Which makes more sense to you? The Latin phrase ex nihilo means "out of nothing". It often appears in conjunction with the concept of creation, as in creatio ex nihilo, meaning "creation out of nothing". Due to the connotations of the phrase creatio ex nihilo, it often occurs in philosophical or creationistic arguments, as many Christians, Muslims and Jews believe that God created the universe from nothing. This contrasts with creatio ex materia (creation out of eternally pre-existent matter) and with creatio ex deo (creation out of the being of God).

A number of philosophers (including Hesiod and his Theogeny, Plato and his Timaeus) in ancient times attained a concept of God as the supreme ruler of the world, but did not develop a concept of God called demiurge as the absolute cause of all finite existence. Before the biblical idea of creation arose, myths envisioned the world as pre-existing matter acted upon by a god or gods who reworked this material into the present world. The Hebrew tradition and the religious thought that developed out of its world-view apparently originated the formulation of "ex nihilo creation".

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I dunno. Creating something from where nothing is or was is .. Unhumanly possible.

I had an interesting conversation with one of those door-to-door-evangelists once.

At one point in our discussion he said "You can't create anything. Only God can create."

So I picked up a stick, broke it in two and said "I just created a break in a stick."

Any questions?

creatio ex deo

This is why I favor pantheistic views of nature over the idea of a jealous egotistical and external creator.

This is also why reincarnation makes so much sense to me. We already know without any doubt that physical bodies are 'reincarnated' out of the same materials. The only question then becomes questions of the 'soul'

Is a new soul created out of 'nothing' when a body is born?

I don't believe so. I believe that spirit is spirit and is eternal. We simply take on different bodies as the process of reincarnation continues.

There was never a time when I was not, nor will there ever be a time when I will cease to exist.

Dualism is the concept that mind is separate from matter, but the concept is one of a parallel between what is material and immaterial.

The issue of course is that for something to interact with a material it would itself have to be material.

The problem of something coming from nothing is likewise contradictory from the standpoint of defining usable terms.

Energy, Matter, fields they are all material.

What would an immaterial thing be, and how could it interact with matter without making use of energy which is also material.

When we examine the world around us we never find an interaction that has an effect (transits a force) that is not accounted for in the material world.

I see no reason to posit one before the big bang. Energy is eternal the cause can have a material source and just be beyond our ability to perceive it past the singularity that was the beginning of our local time.

If you want to call that which is beyond our current ability to perceive immaterial that is fine, but please understand that it is an arbitrary designation, one which has no basis for acceptance.