First order logic, set theory and God

[Rahn127]

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.

I think perhaps you're missing the point.
Ice is a solid state of water. The structure changed.
Nothing was actually created or added to the environment.

Ice is the solid form of water.
The water exists. The ice didn't begin to exist.
The structure of the water that already existed changed.

With the tree branch and baseball bat.
The shape of the branch is altered. All the existing material is still there. The wood shaving on the ground we're part of the branch. They are now shavings.
The bat wasn't created. It was shaped.

It didn't begin to exist. We just changed the label as the shape of the branch was altered.

That is the distinction that needs to be made.

Ice forms naturally. It's not created. It didn't arrive out of nothing. Water was already there. Only the structure changed as the environmental factors changed.

We have the cosmos.
We have the forces of nature.
We have the energy of the universe.

This isn't nothing.

When those existing things change, like a snowflake, a universe is formed, not created. Formed.