# Creation ex nihilo vs. Gradualism: Is the former necessary to western religion?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creation-ex-nihilo-vs-gradualism-is-the-former-necessary-to-western-religion/504659>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [July 29, 2009, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creation-ex-nihilo-vs-gradualism-is-the-former-necessary-to-western-religion/504659 "2009-07-29T12:07:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![SentientMeat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@SentientMeat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SentientMeat)\
**Post date:** [August 11, 2009, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creation-ex-nihilo-vs-gradualism-is-the-former-necessary-to-western-religion/504659/41 "2009-08-11T13:23:41Z")

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Oh, and mods/admin: how the heck do you get an aleph followed by a zero subscript? For some weird reason, it kept putting the zero before the aleph like so:

א [sub]0[/sub]

… which one could interpret as the mathematical notation for creation _ex nihilo_!

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**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\
**Post date:** [August 11, 2009, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creation-ex-nihilo-vs-gradualism-is-the-former-necessary-to-western-religion/504659/42 "2009-08-11T14:52:22Z")

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[symbol]À[/symbol][sub]0[/sub]

[symbol]À[/symbol][sub]0[/sub]

I think that if you simply enter the aleph from a Hebrew-ready keyboard, the code attempts to do something about making the text extend from right to left, but then the Arabic/Latin zero interferes with that code. (I tried putting the subscript before the aleph and it displayed the same way that placing it after the aleph did. Odd.)  
Specifying the code to use the “Symbol” font for only that character appears to break up the translation.

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**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\
**Post date:** [August 11, 2009, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creation-ex-nihilo-vs-gradualism-is-the-former-necessary-to-western-religion/504659/43 "2009-08-11T14:57:36Z")

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In the Christian sense, God is eternal, he has always existed, but our world, ‘Creation’, was created at a certain point. Everything that exists in ‘Creation’ is the natural world. Everything that exists outside of that, that is eternal and uncreated, is the ‘supernatural’ world. But it posits that at some point the material world as we understand it was created.

IE, it speaks to a regress to point where we just cannot comprehend the regression. It’s a hard limit on our ability to understand, not a hard limit on actual existence.

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**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\
**Post date:** [August 11, 2009, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creation-ex-nihilo-vs-gradualism-is-the-former-necessary-to-western-religion/504659/44 "2009-08-11T18:00:21Z")

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> [@mswas](#):
>
> I’ve always found infinite regress to make much more sense than creation ex nihilo myself.

We’re talking about physics at its most basic level here. Anything that makes sense is almost certain to be wrong.

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