Creatio ex nihilo

Creatio ex nihilo (Latin for "creation out of nothing") is the doctrine that matter is not eternal but had to be created by some divine creative act. It is a theistic answer to the question of how the universe comes to exist. It is in contrast to Ex nihilo nihil fit or "nothing comes from nothing", which means that all things were formed from preexisting things; an idea by the Greek philosopher Parmenides (c. 540 – c. 480 BC) about the nature of all things, and later more formally stated by Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99 – c. 55 BC). Ex nihilo nihil fit Ex nihilo nihil fit means that nothing comes from nothing. In ancient creation myths, the universe is formed from eternal formless matter, namely the dark and still primordial ocean of chaos. In Sumerian myth this cosmic ocean is personified as the goddess Nammu "who gave birth to heaven and earth" and had existed forever; in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish pre-existent chaos is made up of fresh-water Apsu and salt-water Tiamat, and from Tiamat the god Marduk created Heaven and Earth; in Egyptian creation myths a pre-existent watery chaos personified as the god Nun and associated with darkness, gave birth to the primeval hill (or in some versions a primeval lotus flower, or in others a celestial cow); and in Greek traditions the ultimate origin of the universe, depending on the source, is sometimes Oceanus (a river that circles the Earth), Night, or water. To these can be added the account of the Book of Genesis, which opens with God creating the heavens and the earth, separating and restraining the waters, not creating the waters themselves out of nothing. Alternately, whether this is truly 'ex nihilo', is unclear. The Hebrew sentence which opens Genesis, Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'aretz, can be interpreted in at least three ways: As a statement that the cosmos had an absolute beginning (In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth). As a statement describing the condition of the world when God began creating (When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was untamed and shapeless).