Did God consult anyone in the assessment of Creation?
The short answer is no.
God did not consult anyone at all, for God is omnipotent and all knowing and he created the universe and all it contains from nothing. Even the angels were part of his creation.
creatio ex nihilo ("creation out of nothing") is the doctrine that matter is not eternal but had to be created by some divine creative act. It is a theistic answer to the question of how the universe came to exist. It is in contrast to Ex nihilo nihil fit or "nothing comes from nothing", which means that all things were formed from preexisting things; an idea by the Greek philosopher Parmenides (c. 540 – c. 480 BC) about the nature of all things, and later more formally stated by Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99 – c. 55 BC).
Ex nihilo nihil fit means that nothing comes from nothing. In ancient creation myths, the universe is formed from eternal formless matter, namely the dark and still primordial ocean of chaos. In Sumerian myth this cosmic ocean is personified as the goddess Nammu "who gave birth to heaven and earth" and had existed forever; in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish pre-existent chaos is made up of fresh-water Apsu and salt-water Tiamat, and from Tiamat the god Marduk created Heaven and Earth; in Egyptian creation myths a pre-existent watery chaos personified as the god Nun and associated with darkness, gave birth to the primeval hill (or in some versions a primeval lotus flower, or in others a celestial cow); and in Greek traditions the ultimate origin of the universe, depending on the source, is sometimes Oceanus (a river that circles the Earth), Night, or water.
To these can be added the account of the Book of Genesis, which opens with God creating the heavens and the earth, separating and restraining the waters, not creating the waters themselves out of nothing. Alternately, whether this is truly 'ex nihilo', is unclear. The Hebrew sentence which opens Genesis, Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'aretz, can be interpreted in at least three ways:
As a statement that the cosmos had an absolute beginning (In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth).
As a statement describing the condition of the world when God began creating (When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was untamed and shapeless).
As background information (When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth being untamed and shapeless, God said, Let there be light!).
It has been known since the Middle Ages that on strictly linguistic and exegetical grounds option 1 is not the preferred translation. Our society sees the origin of matter as a question of crucial importance, but for ancient cultures this was not the case, and the authors of Genesis wrote of creation they were concerned with God bringing the cosmos into operation by assigning roles and functions.
Creatio ex nihilo: the creation of matter
Creatio ex nihilo, in contrast to ex nihilo nihil fit, is the idea that matter is not eternal but was created by God at the initial cosmic moment. In the second century a new cosmogony arose, articulated by Plotinus, that the world was an emanation from God and thus part of God. This view of creation was repugnant to Christian church fathers as well as to Arabic and Hebrew philosophers, and they forcefully argued for the otherness of God and his creation and that God created all things from nothing by the word of God. The first articulation of the notion of creation ex nihilo is found in the 2nd century writing To Autocylus (2.10) authored by Theophilus of Antioch. By the beginning of the 3rd century the tension was resolved and creation ex nihilo had become a fundamental tenet of Christian theology. Theophilus of Antioch is the first post New Testament author to unambiguously argue for an ontological ex nihilo creation from nothing, contrasting it to the views of Plato and Lucretius who asserted clearly that matter was preexistent.
In modern times some Christian theologians argue that although the Bible does not explicitly mention creation ex nihilo, it gains validity from having been held by so many for so long; and others find support in modern cosmological theories surrounding the Big Bang. Some examine alternatives to creatio ex nihilo, such as the idea that God created from his own self or from Christ, but this seems to imply that the world is more or less identical with God; or that God created from pre-existent matter, which at least has biblical support, but this implies that the world does not depend on God for its existence.
In Christian metaphysics, the cosmological argument states in summary:
Everything that exists must have a cause.
The universe exists.
Therefore, the universe must have a cause.
The Kalam cosmological argument is a modern formulation of the cosmological argument for the existence of God:
Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
If the universe has a cause, then a changeless and eternal creator possessing free will might exist and chose to cause the creation of the universe.
God Creating the universe and all it contains was done by his own supreme will and intelligence without consulting anyone!
