The "inside out" problem of creation. Does it have a solution?

I feel like this morning is a good time for a very fundamental question: One of the reasons I can no longer believe in the 'mainstream' concept of God the Creator is what I call the "Inside out" problem. (Perhaps there is a "real" name for it that I'm not aware of.) In summary, the problem is that God's creation of the world is defined in terms of the world itself. The smaller issue is with time. In mainstream Christianity, creation is thought to have both location and size in time, that is, it is thought to have taken some time (whether 7 days literally or that being a figure for other amounts of time) as well as being placed in time "in the beginning" and having a time-ordered set of steps. The problem is that time is part of the world, part of spacetime. So, if we focus on just the time aspect of the world, we can paraphrase that _"In the beginning, God created time"_, which seems nonsensical, as the word "beginning" is already a location in time. The same goes for duration (whatever it may be). The larger issue is with causality, which also, I should like to think, is part of the physical universe, given that it has very real physical mechanics and constraints just like everything else. However, the concept of God Creator already contains causality, it implies God is the cause of the world. Essentially, if we again substitute focusing just on the causality part of creation, we get _"God created causality"_ or _"God is the cause of causality"_, which is, again, a self-contradictory statement. So that's the gist of my "Inside out" problem. So far I haven't come across a solution that would be reconcilable with mainstream Christianity. One could argue, and I have seen arguments along these lines, that somehow causality (and perhaps time) is a thing more fundamental than (the rest of) the World itself, ie. "part of God himself" or something like that. This line of reasoning, in my perception, is not a solution to the problem, just shifts it. Essentially, it's saying that not all parts of our world are accounted for by the Creation. Which reduces the relevance of creation drastically. It's kind of like saying that God created galaxies in an already pre-existing universe. It would still be a mighty feat, for sure, but kind of irrelevant when you're wondering about why the universe itself exists the way it exists. Are there perhaps any Christian writings approaching this problem?