Indeed it is, and I think this is the very point that is causing trouble for you. You are thinking of a “cause” as only something extrinsic to the reality of an action. This would be true in almost every case, such as gravity being the cause for the ball’s fall.
But in the example we are discussing, the very existence or nonexistence of something is intimately tied with its root cause.
This is exactly why I referred you to Peter’s post (#31) but you waved that aside as “a quite different idea.” Here’s why it’s not a different idea (my emphasis added; please read the bold parts carefully):
You claim that the lack of His sustaining power is not a cause, but a mere removal of sustaining power. But we are saying that at this point, the concept of a cause acting upon something is at the end of the line, so to speak, so a universe that exists or doesn’t exist is “caused” by God, though not in the narrow material sense that you are trying to restrict it to.
(Peter, if I’m misrepresenting your view, feel free to jump in.)
My suspicion is that belorg may be referring to the problem of cause involving change (and by implication, time) so that if the universe came into being as an effect then there must have been a “time” in which God was “in” prior to the moment when he brought about the universe. In that case then, God is not outside of time but still in time of some sort and constrained by it. Just a guess. This is why I have “cause” in scare quotes. This might, also, be behind JDaniel’s use of the word create instead of cause.
The difficulty arises because of the way we, as beings constrained within time, are necessarily limited in understanding the manner that actualizing a thing may occur from eternity outside of time.
One way of grasping this is to think of a book (a story that exists in book form complete with characters, setting, plot, etc.,). This story has a beginning, duration and ending. If you had a place within the book you would be in the timeline of the book a certain distance from the beginning. That would be your time reference. Outside the book, from the author’s perspective, the author could at his/her leisure jump into and out of the story at any place in the time scheme of the story. Now assume the book just “always existed.” There would still be a beginning of the story (let’s call it The BIg Bang), to which the characters inside the story would have reference, but there would not be a beginning to the existence of the book itself. The book simply exists. However, the story narrative could have any ending as determined by the author. It could “just abruptly come to an end” if the author determined it had that kind of ending or had decided not to finish the book.
This may be belorg’s problem. Since, if the author decided not to finish the book, how could the book have simply existed without having been started.
The difficulty is how to conceive of a “book” or any other “created” entity existing eternally without some “necessary” connection to God. It may be that some form of “time,” though not necessarily our time sequence must be a necessary aspect of anything in a “created” relationship to God. Time of some form may be a constraint on the creative effects of God, i.e., on the creative activity of God, but not on the being of God himself. That is, when God creates, some form of time is a necessary feature of the creation, although God himself is not “in time” of any form, just everything else is relative to him. Time, any way it is looked at, is quite an incomprehensible facet of existence.
