The Problem of Beginnings: IV. The First Cause That Arrived Too Early

If there was nothing before the universe, perhaps something caused it.

This seems to solve the problem.

Until we ask a simple question:

What caused the cause?

Perhaps the cause did not need a cause.

Perhaps it was eternal.

Perhaps it existed outside time.

Perhaps it was necessary.

There are many possible answers.

But notice what they have in common.

We have begun by assuming that the universe must have a cause.

Why?

Because things that happen usually have causes.

A glass breaks because it is dropped.

A tree falls because of wind.

A building exists because someone built it.

Within the world, causation is everywhere.

But these are all local relations.

A cause is related to an effect.

There is something that causes, and something that is caused.

There is a process connecting them.

There is a difference between what happens before and what happens afterwards.

There is a world in which the relation can occur.

And then we ask:

What caused the world?

We have taken a relation that operates within the world and extended it to the world as a whole.

But if causation is one of the relations that belongs to the universe, can we simply assume that it also stands outside the universe, waiting to bring it into existence?

Perhaps.

But that requires argument.

It cannot follow merely from the fact that things within the universe have causes.

After all, we do not normally ask what caused the existence of the whole causal order every time we explain an event.

The match causes the fire.

We do not need another match to cause causation.

The question changes when we move from:

What caused this?

to:

What caused everything?

The second question may look like a larger version of the first.

It may not be.

A city contains doors.

It does not follow that there must be a door outside the city through which the city entered.

A sequence contains earlier and later events.

It does not follow that the beginning of the sequence must itself be an earlier event.

And a universe contains causes.

It does not follow that the universe itself must stand within a larger causal order.

Perhaps the first cause arrived too early.

Not because it is impossible.

But because we placed it inside a framework that may not yet have existed.

We imagined a cause before the universe.

But before may not have been available.

We imagined a cause outside the universe.

But outside may require a space beyond the universe.

We imagined a cause producing the universe.

But producing may itself be a relation within the world whose emergence we are trying to understand.

The difficulty, then, is not simply finding the first cause.

It is deciding whether “first cause” is a coherent extension of the concept of cause.

Perhaps causation explains how things happen within a world.

Perhaps it does not explain why there is a world in which things can happen.

And perhaps that is not a failure of causation.

Perhaps it is simply the point at which a local relation reaches the edge of its domain.

Which leaves us with a different question:

What kind of background must exist for a cause to be a cause?