Nihil ex nihilo fit – nothing comes out of nothing. This is the starting point for the “debate” or slanging-match between the creationists and the new atheists. It is a very old argument and it is not very enlightening, despite its venerable credentials. It is in essence the same argument as that between the 18th century deists such as William Paley and their positivistic opponents such as David Hume. It goes even further back, to Aquinas and the scholastics and eventually to Aristotle. David Bentley Hart comments acerbically that the two sides in this dispute are so fatuous that they deserve each other.

For God is not the Great Architect, as the freemasons vainly believe. God is not the supreme technologist and fabricator, the one who made all the bits: he is the Creator. God was regarded by Augustine and Aquinas as the First Cause, but they didn’t mean that God set some mechanical sequence in motion and then, as it were, retired. By “First Cause” they were not talking about some aspect of thermodynamics: they meant that God is the One who gives reality to what otherwise would remain forever only potential.

This is what the Creed means when, quoting the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, it says by whom all things were made.

God does not therefore fabricate the world: rather he bestows upon the natural order its being. Something of this can be seen in the very first verses of Genesis where in the beginning there was not nothingness, but the earth was without form and void. It is God who gives form – being – to the formless void.

Those, like Richard Dawkins and indeed all materialists, who argue that the material order requires no Creator and that it is self-generating and self-sufficient – that there is nothing but the material order – fail to understand that, if that were the case, there is no way we could ever know that it is the case. Because knowledge implies thoughts, and thoughts are not material.

Perhaps there is an analogy between God’s creativity and ours – which we should in any case expect since we are made in God’s image. So the novelist when he creates his novel does not make the pen and paper with which he writes it though, of course, without the pen and paper, the novelist would not be able to present to us the characters he invents for us. These characters are not the ink marks on the page: they are the production of the mind of the novelist.

Similarly, we are creatures created by the mind of God. Specifically, as Augustine says, by the love of God. And God’s act of creation is not like the big bang. It is continuous and everlasting. Augustine says that if God were to stop loving us even for a moment, we should immediately cease to exist. Fortunately for us, God cannot do this. For God is love and he is bound to act in accordance with his nature. Augustine goes further and says, God is love and nothing else. Thus if God were to cease loving, he would cease to be God. (To express this anthropomorphically, God would cease to exist)  

Incidentally, that old chestnut objection to the existence of God expressed by the question, Who made God? can be applied more pertinently to the big bang: if the big bang were really the first cause, what caused the big bang? In other words, how could a purely natural order naturally generate itself?

Dante underscores this truth at the end of The Divine Comedy when he speaks of the love that moves the sun and the other stars

Thus our existence is not our material features, but it is our being, our reality, bestowed upon us by the gift of God.

Once we understand this, the familiar difficulties with the idea of life after death entirely disappear.