In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth.

—Genesis 1:1

This verse from Genesis, as understood by orthodox Christian theology, describes God creating the world ex nihilo; that is, from nothing. Imagine that! Granted this was said for comedic purposes, Ricky Gervais once remarked that this was an incredible statement: it’s not like God went “on holiday” and said, “Let’s have some of that back home”. He simply made up everything there is out of nothing, a painfully tricky concept for the western philosopher. Eastern philosophers, however, have less trouble with the concepts of nothingness or emptiness. For the western mind, nothingness is a feeling of mourning the death of God and the absolutes of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy; whereas for their Eastern counterparts, absolute nothingness is conceived as a negation even of nothingness itself, and therefore a space in which one finds something akin to the resurrection of Christ—death-qua-life, negativity-qua-positivity, negation-qua-affirmation. Consider the implications of such a doctrine:

[N]o matter where we turn, God is not there; at the same time, wherever we turn, we come face to face with God. That is, the God before whom all of creation is as nothing [emphasis added] makes himself present through all of creation. The Christian [who believes that God created the universe ex nihilo] must be able to pick up a single pebble or blade of grass and see the same consuming fire of God and the same pillar of fire, hear the same thunderous roar, and feel the same “fear and trembling” that Moses experienced.

—Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness

In other words, that which we seek is both absent and expressed in the character of the world that we recognise as ultimately emerging from no-thing whatsoever. We can see the vacuum of an self-defeating emptiness from which the awesome creative power of God works. That is if one believes that there is a God and that this God created the world, which of course you are not obliged to. In fact, I don’t mean to talk about God at all today. Rather, I began with this theological exposé to draw a comparison to something far more tangible. It it said that this something “talks” and “makes the world go ’round”. Can you guess what it is?

If you guessed money, then you would be absolutely correct. But what comparison might I draw between an antique religious text and a banker’s truest love? Well, I would remark that money, too, is in fact created from absolutely nothing. Ask yourself: how much is a dollar really worth? Stupid question, you might think. A dollar is worth just that: one dollar. However, this is response is self-referential. If we want to understand what a dollar is worth, we need to understand its worth as a universal medium of exchange. This is the purpose of money, after all. Alas, the answer would really depend on how much money was in circulation, amongst other factors. One dollar, for example, is worth far more in an economy of a thousand dollars than one of billions of dollars, ceteris paribus. This gets even more complicated, though, when one factors in the fact that a dollar isn’t always an asset but sometimes a debt, or something owed. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism, political commentator Grace Blakely (who also made this comparison to explains that if someone were to put £100 in a bank and the bank lends out £90, then you have an economy of £190 where only £100 of it is in any way “real”.

Furthermore, there is the question of utility for individuals. One hundred dollars to a billionaire might be worth as much as toilet paper but to some worker living paycheque to paycheque, it is worth a hell of a lot more. What could it do for the billionaire? Buy another dinner? Whereas for the worker that $100 might be the difference between groceries and going hungry. There is, therefore, an immense practical value to money, but as I have described, it is ultimately rooted in nothing at all. It is without any value whatsoever. This may be obvious, but it is seldom appreciated. Like Nishitiani’s ideal Christian, do we truly understand that money is inherently empty, that it is only a means to an end in the real-world? Do we ourselves both absent and revealed in its social construction? Dare we consider that this revelation might be a poor reflection of us and, if so, that it is our moral imperative to change this?

I say all this to illustrate just how baseless our conception of value truly is and that our current way of doing things is not at all our natural state. Rather, it is an environment of our own making. Truly, we have lived up to that prediction in Genesis that we should become like gods knowing both good and evil. That homo deus is an apt description of our self-image is beyond a doubt, particularly as we live in a time where human activity continues to raid natural resources and damage the environment. We have killed God, usurped his throne, and fashioned ex nihilo a world of our own. The only question remaining is what sorts of gods shall we be?