Creation Ex Nihilo — The Doctrine That Makes God the Author of Sin
If God created everything from nothing, including your will, then he created exactly the person who would make exactly the choices you make. He then judges you for choices he pre-programmed into a will he created. This is not justice. This is theater.
What Ex Nihilo Means and Where It Came From
Creation from absolute nothing. No pre-existing matter, no pre-existing intelligence, no pre-existing anything. Everything that exists was called into being from non-being by God’s creative act. Before God spoke, there was literally nothing — not empty space, not potential, not even darkness. God alone existed, and from that solitary existence he produced the entirety of reality.
This doctrine does not appear in Genesis. The Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1 uses the word bara — which means to shape, form, or bring forth. It does not require creation from nothing. Ancient Jewish readers did not read it that way. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was formalized by Christian theologians in the 2nd century, most prominently by Theophilus of Antioch around 180 AD, under heavy influence from Platonic philosophy, which insisted that matter was inherently corrupt and that the divine must be wholly immaterial and transcendent.
It was a philosophical import dressed in biblical language. The Bible does not teach it. Councils and creeds institutionalized it. And once it was locked in, the logical consequences followed — and they are devastating.
The Logical Problem
Here is the argument. Follow it carefully.
If God created everything from nothing, then he created your will. Not just the physical brain substrate — your will itself. Your desires, your inclinations, your capacity for thought, your capacity for rebellion. Every disposition you have toward good or evil was constructed from nothing by God’s direct creative act. You arrived in existence with exactly the nature God designed for you.
He then holds you accountable for using exactly the will he created. He judges you for being exactly the person he made you to be.
Under this framework, Adam and Eve did not fall. They performed as designed. God created a creature with the precise disposition to eat the forbidden fruit under the precise circumstances he arranged, and then called it a fall. God is the author of the Fall. God is the author of every sin, every cruelty, every atrocity in human history — because he is the author of every will that committed them.
The Calvinist tradition deserves credit for intellectual honesty here. Calvinism followed the logic where it led. Double predestination is the honest terminus of ex nihilo theology: God elected some to salvation and ordained the rest to damnation before the foundation of the world. The Westminster Confession of Faith states it plainly:
Westminster Confession 3:7
“The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy, as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice.”
God created the reprobate. God designed the reprobate. God ordained their damnation. And then God is glorified by punishing them for it. That is where ex nihilo leads if you are honest enough to follow it.
The LDS Answer
The Gospel of Jesus Christ teaches something fundamentally different. Intelligences are co-eternal with God — they were not created from nothing because they cannot be.
“Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”
This single verse dismantles the entire edifice. Intelligence cannot be created. It cannot be made from nothing. It was in the beginning with God — not created by God, but coexistent with God. God organized intelligences, clothed them in spirit bodies, gave them experiences, provided them with a plan of salvation — but he did not manufacture them from nothing to spec.
We are not products. We are co-eternal intelligences who pre-existed this creation, who have our own irreducible capacity for choice, and who were invited — not programmed — into a plan of exaltation.
Why This Matters
Genuine moral accountability requires genuine independent existence. A created will is not free — it is a mechanism executing the design of its creator. Agency, in any philosophically coherent sense, requires that the agent have some existence and capacity not derived entirely from a single creative source.
“All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence. Behold, here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man.”
The text is explicit: agency requires independence. Not independence granted by God — independence that is constitutive of existence itself. “Otherwise there is no existence.” A being that is not independent in some irreducible sense does not truly exist as an agent. It is an extension of its creator.
The LDS cosmology is the only Christian cosmology in which genuine moral accountability is philosophically coherent. In every other framework, you are either holding God responsible for sin or you are asserting agency without a metaphysical foundation to support it.
Verdict
Creation ex nihilo, followed rigorously, makes God the author of sin. It makes judgment a performance and accountability a fiction. Calvinism at least had the courage to say so plainly. Most Protestant theology holds ex nihilo in one hand and genuine free will in the other, pretending the contradiction doesn’t exist.
The Restoration solved the problem. Not by ignoring it — but by returning to a cosmology in which intelligences are co-eternal, agency is real, and God is the organizer of a plan, not the manufacturer of puppets he condemns for performing as built.
Augustinian theology created the problem. The Restoration fixed it.