Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Creation Part 1.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

Having completed the section on the doctrine of Christ, we turn today to a new section in our class. The bulk of our time has been

spent talking about the doctrine of God quite appropriately. So after an initial section on the

doctrine of Revelation, we plunged into a discussion of the attributes and existence of God.

We looked at the Trinity.

We looked at the person of the Holy Spirit.

We looked at the person and work of Christ.

And today we want to shift our attention from God to the world that he has made.

And this is the subject of the doctrine of creation.

You'll remember when we discussed the attributes of God,

we saw that one of God's essential attributes is a seity,

that is to say his self-existence.

And we saw that God is the only uncreated being.

He is the sole ultimate reality. There is nothing apart from God that is uncreated.

If you could think of anything that is uncreated other than God,

then the correct answer to that example would be to say that is too created or else that does not, in fact, exist.

Everything that is real that exists other than God has been created by God.

And this is the doctrine of creatio X. Nihilo, which lies at the very heart of the doctrine of creation. Now, the phrase in Latin, creatio ex nihilo, means literally creation out of nothing.

But when theologians affirm that God has created the world out of nothing, they do not mean

that he has created it out of something, and that is nothing.

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