at the start of the transition from potential to actual.
Even when the substance of a thing has been in existence, and has only changed its form, the thing itself, which has gone through the process of genesis and development, and has arrived at its final state, has now different properties from those which it possessed at the commencement of the transition from potentiality to reality, or before that time (Pines 178).
His claim is a physical one about the nature of change that he illustrates with the example of semen and its relationship to a fully developed human. The properties of the semen at conception, (fluid, microscopic, head-tail morphology, etc.) are different from the properties of the human after development (solid, with appendages, bipedal, etc.). From this obvious observation, he establishes the core of his argument, that it is impossible to infer from the present nature of a thing what its properties were at the moment its developmental process began.
[It is] impossible to infer from the nature which a thing possesses after having passed through all stages of its development, what the condition of the thing has been in the moment when this process commenced (Pines 179).
This claim is the nucleus of his argument against the Aristotelian method of retrojecting back from a current state of a thing to understand its starting state. He sets up a thought experiment to illustrate the fallacy of this model in which a male infant is raised on a lonely island by his father after the death of his mother. After this man grows up and is fully developed and wise, he questions how he has come into existence. He has never seen a woman, though he is told that “man begins his existence in the womb of an individual of his own class…he then leaves the womb and continues to grow till he is in the condition in which you see him” (Pines 179). When the man considers this account in light of his knowledge of his current existence, he is unable to reconcile a stage in his development when he did not breathe air, excrete, or take in nourishment orally. Therefore, he concludes it impossible to have developed this way.
Maimonides presents the example of the man on the lonely island as an analogy to the Aristotelians and their methods for theorizing about the origin of the Universe. The man uses his knowledge and perception in his confined realm to deny the possibility of the account given to him that does not accord with his state. Maimonides analogizes the man’s denial to the Aristotelian’s denial of Creatio ex nihilo because it does not accord with the developmental model they observe. While he subscribes to their developmental model for already existing things, he claims its application to understand the genesis of substance is an over extension of the development paradigm. Maimonides’ epistemological challenge posits that once you have the substance of the fetus, the Aristotelian model of moving from potentiality to actuality has explanatory power. However, how the fetus came into existence i.e. it’s generation, is a separate matter that this model cannot explain. When it does attempt to offer this explanation, thinking it has shown the inadmissibility of a universe creatio ex nihilo, it explains beyond its bounds. Aristotle’s potentiality/actuality analysis can explain how things change over time, but this analysis is restricted to the realm in which things already exist. This theory cannot handle the more basic question of generation: where did the substance come from?
Once Maimonides has established the categorical difference between development and generation broadly, he turns his focus to the dispute at hand. He argues for the possibility of the creatio ex nihilo account in the Torah in light of the distinction between subjects that reason can rationally make conclusions about and those where we can merely rationally speculate.
The Creation story in the Torah details God’s creation of the universe from nothing. For Maimonides, the question of where the substance of the universe came from is part of the class of problems beyond the reach of reason. We are like the man on the isolated island; our domain of perception and knowledge is limited to the island, so we are unable to definitively prove how the island came to be. The best we can do is offer possibilities. Maimonides has set himself up in a position to establish the possibility of the Creation account in the Torah and refute the Aristotelian proof for the inadmissibility of creatio ex nihilo. He claims that we cannot know that something created from nothing, as is the case in the Torah, must have previously been in a state of potentiality, as the Aristotelians claim it must have been. If we cannot know this, it is possible that the universe was created from nothing. This claim is bolstered by his exposure of the irrationality of overextending the potentiality/actuality analysis to the generation of the universe itself.
Nothing perceived with our senses or comprehended in our mind can prove that a thing created from nothing must have previously been in a state of potentiality (Pines 180).
The implications of this argument vis-a-vis the dispute with the Aristotelian picture of the cosmos prove that Judaism does not oppose this view. By clearly delineating the problems for which we can offer definitive proofs from those for which we can only rationally entertain possibilities, Maimonides establishes the account in the Torah as a superior account to that of Aristotelian eternity. The Torah’s divine authorship and the true prophecy of Moses, assumptions that undergird Maimonidean philosophy, provide an explanation that transcends what our episteme is capable of comprehending, thereby making it resilient to criticisms of inadmissibility.
The principle…[is] able to resist all missiles directed against it. Aristotle, or rather his followers, may perhaps ask us how we know that the Universe has been created…We reply, there is no necessity for this according to our plan; for we do not desire to prove the Creation, but only its possibility; and this possibility is not refuted by arguments based on the nature of the present Universe (Pines 181).
Maimonides’ argument is about an implicit lack of access to a full understanding of substance generation. Therefore, his own argument limits the explanation he offers to strictly the possibility of the Torah’s account of Creation. This argument as a whole is humbling in its recognition of our finite epistemological reach, yet its acknowledgement of this limit also gives it an ability to thwart criticisms, contributing largely to its continued classification as rational.
Maimonides crafts this highly rational argument as part of his general project which “[restricts] knowledge of God severely, [so] he cannot claim certainty about how God is responsible for the world” (Seeskin 93). This argument is rational from its initial goals, method of derivation, lack of assumptions and convincing thought-experiment evidence. Most importantly for rationality’s sake, he does not aim to prove anything with complete conclusion. He just needs to that show that something is possible, a type of claim that is more difficult to disprove than a clear-cut explanation which is intended to be accepted above all others alike. Further, he derives his conclusion about the limits of our reason through realistic, rational thought experiments and his argument is largely devoid of assumptions, even though it speaks about the Torah. The core of the argument not inextricably linked to the Torah, and is instead agnostic to the frame of reference regarding creation from nothing. The same argument would be rational if evaluating the possibility of creation from nothing without the Torah’s specific account or any God language. Lastly, his argument does not rely upon in a particular model of physics that could be debunked by new insights into the workings of the universe. Even though our understanding of physics, biology and the evolution of the universe is almost entirely different from their understandings during Maimonides’ lifetime, this argument and his conclusions are rational in a contemporary context.
The impossibility of forming an objective account of transcendence is an idea that would later become one of the greatest focuses of the modern philosophical movement, with philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant claiming the same limits of reason that Maimonides explained five hundred years prior. Hume devoted a great deal of his philosophy to “determining the extent and limits of reason’s powers and capacities” (Morris, Brown) while Kant developed similar notions that “[devastated] reason’s pretenses to transcendent insight” (Rohlf). Both Hume and Kant came to realize that our embodied existence in the world limits our ability to make a priori transcendental claims, the same limit Maimonides understood. The recurrence of this argument demonstrates its rationality in the context in which Maimonides wrote and its contemporary rationality. To this day, scientists, metaphysicians and philosophers alike concede this innate limitation, accepting that complete access to transcendent reality is epistemologically impossible. Since Maimonides’ argument, there is large consensus with his argument that proving the ultimate nature of reality is beyond reason’s scope.
Footnotes
[1] I mean “successfully” with regards to rationality. Whether it was successful in its reception is an historical point.
Works Cited
1. Maimonides, Moses, and Shlomo Pines. “Part 2: Chapter 17.” The Guide for the Perplexed, Dover Publications, 1956, pp. 178–181.
2. Seeskin, Kenneth. “Chapter 3: Metaphysics and Its Transcendence.” The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 93–94.
3. Morris, William Edward, and Charlotte R. Brown. “David Hume.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 26 Feb. 2001, plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/.
Rohlf, Michael. “Immanuel Kant.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 20 May 2010, plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/.
