Are various concepts of divine creation based on more basic/simpler/integrated concepts, or are they indefinitely diverse?

Question

For example, take these four notions:

1. Creation by rearranging/ordering prime matter (AKA from preexisting substance).

2. By emanation.^𓆉

3. "From nothing."

4. Modal "toggling": switching mere possibilia to actualitas?

The first three seem correlated with types of founding relations: preexistent creation is well-founded, emanation is looping/Quinean (esp. in a pan(en)theistic setting), and exnihilation is either from the void relation or infinitely-descending.

On the other hand, destruction-of-nonexistence as a sort of "reified" double-negation elimination seems (3)ish, too (though note the theme in deep antiquity of (1) as a "victory over chaos"), unless we separate Apollyonic creation-by-destruction, as void-founded, from descending exnihilation by the Form of Creation. Moreover, I'm not sure where to fit intellectual intuition (Kant's technical definition of divine creation^𓆣) into this scheme: is it generic over the other direct options?

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^𓆉I have in mind the doctrine, among some antenicene Christians (notoriously Arians), that the Son was especially emanated from the Father, hence still created in some sense preclusive of strict deity on the Son's part, yet otherwise as if all the fullness of the Father's deity was embodied in another form. Perichoresis seems cofoundational more easily, without indicating that the entities in circumincessio are created by each other. Otherwise, circular sets can be either finite or infinite in some capacity. So whether all emanationism corresponds only with cofoundationalism, is not decided in favor of the correspondence strictly speaking, since as per Conifold's example of Plotinus, we seem to be speaking of a hyperfoundational relation also or instead.

^𓆣Kant uses the phrase "intellectual intuition" in the Transcendental Analytic, e.g. here:

... an intuition different from the sensuous ... [which is] an intellectual intuition...

The transcendental definition of sensation is from its passivity, as opposed to the spontaneity or proactivity of understanding and reasoning. So intellectual intuition is the Agent Intellect of Aristotle's (and the scholastics), who suggested a divine character for such a force.

Kant also refers to this "faculty" as an intuitive understanding:

... I cogitate an understanding which [is] itself intuitive (as, for example, a divine understanding which should not represent given objects, but by whose representation the objects themselves should be given or produced)... [emphasis added]

Accordingly, via divine unity, there is no difference between God's way of knowing the things It creates, and Its will in creating them; there is no difference between intellectual intuition and the act of divine creation.

Answer 1

I mean, a lot comes down to definitions.

One of the most widespread traditions is a pre-existing condition of chaos, typically personified as a chaoskampf like Maat, Isfet, Tiamat, Illuyanka, & Python (slain by Apollo & the fumes said to inspire the Pythia, the Oracle at Delphi). Evidence from comparative mythology suggest this may be humanity's oldest myth, predating the arrival of humans to Australasia. In the Alchemical tradition, this is described as creation arising from 'prima materia'.

The lines in Genesis

"And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly" King James version.

"So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm" ESV version

is said to echo the Babylonian Enuma Enis:

"When on high the heaven had not been named,

Firm ground below had not been called by name,

Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter,

(And) Mummu*–Tiamat, she who bore them all, Their waters commingling as a single body;

No reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared,

When no gods whatever had been brought into being,

Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined—

Then it was that the gods were formed within them"

But, in Genesis asserting the deity of the Bible as predating everything, as uncreated, and not merely overpowering the whales/primordial monsters, but as having created them, and undertaking the 'dividing of the waters'.

The Buddhist tradition involves cycles, and an eternal cosmos with eternally pre-existing beings that have been being reborn. The Therevada version of the Brahmajala Sutta is fascinating, on the role of Buddha as Teacher of the Devas, guiding the apparent Creator Brahma to the understanding it was only the first being into this realm, and so to occupy it's brahma-house, the position of divinity, due to it's karma. Is this then just reorganising of material? I would say no, because in Buddhist thought the mental, the psychological, has primacy - as per Indra's Net, and made explicit in Yogacara philosophy called the 'mind only' school which dominates Mahayana Buddhist thought.

The doctrine of cretio ex nihilo involves a distinction between time-bound limited mundane matter, and timeless transcendental divinity. In modern physics this looks increasingly hard to make sense of, with ideas like Conformal Cyclic Cosmology connecting the timeless to the 'mundane', and objections to a substance-dualist picture of a metaphysical strata to reality going back at least to Elizabeth of Bohemia critiquing Descartes, and propounded by Hume. You could maybe identify potentia with the space of possible fundamental constants, like the mathematical structure E8. Personally I'm not convinced the semi-Jewish semi-Platonic picture of a Creator as the locus of dubiously conceivable superlatives is either coherent as a hypothesis, or useful philosophically for anything but propping up Bronze Age intuitions about the world. A meaningful picture has to connect a Creator to mundane necessities like in henotheism, for them to be actively involved. Or places them beyond the mundane, resulting in a deist picture of a grounding reality or principle that cannot intervene, or respond to prayer or worship.

My bigger problem with your way if grouping the many different types of cosmology into your three groups, is that it focuses on superficial criteria over what the cosmology is actually doing. Cosmologies aren't simply an account of history taken as neutral background. They locate us within the Cosmos, and imply how we are affected by and can affect wider reality. The Buddhist picture and the chaoskampf picture can be described in your classification as 'the same', but their purposes are radically different. I would describe the Buddhist picture as identifying that all beings face the challenge of how to live well (cease to create suffering), whereas the chaoskampf picture seeks to account for the landscape and the rising of a primary deity or culture hero (usually the source of the royal lineage). Consider as further example the Daoist idea of the taiji, as the differentiation from something universal ('the unnamed is the mother of the ten-thousabd things'). It's a positively pansychist unity of the divine principle into matter, leading to a radically different perspective.

I can't think of a Creation myth or Cosmology that doesn't fit into your categories, but I think that's because they are so vague that their utility is highly suspect.