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Creatio ex nihilo is the doctrine that all matter was created out of nothing by God in an initial or a beginning moment where the cosmos came into existence. [13] [14] The third-century founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus, argued that the cosmos was instead an emanation from God.
The idea that life originated from non-living matter in slow stages appeared in Herbert Spencer's 1864–1867 book Principles of Biology, and in William Turner Thiselton-Dyer's 1879 paper "On spontaneous generation and evolution".
The process inverse to particle annihilation can be called matter creation; more precisely, we are considering here the process obtained under time reversal of the annihilation process. This process is also known as pair production , and can be described as the conversion of light particles (i.e., photons) into one or more massive particles .
Creatio ex materia is the notion that the universe was formed out of eternal, pre-existing matter.This is in contrast to the notion of creatio ex nihilo, where the universe is created out of nothing.
The question does not include the timing of when anything came to exist. Some have suggested the possibility of an infinite regress, where, if an entity cannot come from nothing and this concept is mutually exclusive from something, there must have always been something that caused the previous effect, with this causal chain (either deterministic or probabilistic) extending infinitely back in ...
Aristotle argued that a "vacuum" (that is, a place where there is no matter) is impossible. Material objects can come into existence only in place, that is, occupy space. Were something to come from nothing, "the place to be occupied by what comes into existence would previously have been occupied by a vacuum, inasmuch as no body existed."
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The etymological origin of nihilism is the Latin root word nihil, meaning 'nothing', which is similarly found in the related terms annihilate, meaning 'to bring to nothing', [5] and nihility, meaning 'nothingness'. [21]