# Create/Creation

Discover how Mormon cosmology reimagines creation as the organization of eternal matter, bridging cosmology and divine apprenticeship.

[Image: Mormon theology casts humanity as co-creators with God, with the moral obligation to take up the ongoing work of creation.]

The Hebrew Bible begins the story of creation with the verb *bara*. The word denotes divine action, yet remains silent on the nature of materials used. Later Jewish and Christian theology filled that silence with *creatio ex nihilo*—creation from nothing—a doctrine formalized in the second century partly to distinguish God from Platonic craftsmen who merely arranged preexisting stuff. The Book of Abraham reverses that development. Its account has the Gods organizing and forming what was already there, and Joseph Smith argued in the King Follett discourse that the correct sense of *bara* is to organize rather than to conjure, since “element had an existence from the time [God] had.”

That reading carries profound metaphysical weight. It rests on the premise that matter is co-existent with God (D&C 93:33). This shared reality changes everything. Because God operates within the same universe as humanity, classical ontological dualism collapses. Stripped of that dualism, the gulf between Deity and humanity is no longer one of fundamental nature, but merely one of scale, wisdom, and power.

## Worlds without number

Genesis frames creation as an act of differentiation: light divided from darkness, waters from waters, dry land from sea. Each act carves out a distinct domain and then populates it. Modern cosmology describes a remarkably similar sequence, where unbroken symmetries fracture and matter cools into structures capable of sustaining complex forms of life. Mormon scripture pushes the scope outward, with the Lord telling Moses that “worlds without number have I created” (Moses 1:33) and that his works have “neither beginning of days nor end of years” (Moses 1:4). Creation, on this account, is ongoing and has no completion date.

## Divine Apprenticeship

From the beginning, God assigns humanity a vocation, granting them dominion over all His creations, along with the mandate to multiply and replenish the earth. Mormon theology elevates this charge to an apprenticeship for exaltation, promising a future where humanity might govern creations of its own. Human ingenuity already mirrors this divine pattern. Synthetic biologists sequence genomes, engineers structure matter at the nanoscale, and theorists draft plans to terraform barren planets. In a theology where creating is synonymous with organizing, none of these ambitions constitute a trespass. They are exactly the work humanity was commissioned to do.

## The moral burden of compassion

When God surveyed the organized world, He pronounced it good—a judgment that implies enduring responsibility. Anyone who takes up the mantle of organizing life, whether shaping an ecosystem or engineering a synthetic mind, inherits that exact moral burden. The natural evolution of human intelligence was forged through unimaginable suffering, but creators gifted with foresight have no excuse for replicating the brutal methods of the past. This demands a standard of compassionate creation: those who build must extend more benevolence to their creations than they themselves received

*See also*: [Agency](/topical-guide/agency), [Build](/topical-guide/build), [Commandment](/topical-guide/commandment), [Covenant](/topical-guide/covenant), [Exaltation](/topical-guide/exaltation), [Grow](/topical-guide/grow), [Purpose](/topical-guide/purpose), [Restoration](/topical-guide/restoration), [Revelation](/topical-guide/revelation)