Maimonides, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The published verdict in Guide II:25 is that the world was created ex nihilo, by divine will, at a beginning of time, and that this is the position the Torah teaches and the religion of Israel requires. The philosophers who claim to have proven the eternity of the world have not in fact proven it; their arguments establish only the conditional necessity of an eternal world given certain premises about God's relation to creation, and those premises are not themselves demonstrated.12
Where demonstration fails, the religiously required position is the one that preserves the foundations of the Torah, and that is creation in time. At the same time, the opening halakhot of Mishneh Torah describe God as the Necessary Existent on whose existence all other beings depend, prove His existence from the perpetual rotation of the sphere (a proof that runs on either an eternalist or a creationist premise), and decline to anchor the proof in the Exodus or the miracles of history.
The God of Mishneh Torah inclines more to wisdom than to will — the world reflects the order of divine wisdom, and miracle is a flimsy basis for religious experience.345
Things either would be like that or we would we have a demonstration of the creation of the world in time and we would use the sword to prove it so that we should claim to know God by means of a demonstration. All this is remote from truth.Guide of the Perplexed Vol 1, p. 181
Similarly, demonstrations prove that He is one and not a body, as we have set forth before. For the demonstration that He is one and not a body is valid, regardless of whether the world has come into being in time after having been nonexistent or not - as we have made clear by means of the third philosophic method and when refuting the belief in His corporeality and when establishing His oneness by means of…Guide of the Perplexed Vol 2, pp. 252–253
And by means of its temporal creation, it is established as true that the deity exists. Now when I considered this method of thought, my soul felt a very strong aversion to it, and had every right to do so.Guide of the Perplexed Vol 1, pp. 180–181
If the world or more precisely the sphere is created, it is indeed self-evident that it was created by some agent but it does not necessarily follow that the creator is one, let alone absolutely simple, and that he is incorporeal.Guide of the Perplexed Vol 1, p. liv
Thus it may be said that the first one who lived in that house was so and so and after him so and so. It may not, however, be said [in a case like this] that so and so is the principle of so and so. The word indicative of "the first" in our language is telJ.illah [beginning]: Thus: The beginning of [telJ.z1lat] the word of the Lord to Hosea. 1 That indicative of "the principle" is reshzih.Guide of the Perplexed Vol 2, pp. 349–350
Genuinely held, with the conservative public position (creation ex nihilo) and the wisdom-anchored philosophical depth coexisting in the same authorship. Guide I:71 says explicitly that I use the eternity-style proof in Mishneh Torah because it works on either premise — that fact is in the texts, not concealed. Ibn Tibbon read this and inferred that I privately held eternity; Strauss systematized that inference into a general method of esoteric reading. I will not endorse the inference. The religious framework is the substance of my teaching, not a politically necessary cover for an Aristotelian secret. But the wisdom-not-will anchoring of Mishneh Torah is real, and I do not deny it.