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Cause and effect: Because God is eternal and thus independent of time and God created time, and since cause and effect is a temporal phenomenon, it stands to reason that there is truly no such thing as cause and effect except that there is a general relationship between two situations in the sense that at one point of time there was one situation, and at another point in time there was another situation, and after successive observations, it is shown that the latter situation generally follows the former chronologically. But the two situations are distinct one from another in space-time, and it is at least suggested that there is a relationship or correspondence between the two situations.
What is being argued here is not that the two are entirely separate and unrelated, and that they concur incidentally, but rather that one is not the cause of the other, nor the other the effect, that but that a relationship exists between the two such that, from a certain space-time standpoint, one follows the other chronologically. For example, if one takes a pen and writes a letter on a page, then it seems that the appearance of the letter is the effect of the movement of the pen over the page. However, if one was to travel backwards in time (in comparison to the normal progression or route that humans take) then one would first see the letter on the page (actually one would probably first see disintegrated molecules gradually coming together to form a page…. And then a tree, and so on) and then a pen moving over the letter and erasing it, and then the pen standing over a letterless page. In this case it would seem as if the pen erased the letter, or perhaps it would seem that the appearance of letters (in general) on pages somehow caused pens to move over them. If this seems absurd, it is only so because we have progressed through time in a certain direction and come to expect things to occur in such a way that pens move over a page Before the letter appears on the page. The eternal standpoint, however, is neither, for God does it see it as the pen causing the letter to appear nor as the letter causing the pen to move over the page, since God does not travel through time in any direction (though He may seem to do so in the case of Theophanies and Christophanies, and in the person of Jesus. Apparently it seems that the human passage through time is God-ordained, which is a good thing since we now have an ultimately authoritative consensus regarding in which direction to move through time). Rather, the two situations are fundamentally related to one another; absence of cause and effect does not preclude absence of relationship, and so the universe and God exist not as cause and effect but rather as a set of relationships.
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