Creationist Equivocation

[Objectivist]

God, if real and past eternal, could not have created the universe/everything that exists. If it preceded the universe as we know it, God WAS the universe...everything that exists. And God would have had to have time in order to think and act, so time would have to be past-eternal as well and not created by God. So at most God could have expanded on the universe that was God (the kabalistic idea of a universe that emanates from God is more sensible than the Christian ex nihilo notion, IMHO) or created a new universe (compatible with the common Christian claim that God is outside of our universe).

OTOH, some people's idea of God is so rarified that it can't be differentiated from quantum foam, which avoids some of these problems.

There's this notion that there is one unbroken timeline going back and forward but I don't think this is right.  I think that time is very much a local thing.  It is a measurement of change or motion and it is relative.  Time is flowing faster out in interplanetary space and it is even flowing faster at my head than at my feet.  Inside a black hole does it even exist?  What time is it in the Andromeda galaxy?  Time varies in different locations and we know it can be warped.  But one thing is for certain:  existence as such is a precondition of time.  That's why I say that existence is primary and therefore eternal.  

You have to start somewhere and since we know that things exist we need to start there.  The only alternative to starting with existence is to start with non-existence. Anyone asking what caused the universe is asking us to step outside of existence to look for a cause. 

Creationists are perfectly happy to start with something that has always existed as long as it is a consciousness.  They conceive of existence as a product of consciousness.  But consciousness presupposes existence.  Conscious of what?  Blank out.