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

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!

[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.

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.

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