God creates matter itself, not just form

From this they go on to deny that the great God presided over the constitution of all things, and to claim that he was like a contributor to some common feast, throwing in only a small portion of his own toward the origin of things. They could not, because of the lowliness of their reasoning, look up to the height of the truth: that here among us the crafts come after their materials, since they were introduced into human life by the necessity of need. The wool existed first, and weaving came afterward, supplying from itself what nature lacked. The wood was there, and carpentry took it in hand, shaping the material for whatever need was sought at the time, and showed us the usefulness of wood—providing an oar for sailors, a winnowing fork for farmers, a spear for soldiers. But God, before any of the things now seen came to be, set his mind to it and resolved to bring the things that were not into being; at one and the same moment he thought what kind of world it should be, and generated together with its form the matter that suited it. For heaven he set apart the nature proper to heaven; for the shape of the earth he supplied the substance that belonged to it and was owed to it. Fire and water and air he shaped as he willed, and brought them into being as the principle of each thing that came to be required. And the whole world, being of unlike parts, he bound together by some unbreakable bond of friendship into one communion and harmony, so that even the things most distant from one another in position seem to be united through their mutual sympathy. Let them cease, then, from their mythical fabrications, measuring by the weakness of their own reasoning the power that is incomprehensible to thought and utterly inexpressible by human speech. “God made the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1)—not each halfway, but the whole heaven and the whole earth, the very substance taken together with the form. For he is not a discoverer of shapes, but the maker of the very nature of things. Otherwise let them answer us: how did the active power of God and the passive nature of matter ever meet one another—the one supplying the underlying thing without form, the other possessing the knowledge of shapes without the matter—so that each might receive from the other what it lacked: the maker having somewhere to display his craft, and the matter putting off its formlessness and its lack of shape? But enough on these matters. Let us return to the beginning. “The earth was invisible and unformed” (Genesis 1:2). When Moses said, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), he passed over many things in silence: water, air, fire, and the qualities that arise from them. All of these, as things that complete the world, clearly came into being together with the whole; but the account left them out, training our mind toward quickness, giving us from a few starting points the ability to reason out what remains. Since, then, nothing is said about the water—that God made it—but it is said that the earth was invisible, consider for yourself by what covering it was hidden from view. Fire could not have covered it, for fire gives light and makes visible whatever it comes near, rather than casting darkness.