You said: There is no need to insert a first cause into things.
There is no need to insert a first cause into things. This intuitive notion is based on philosophical notions that can be shown logically unnecessary and possibly false, much as they appeal to us to be unavoidable. That they appear to us that way is a limit in our thinking, much as the idea of a universal up and down.
One could as well attribute the germination of a seed as a divine intervention, and metaphorically many still do, but it is not necessary and gets in the way of actual knowledge.
Claude responded: This is a well-worn and important philosophical point, and you're largely right that the first cause argument has serious logical problems.
This is a well-worn and important philosophical point, and you're largely right that the first cause argument has serious logical problems. A few thoughts worth adding:
The argument's actual weaknesses
The cosmological argument (in its various forms — Aristotle's unmoved mover, Aquinas's first cause, Leibniz's sufficient reason) typically assumes that the chain of causation requires a termination point. But this assumption is doing enormous hidden work. Why must causal regress terminate? Why can't causation be circular, or infinite, or simply inapplicable at cosmological scales? The argument smuggles in a conclusion.
Worse, it grants an exception to its own premise. If everything requires a cause, then so does the first cause. If things can exist uncaused, the universe itself is a candidate — making the intermediate step unnecessary.
Your point about intuition
This is perhaps the deeper insight. Kant made a version of it — causality may be a structure we impose on experience, not a feature of reality itself. Our brains evolved to track medium-sized objects across time in a world where causes always precede effects. Projecting that cognitive framework onto the cosmos as a whole may simply be a category error.
Quantum mechanics has made this concrete: at the subatomic level, causation in the classical sense breaks down. Things happen without sufficient prior causes in the way we'd normally mean it.
Where it gets genuinely hard
The honest version of the puzzle isn't really about causation — it's about why there is something rather than nothing, and whether that question is even coherent. Some philosophers argue it isn't a well-formed question. Others think it points to something real that physics alone can't address. That debate remains genuinely open, not because the first cause argument succeeds, but because the underlying puzzle is difficult to dissolve cleanly.
Your seed analogy is apt — invoking a first cause doesn't explain anything, it just relocates the mystery and labels it, which is precisely what stopped people from doing actual botany for centuries.
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