What do we understand by the word “creating”? What does “to create” mean?
Does it mean, perhaps, to take some scattered separate but existing materials and, by utilizing certain experimental principles or applying certain rules, bring them together, re-group, fix and coördinate them in such a way as to make something out of them?
No! This does not mean “to create”. For example: Can one say that a house has been created? No! It has been built. Has a piece of furniture been created? No! It has been made. And, again, has a book been created? No! It has been compiled, printed.
Therefore, taking some existing materials and making something out of them is not creating.
What, then, does “to create” mean?
To create!... Verily, I find myself in difficulty in explaining that which cannot be explained, in defining that which cannot be defined. Nevertheless, I shall try to make myself understood.
To create is to extract something from nothing and with this very nothing do something: it is to call the void into being. Now, I think that we cannot find a single person endowed with reason who could conceive of and admit that something can be extracted from nothing, that nothing can be turned into something.
Just take a mathematician, the most expert of calculators; give him a gigantic black-board; now beg him to write some zeros and some more zeros. Let him add and multiply to his heart’s content; let him indulge in all the operations of mathematics. He will never succeed in extracting one single unit from all those zeros.
Nothing is just nothing; with nothing you can do nothing, and the famous aphorism of Lucretius — Ex Nihilo Nihil — remains an expression of manifest certainty and evidence.
The creative act is inadmissible, is an absurdity.
To create, then, is a mystical religious expression which can be of value only in the eyes of those persons who are pleased to believe that which they cannot comprehend and on whom faith exerts an imposition conversely proportional to their lack of comprehension. But to any intelligent man, to any observer for whom words have value only in the measure that they represent a reality or a possibility, to create is an expression void of sense.
The hypothesis of the Creator is, then, loth to reason. The Being-Creator does not exist; He cannot exist!
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