Kharakov

So you think of god as the illogical beginning of the universe? hehe

The point I was trying to make is there doesn't have to be ONE "beginning" in an infinite or circular ( John) progression. There is instead an infinite number of beginnings, or causes, depending on where you start looking for a prior cause in existence. Each of these causes has an infinite number of causes as well. You can cut about the isolation of the event. I am not saying that it is not useful to think of things as having a finite cause and effect, but you need something off from the rest of existence and label it as the cause of a subsequent event, but you would be wrong in any assumptions you made to remember that this stance is essentially false.

-k

Afghan

I am not sure about causality persay but it seems to me that there is a weaker condition, that of connectivity, that is just as effective in understanding the universe. Connectivity, I suppose, is causality without direction. A causal explanation, for instance, that Hamlet would not have killed Polonius had he not seen his father's ghost. His father's ghost caused the death of Polonius.

But deterministically, Hamlet would not have seen his father's ghost without killing Polonius. The two events are really connected, relying on each other. The relationship between them only appears causal because of the way humans experience time. Really though, when we say one event causes another we really mean that the events cannot exist independently of each other without implying a 'direction' to that connection.