Creating versus making - continued

We noted in a recent post that God is said to create darkness and woe whereas He makes light. Later on in Isaiah (45:13), God makes the earth, but creates human beings upon it. Is it being too clever to suggest that in man's spiritual nature, there is something different, something ex nihilo that requires God's intervention? One thinks, for example, of the gap in essence between chimpanzees and homo sapiens: is Isaiah perhaps alluding to this irreducibly spiritual component to man by insisting that man is created in a manner that the earth is not? Can the same be applied to our earlier observations about darkness? Is evil ultimately purely spiritual, a product, as I suggested last week, of the freedom to choose against God?