Sorry, there is a huge paradox, as the earlier comments illustrate.
Time is a dimension and there may be more than one dimension of time (Vafa, Wesson et al) just like there are at least three dimensions of space.
May be? Time is a scalar quantity.
Time and space are required for physical causality - not the other way around.
The first cause (the cause of a mathematical point of zero spatial dimensions which can then change giving rise to dimension time) cannot be physical.
God alone can be the uncaused cause of physical causation. The Creator is not physical, He is not a part of the creation.
Words and measures that we use to describe the beginning of creation - indeed, the creation itself - are themselves part of the creation - as we are - and cannot apply to the Creator of them.
I wrote:
The moment something changes what it was doing (or not doing) is the moment it ceases being changeless, and therefore ceases being timeless. The moment of creation is such a moment. For the created and the creator.
The problem is not merely that the creator changed after an act, but that the creator was never free from the bondage of time, in the first place. A change of state required to perform something at a finite moment renders the performer chained to the influence of time, both before and after the act was performed. Otherwise, change would not be possible. No change implies no finite moment of creation.
The paradox clearly exists unresolved by your attempted explanation.
God is not thingly.
Are you saying that the First Cause is a material cause?
It seems to me the paradox goes away when one stops making God subject to time.
A human creator creates in time, which is sensed as an irreversible series of moments past, present, to future. The past slips away, the future is not yet, and even the present is not really "present" — for as Alamo-Girl has pointed out, there is a lag time between the original perception and its sensory processing before the processed data can be made available to the mind as a cognition. But because this is the way things work for humans "in time," we cannot say that this "model" pertains to God, Who is not in time.
Plus I want to know in what way is the human changed by his creative act? If I knit a sweater, say, in what way am I "changed?" Sure, I had to work with changes in pattern — alternating knit stitches and purls as the pattern requires. But in what way am I changed by this?
If a human is not so changed, then why would you say that God is changed by His creative act?
I think you are trying to apply "human rules" to God, rules of time to the timeless. No wonder you come up with a "huge paradox!"
You wrote that "Time is a scalar quantity." Again, as my dearest sister Alamo-Girl has pointed out, it certainly was thought to be so by Aristotle. An exercise in simple counting demonstrates his point. But Aristotle has been roundly criticized by persons of Pythagorean persuasion, for not seeing that numbers are not merely a countable series, but also possess individual "magnitude." This observation "opens up" time, from a scalar, linear series of passing moments, to time conceived as a volume. Indeed, it seems to me time has to be "volumetric" in order to accommodate the expression of numerical magnitude.
Just look at the critturs on the number line — some of them point to infinite extension; some are even called transcendental numbers. Like pi, for instance. Now that's what I call "magnitude!" Plus check out the primes and perfects — certainly they have a very special character that is not exhausted by their utility as counting numbers.
As ever, our notions about time constrain what we find in the world of experience and what we can know and say about it. If our understanding is faulty, then our knowledge will be faulty and/or incomplete.... And paradoxes will spring up.
Or so it seems to me. Just some thoughts, FWIW.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights into this problem, James C. Bennett!