creatio ex nihilo

(Latin: "creation from nothing") The Judeo-Christian doctrine which acknowledges ABSOLUTE creation. This dogma, which distinguishes Judaism and Christianity (and perhaps Islam) from all other religious cosmologies about the "beginnings", holds that a transcendent, eternal, uncreated, self-existent God created everything that is the natural universe(and every angelic spirit) out of nothing. It differs from the Hindu idea that God created the universe out of Him/Her/Itself and from the ancient quasi-pantheistic Greek idea that creation "emanated" from God/the gods. The concept of absolute creation is extremely difficult to grasp(perhaps impossible), since it assumes that God "invented" or "thought up" matter, time, and energy and set them in motion by His own will(that is, He had NOTHING with which to create, but really created entirely NEW things which were not already pre-existent). The Church has held to this dogma(NOT a particular VERSION of this dogma, i.e. young earth creationism, old earth creationism, theistic evolution) which has never been directly challenged (and seems to even be supported) by modern science, since most physicists agree that the universe had a beginning.