When we think back to the ‘big bang’ our next question is why that event, then? We are not happy with the answer ‘no reason’, because we are not happy with events ‘just happening’: the drive to explanation grips us. So we postulate something else, another cause lying behind this one. But the drive now threatens to go on forever. If we have cited God at this point, we either have to ask what caused God, or cut off the regress by arbitrary fiat. But if we exercise an arbitrary right to stop the regress at that point, we might as well have stopped it with the physical cosmos. In other words, we
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