Everything In Time Has A Cause The issue is to do with causation, not time. There's event causation - that's the familiar kind in which one event causes another event. But we know - know - that not all causation can be of this kind. It has nothing to do with 'time', but everything to do with the impossibility of there being actual infinities.
If all causation is by events (whether prior or concurrent) then we would have to have an actual infinity of events.
There cannot be any actual infinities of anything.
Therefore, not all causation is by events. Some of what is caused to occur must be caused to occur not by any event, but by objects - substances.
Not, note, by the object undergoing some change - that would be an event. No, 'directly'. The substance causes the event, not by means of another event, but 'directly'.
That argument establishes that there is substance causation and that such substances exist. Furthermore, as such substances cannot have been caused to exist by any prior event - for then the regress starts again - such substances must be self-existent. That is, they exist by their nature.
The only kind of object that exists by its very nature is a simple object.
Thus we can conclude that there exist some simple objects and that these simple objects are ultimately causally responsible for all else that exists.
Time doesn't come into it. We can get to that conclusion without invoking time.
But note that 'creating time' requires timeless causation - which is exactly what substance causation would be, given that it is 'events' that are essentially in time.
If God is a simple substance with the power of substance causation, then God can create time by 'substance causing' it to exist. As substance causation is not causation by an event - and it is events that are datable - this explains how God can create time. — Bartricks
I agree we should take phenomenological views out of the matter, because what everyone is stating is metaphysical. Another thing, let's clean up the semantics and terminology. The main standpoints that everyone is taking is too vague to be effective. t.
Immanence- Are the causal relata immanent, or transcendent? That is, are they concrete and located in spacetime, or abstract and non-spatiotemporal?
This question is connected to the question of category. If the relata are transcendent, then they are facts. If they are immanent, then they are events, or one of the other candidates such as features, tropes, or situations.
In practice, one finds two main arguments on the question of immanence. First, there is the argument from pushing, which maintains that the relata must be immanent so as to push things around. Second, there is the argument from absences, which maintains that the relata must be transcendent so that absences can figure in causal relations.
Pushing: The main argument for immanence is that only immanent entities can interact. This argument is nicely summarized by one of its opponents, Bennett: “Some people have objected that facts are not the sort of item that can cause anything. A fact is a true proposition (they say); it is not something in the world but is rather something about the world, which makes it categorically wrong for the role of a puller and shover and twister and bender.” (1988, p. 22; see also Hausman 1998) According to the pushing argument, only concrete spatiotemporal entities can be causes and effects.