We live in a world of origins. The sun rises, and then do windows, blinds, shoes. First, a thing does not exist, a song, and then by the magic of our car stereo, it arrives in the air. By wit and vigor, the world we inhabit is filled with things which were created by the exalted manufacturer, by the inventor, by the creative. Our creations are good and pleasing to us, and we think, maybe we, ourselves, are good and pleasing to that which created us. That perhaps it smiles upon us, that it is happy, that our actions and the result of our nature is pleasing to it.
Whatever it is.
Which is to say, what created us, and if it is ongoing, what continues to create us? What moves us to create things?
Mythical narratives run into some technical incompatibilities, both with one another and with current knowledge of the world, but religious philosophy connects the essence of a creator with the origin of causality.
After all, the conditions that precede one moment in time can be considered to have some causal influence on that next moment, in essence, being the one that determines its properties and events. The immediately next moment is fully informed by the preceding one, and is brought into reality by the passage of time through that preceding moment. One moment creates another, and so location of the creator must before all moments, before all causes. This is a form of the first argument for the existence for God by St. Thomas Aquinas:
"If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God."
-- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
We should assert that a true first motion cannot be preceded by any other objects or entities, otherwise those other things would be the cause, and the chain of causality would continue to regress beyond the beginning of the universe, which would create the possibility for infinite regression, which the first mover argument is predicated upon rejecting. Therefore, the prima causa suggested by Aquinas's argument would be detached from any described theological entity, since any properties held by that entity must have been endowed by the causeless motion, and would have only existed after the first motion.
To me, this presents as a more personally religious contradiction that I have a hard time shaking. How can God be both before all time, and also be wise? Wisdom necessarily comes from experience. If God is first before all things, then how did he become wise? If he lacked wisdom, then he must have created the world while having a level of wisdom both attainable and surpassable by humans, since he would have had none. And if we were created by a God that was not wise, then do we acknowledge such an entity when we worship ours that is wise?
If he is part of the result of the first motion, can it be said that he is the true first mover at all?
The argument has been made that causality cannot apply to a creator, who could theoretically exist beyond time and space, and therefore that the creation of the universe happened while the creator was already defined and extant. But this just seems like sleight of hand to me, creating a special exception for a particular event and saying that the rules of causality cease at this point, for no particularly compelling reason. There is no cause for the causeless creator (and there is no man behind the curtain.) Asserting that a creator has both eternal existence and primacy of causality requires the imagining of a type of action that has never existed, and requires detaching causality by traveling to a dimension where existing relationships between cause and effect break. In short, it embraces the contradiction, rather than resolving it.
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The argument for God as the first mover requires the rejection of the concept of infinitely regressing causes. In order to argue that a first mover *must* exist, the argument has to prove that infinitely regressing causes *could not* exist. It is a weakness of the argument that there is no strong logical argument as to why an infinite number of causes could not trail out behind all events. Why exactly must there be a prime, beginning-side end of time? Is it not simpler to think that all causes are like the ones we already know, and that all moments are like the moments we already know?
All slices of time are preceded by another.
All motions are first caused by another.
These are observed by us, and they have never been untrue, but it is taken for granted within the first mover argument that these properties must be at some point have been inverted. For the sake of the first mover, another type of motion and another type of time must exist, and time must have had its first ending. We live in a world where time can regress further than we can imagine, so why is it necessary to imagine that regress must end? Occam's razor would point out that it would require a finiteness that has not been shown to exist, a type of philosophical action that does not exist, and that this improbability is increased by the necessity of violating the maxim "nothing comes from nothing", which has never been shown to be untrue.
If nothing is the origin of no existing objects, then all existing objects must have originated in other objects. If all existence comes from existence, then existence always existed.
Isn't it possible that things simply went on forever before us? The same way that they will likely go on forever beyond us? We have never known that time has ended, or that it ever began. What we do know, is that origins for smaller, likelier things have their beginnings and endings, their small and material ways of beginning an ending. A shoe begins at a factory, and ends at a landfill. A day begins at dawn, and ends at dusk. We have these small and indeterminate beginnings of the objects of our world, but they are neither true beginnings or true endings.
It is consistent, because the material of all things which now exist, has always existed. The argument for the first mover is a violation of the notion that nothing comes from nothing, an insistence upon all of existence bursting out of an empty void (and the qualities of that universe characterized by an entity's anthropomorphic values and designs), upon such an impossibility that is uninformed by the natural world. They may have been in different forms, grown or cut or manufactured from something else, but it was always in some kind of material form, and remains so forever. It is only our notions of the material, our ideals for their use, what Aristotle described as the "final cause" for an object which may begin or end.
A lump of wood planks from disparate cuts has its own atomic origins and destinies, but its role as a table has a firm beginning and end. It is this notion of the final cause, the human use that elevates raw matter to implement, that underpins the seemingly intuitive, but illogical, idea that things must originate from non-existence. Things cannot be manifested from thinglessness, but purpose has origins that are beyond mere physical matter. It is an abstraction, with a beginning from a time when it did not exist, and when the use of an object ends, its purpose decays too. When things are known for their "whyness", it is easy to see how the search for the first cause resolves towards a creator: because creation determines why the creation exists.
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If there is a reason why things are the way that they are, it is not because of a pre-existing entity that is beyond time and space, where the laws of logic and causality do not apply, like the out-of-bounds area of a videogame. It would have been embedded into the universe itself. If God knows why the universe is the way it is, he would have received that knowledge from the universe, or by the force which created him and the universe. He would have been subject to the same forces, the same events, and occupied the same space and matter as we do, and therefore the knowability of the meaning of the universe would be located within it. We would both be endowed with knowledge, meaning, and wisdom, He informed directly and divinely, and we through the living of temporal lives, but alike as twin siblings after the birth of existence.
Or, there is the other option. That the universe did not originate at any point, was not carved out, and measured like a table to serve a purpose, that there is no "final cause" for the world. There are only ad hoc, emergent human purposes for small chunks of the world of infinite timescale, our reachable clusters of matter and time to inhabit. A life to live, and by cobbling together meaning from that which does not exist yet, the chance for a brief act of creation upon a landscape of the eternal.
That, to quote the philosopher and mother of the leader of the human resistance, Sarah Conner, there is no fate except what we make.