Q&A: Can a Human Being Create Something from Nothing?
Can a Human Being Create Something from Nothing?
Question
Hello Rabbi. I read the Rabbi’s article on “The Labor of Carrying and Our Functioning in the World.” The Rabbi argued there that the Holy One, blessed be He, creates something from nothing, whereas a human being does not create something from nothing but rather something from something. My question is: if we look not at a person’s actions but at imagination / dream / vision that precedes the actions, that dream would seemingly be something from nothing, since he imagines a reality that has not yet occurred. Can we therefore compare him to his Creator, who creates something from nothing?
Answer
One can certainly argue over this, but I don’t see any practical difference that would come out of it. There is no prohibition against imagining on the Sabbath. The anthropological proof is built on the claim that a person cannot imagine something from nothing, and if he has an image of a perfect being then he apparently learned it from somewhere, and therefore God exists. That always seemed like a weak argument to me, because a person actually can create an image of something he has never encountered by means of generalization and expansion. But even that is not an invention of something from nothing, only an extension.