How can divine creation produce creatures that are truly distinct from God?

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I’ve had a chat with someone that makes me rethink everything. We believe in perfect distinction of creature from Creator. But how is it possible for anything to exist apart from God, even in the sense of God’s immanence and omnipresence? If God is in me as my ultimate cause, how can the part of me that is NOT God exist at all?
 
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Rubee said:
If God is in me as my ultimate cause, how can the part of me that is NOT God exist at all?
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  1. No part of you is God. Your soul, in its immaterial nature, shares that aspect with God, but you do not have God inside of you.
  2. Your whole person exists due to the continual and eternal love of God
 
I get this, but where does my existence come from? How can it be separate from God. Does it not mean things are capable of existing separately from the divine? How is this possible? I am asking because I’ve looked for information around creatio ex nihilo describing what the nature of our existence is and how it could be sustained at all without being part of God and haven’t found too many answers. I was in a discussion with pantheists and they challenged me on this.
 
That is why I am more of a Non-dualist. We are like on the periphery of God rather than the synergistic totality of god…if that makes any sense to anyone but me.
 
Maximilian75 said:
No part of you is God. Your soul, in its immaterial nature, shares that aspect with God, but you do not have God inside of you.
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Precisely. I think Aquinas made analogy between God and painter and humans and painting. The painter isn’t in the painting, but his brushstrokes are.
 
But you are not creating it out of nothing. You are using materials that already existed.
 
The problem here is that you don’t create any book shelf. You simply rearrange wood (that you did not create) and nails and other things in a way that serves your purposes. You cannot give the wood it’s existence or its properties. In other words, even before you start, you and the wood, nails etc (book shelf) already exist and are separate from each other.

The problem I’m talking about is this: We are made out of nothing, from no pre-existent materials. That’s always been fine with me. But during a discussion recently, it occurred to me that this means we have an actual separate existence from God, who is existence itself. What kind of existence is it (ours) then, if it is not God’s? And how can there be any kind of existence at all, apart from God’s?

It is a conundrum because:

(1) I can’t accept an evolving, incomplete God like many pantheists believe–He would require an explanation for his own existence just like we do. He couldn’t be God as we think of him.

(2) Yet the only way nothingness/non-God (us and all creation) can exist is if we had existence. How can this existence we gain that brings us from nothingness to somethingness be other than the existence of Existence itself (God)?

It seems God must be distinct as well as non-distinct from us. Which makes my head flip, roll around and boil.
 
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God is subsistent act of existence itself, yes.

But every other reality, insofar as its a unity in itself — a “being” — is existence limited by an essence. Such that, existence is the maximum (and not a minimum), and essence is not a positive, but more like a negative or limitation of being.

You see that, on this view, individuals beings would not make up being itself (God), because being itself is fully actual, infinite, unconditioned, etc. This Unconditioned Reality is distinct from other acts of being, because all other acts of being are limited versions of being — while, again, the Unconditioned Reality remains existence in its fullness.

In a book called The One and the Many, the author (who is a Thomist) recommends we think of an individual reality like a cat as “an act of existence acting in the manner of catness” (paraphrase) as an exercise in Thomistic metaphysical thinking.
 
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And so you are right to note the tug between two different facts: that in a sense, outside of God there is nothing, but that the everyday things of our experience really do exist. There has to be a proper balance, and this way, pantheism/monism is not so much wrong as only focusing on half of the equation.

But this is where I think Thomistic thinking can help, especially when considering essence as a limitation or manifestation of existence (but existence itself, God, still retains His integrity as fullness, pure actuality).
 
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Thanks for the reply! @RealisticCatholic. So we are acts of existence? I’ll look for that book. I wonder how these acts can sustain themselves (i.e. their relationship with the unconditioned existence)…is there a strict distinction?
 
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It is precisely only in relationship to the Unconditioned Reality, Existence itself (God), that these acts of existence are maintained.

Not only when they first come to be be, but even now.

How so? Because the existence of any individual reality of our experience presupposes that it is an act of existence combined with an essence. An individual reality cannot be the cause of itself, hence it makes no sense to say that the act of existence is contributed from a thing’s essence.

Remember that an essence just is that limitation of a particular act of existence. It is distinct from existence, but it is not some positive “extra.”

Yet the distinction remains as that particular being endures, so even though we say a particular reality (“substance”) is an act of existence in a certain manner (like a water molecule or cat), it still depends on the conjoining of the essence with the act of existence. Hence, the ultimate cause of any conditioned reality in which its essence is distinct from its existence is a reality whose essence and existence are not distinct: This is what it means to be the Unconditioned Reality.
 
Where is it written that God is existence? Satan exists. What then, is the relationship between God and Satan?

If we are saying that nothing can exist apart from God, what is being cutoff from God mean?

Can someone give a reference to this teaching?
 
God is pure existence. Existence is objective, whereas essence is subjective. Existence is univocal, whereas essence is equivocal. Existence has grades, similar to the brightness or intensity of light.
 
That’s been Christian conception for the two millennia. In addition, God himself said it: YHWH (I am who am) He identified himself as being (existence) to Moses.
 
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Can you explain the answer to my question about the relationship between God and Satan? I need a hard example. I just don’t understand. Are you saying that Satan is a part of God and not completely distinct from him?
 
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Thanks again, @RealisticCatholic! So, I’ll rephrase (give my understanding) then you can tell me where/if I’m wrong:

We are acts of existence + essence. Essence means a specific limitation on existence.
We are not sustained by our essence but by existence (boundless).

Where I’m a bit lost is, is our existence then, furnished from divinity? Then the essence distinguishes us from it? What’s the ‘stuff’ of our being? Is it like a droplet of water vis-a-vis the ocean except this time the ocean doesn’t get “reduced” by one droplet because it is infinite?
 
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