Physics Without Divinity: 4 No Creation, Only Emergence

From Ex Nihilo to Relational Actualisation

Cosmology often carries the shadow of Genesis. The Big Bang is described as a “creation from nothing,” a moment when the cosmos burst into being. This is ex nihilo in scientific clothing: a secularised origin story that still presumes the logic of creation.

But nothing is ever created. What we call “emergence” is not production from void but the actualisation of potential. The cosmos is not a thing that began; it is the ongoing unfolding of relation. What appears as a beginning is the perspectival mark of a cut — a horizon where our capacity to trace relation falters, and possibility resolves into actual patterns.

Ex nihilo is a myth of command: first there was nothing, then decree, then existence. Emergence reframes this entirely. Potential is never absent; it saturates relation. Actualisation is not the arrival of being from nothing, but the phase shift where one configuration gives way to another.

There is no cosmic moment of fiat. No singular event of creation. The universe has never been “nothing” — it has always been relation in process, possibility pressing toward actualisation.

To speak of “origin” is already to misplace the question. There is no beginning to being, only the unfolding of possibility.