 Creation out of nothing presupposes the possibility of total nothingness. This in turn implies that there can be some nothingness. Thus Christians had a motive to first establish the possibility of a little nothingness. Their strategy was to start small and scale up.Accordingly, scholars writing in the aftermath of the condemnation of 1277 proposed various recipes for creating vacuums (Schmitt 1967). One scheme was to freeze a sphere filled with water. After the water contracted into ice, a vacuum would form at the top.Aristotelians replied that the sphere would bend at its weakest point. When the vacuists stipulated that the sphere was perfect, the rejoinder was that this would simply prevent the water from turning into ice.