(November 30, 2018 at 7:59 pm)Rahn127 Wrote: The phrase "began to exist"
I used this analogy in another thread but I like ice, so I'll use it again.
A cup of water is left outside over night and on this particular night, it got cold enough to create a little ice in the cup of water.
First question ....When did the ice "begin to exist" ?
Was ice "created" ? When creationists say the universe was created, would they also say that the ice was "created" ?
A baseball bat can be whittled down from a tree branch.
The branch existed the entire time, so when did the branch stop existing and the baseball bat began to exist ?
It was created as soon as the crystallization process ended.
Causality isn't continuous but rather discrete, and that is because the cause and effect are generally regarded as immanent.That is, the event of a " baseball bat being whittled down from a tree branch" is something concrete that occurs at a particular spatiotemporal location. Perceptually speaking, The tree branch (cause) and the bat (effect), can be individuated by their characteristics in a sense that they're both qualitatively distinct. The bat basically ceases to exists as soon as its qualitative properties appears to be inexistent, and that the properties of the bat come into being. Also, nothing stops the causal relatedness of the two entities to be partially contemporaneous, in a sense where entity A's time of occurrence includes the time at which the entity B's existence begins.