Creativity From the Start

Good morning Immanuel. Only God can create from nothing. God be praised!

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)

Photo by Skye Studios on Unsplash

The Kalam cosmological argument re-popularized by William Lane Craig states:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

When I sit down to write a song, I already have an idea of how the song will sound when I complete it. I hear the song as it will be before I begin. I can hear it produced in its entirety. But before I write the song, it exists only as an idea. It is pure potential. Once I write the song, it is actualized and then exists. The point is, just as songs have a beginning, so does all creation.

Both science and religion agree that the universe is not steady and did not always exist. There was a “time” when both time and the universe were not. The cause of the songs I write is me. The universe had a beginning, and that beginning was a creative endeavor. When I write a song, I am being creative in a sense, but I am not making up new chords or new melodies. In western music, there are only 12 notes. I am not choosing any truly unique combination of those notes (and neither is anyone else). What I am doing is fashioning and combining different influences in the hopes of innovating something new. Humans are creative in a reflective way, but we are incapable of creating in a vacuum. We do not create anything from nothing. Only God can create from nothing, and it would take an almighty all-powerful, and all-loving God to generate the universe as we know it from nothing. “In the beginning, God created…” is inspiring and humbling!