The First Cause demand is natural theology's oldest cosmological move and its most systematic: if T, S, and Φ are necessary, what caused them to be? The demand presses the account of §[§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>)–2.6 to either produce a cause outside the structural order or concede that necessity has a source the account has not named. Three claims carry the reply. First, the Kalām traversal argument is a spatial metaphor applied to a successional order, and Oppy's deflation of Hilbert's-Hotel absurdities(Oppy, Graham, 2006) shows the metaphor does not transfer. Second, the contingency-of-the-whole move conflates the contingency of individual events with the contingency of the order they occur in and illicitly exports the former to the latter. Third, the PSR appeal, pressed as a demand for something rather than ∅, presupposes a contrast class whose incoherence [§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>) has already established; pressed as the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact, it demands a necessary explainer outside Nature that the PSR alone does not deliver, as [§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>) shows.

The three forms sort into two wings the reply treats differently: the necessity-seeking wing (Leibniz, Koons, Pruss) is answered by being grounded, since □(T∧S∧Φ) already supplies the necessary terminus it reaches for; the causation-seeking wing (the Kalām and its kin) is answered by being dissolved, since a boundary is a feature of the order, not an event outside it.

The argument concedes at the outset that the Leibnizian tradition is correct on a narrower point: causal series within the structural conditions do admit, and often require, further explanation. The claim pressed here is weaker than the target that tradition is built to refute. The order through which causal series run is not itself a series. Causal vocabulary applies to what occurs within the order, not to the order itself. A framework that makes causation possible is not among the candidate effects causation explains.

The cosmological tradition offers a resilient natural-theological resistance to the sufficiency of structural necessity. Its core commitment is simple: something must have started things. The universe is a vast succession of causes and effects extending backward in time; either that succession is infinite or it has a first member. An infinite past, the objector contends, is incoherent: actual infinities cannot be traversed, and we could never have arrived at the present if infinitely many prior moments had to elapse first. A finite past therefore requires an originating cause, and such a cause cannot itself lie among the events it initiates. The argument's classical roots run through the Islamic *kalām* tradition (medieval speculative theology that pressed dialectical-rational defenses of revealed doctrine): Al-Kindi's *On First Philosophy* (al-Kindī, c. 850) gives the earliest systematic case for the impossibility of an infinite past, and Al-Ghazali's *Tahāfut al-Falāsifa* (al-Ghazālī, c. 1095) develops the mature premodern version that the contemporary recovery directly invokes.^(William Lane Craig, 1979), ch. 1; (Herbert A. Davidson, 1987) traces the Islamic transmission. The point has been refined by its contemporary inheritors into three distinct argument forms: the Kalām appeal to traversal, the Koonsian appeal to mereological contingency, and the Pruss appeal to the Principle of Sufficient Reason.(William Lane Craig, 1979); (Koons, Robert C., 1997); (Pruss, Alexander R., 2006); (Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018); (Rasmussen, Joshua, 2019) Each converges on the same conclusion: a necessary being outside the causal order, identified with God. The present account lands next to the Leibnizian wing of this tradition — □(T∧S∧Φ) and their necessary ground being adjacent endpoints — and diverges from it only on the line taken and the commitments incurred along the way.

The challenge bears directly on §[§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>)–2.6. T, as defended there, is a necessarily instantiated structural role, derived without PSR machinery and without any external originating cause. The First Cause objector grants the necessity and demands a cause for it: the account has explained why Time must obtain, not what started it. Three forms of the move take up the objection; the narrower point that individual causal series within the order admit explanation stands untouched.

*First.* The Kalām traversal argument, regimented, runs:

1. *Causal principle.* Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

1. *Finite past.* The universe began to exist: an actual infinite sequence of past events cannot be traversed, for if infinitely many moments had to elapse before now, now could never arrive, so the past is finite.

1. *Conclusion.* The universe therefore has a cause; and a cause not itself in time must be a timeless agent, which is God.

The traversal argument is a spatial metaphor dressed as a structural claim. 'Traverse' treats the past as a finished road Now had to travel down, a road whose length must be completed before the traveler arrives. But in a successional order, Now is not a traveler reaching a destination. It is the current coordinate of the order's state. You do not need to 'finish' infinity to be at a specific point within it, any more than you need to visit every point on an infinite plane to be at coordinate (0,0). Oppy(Oppy, Graham, 2006) formalizes the point: the absurdities of Hilbert's Hotel require the simultaneous rearrangement of discrete objects, a spatial and substantial paradox that does not map onto temporal succession. You cannot shift past moments aside to make room for the present. The mathematical tools Craig invokes to generate absurdity do not apply to the domain he applies them to.

Craig(William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, 2009), §3; (William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (eds.), 2000) has pressed a generalized version of the point in reply: the absurdities follow from the actuality of the infinite itself, not from any rearrangement procedure; Hilbert's Hotel is a vivid illustration of a more general impossibility rather than its only form. Granting actual-infinite-absurdity in general (the cases involving completed infinite collections accessed as totalities), the question is whether a temporal past counts as that kind of completed-collection-accessed-as-a-totality. It does not. On a tensed or passage-centered theory, the past need not be treated as a completed collection accessed from outside; on a tenseless block theory, the past can form a completed ordered totality. The traversal objection therefore depends partly on the theory of time and cannot be dismissed by one model alone. The tensed/tenseless question is the standing pivot of the Kalām dialectic, but the account need not adjudicate it here: on the composition defended at [§7.2.2](<7.2.2 What is Required.md>), tenseless order and tensed passage are not rival readings of Temporality but the two features it jointly requires, and the reply holds on each. Taken as ordered dimension, the traversal worry does not arise: there is no formation to complete, only an ordered manifold at whose interior Now sits. Taken as directed passage, grant the finitist the point in full — successive addition, if it establishes anything, establishes that the past is finite; that much is conceded below, since the account is compatible with a finite-past cosmology. A finite past is a chronometric boundary within T, the earliest coordinate the passage has reached from within, not a moment-prior-to-T from which T departed. So the theological inference fails on both features alike: what it needs is not a boundary but a cause outside the order, and the boundary is a feature of the order ([§7.2.2](<7.2.2 What is Required.md>)). The Kalām's own conclusion about finitude is granted; only the step from finitude to an external cause is refused. Craig's stronger reply keeps open the question whether a beginningless temporal order can be actually infinite without anyone traversing it from an external vantage. Oppy's response weakens the traversal metaphor; it does not by itself settle every argument against an actual infinite past.

Craig's empirical prong is separable from the conceptual one. The Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem(Arvind Borde, Alan H. Guth and Alexander Vilenkin, 2003) is standardly cited as proving the universe had a past boundary, and Craig treats it as empirical confirmation of Kalām's second premise. Two points cut the weight. First, BGV establishes only that geodesics with positive average Hubble expansion are past-incomplete, not that the universe as such began. Aguirre and Gratton (Anthony Aguirre and Steven Gratton, 2002) and Carroll (Sean Carroll, 2010); (Sean Carroll, 2016) describe eternal cosmologies in which past-incompleteness of inflating geodesics is compatible with an eternal ambient spacetime. Craig and Sinclair's *Blackwell Companion* reply (William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, 2009), §4 presses that Aguirre–Gratton requires a quiescent low-entropy past boundary that itself functions as a beginning, and that Carroll's eternal cosmologies require thermodynamic time reversal at a past boundary that operates likewise; the 2014 *Greer–Heard Forum* exchange with Carroll restates the point.

Granted: the quiescent boundary, where one is required, is a beginning in the chronometric and thermodynamic senses. It is not a beginning in the categorial sense the Kalām requires. A past boundary is the first coordinate of T along the dimension (the earliest position the passage has reached from within), not a moment-prior-to-T from which T departed. The chronometric beginning is a feature within T (§[§2.4.6](<2.4.6 Succession Requires Temporality.md>), 7.2.2); the categorial beginning, which the Kalām needs and the cosmological model does not deliver, is foreclosed by Parasitic Negation on T (§[§2.1.5](<2.1.5 The S5 Bottleneck.md>), 5.1.6).

Second, even if the universe has a finite past boundary in its own time-coordinate, that boundary is a feature within T, S, and Φ: the first chronometric coordinate of the successional order, not an event caused by anything outside it. A boundary of the order does not transport the order's explanation outside the order. The argument concedes the empirical finding and denies the theological inference it is supposed to underwrite.

A newer wave of anti-infinite-past work has migrated away from actual-infinity absurdities toward paradox-based causal finitism. Koons(Robert C. Koons, 2014) presses Grim Reaper cases (scenarios in which an infinite staggered sequence of potential killers generates contradiction) as evidence that infinite causal sequences are metaphysically impossible even when mathematically coherent. Pruss's *Infinity, Causation, and Paradox*(Alexander R. Pruss, 2018) generalizes the point into a systematic case. These arguments are not touched by Oppy's Hilbert deflation, because they do not turn on Hilbert-style rearrangement; they target the supposition that infinitely many prior events could each causally produce the next. The present reply does not contest causal finitism in general (the account is compatible with a finite-past cosmology) but denies that causal finitism, even if sound, establishes what Kalām requires. A finitely-extended past is still a past within T; its first chronometric coordinate is the earliest position the passage has reached from within, not an event caused by something outside the order it would initiate. The Kalām framework presents this as a forced choice between (i) the first moment of T has no cause (denying Premise 1) and (ii) the cause is not within T (and so outside T). The present account takes a third position. The present account treats the first chronometric coordinate as a boundary of the temporal order rather than automatically as an effect of something outside it. The Kalām defender can contest that category assignment and argue that the universe's beginning is an event falling under the causal principle. The dispute therefore turns on the scope of causation, not on a contradiction generated merely by asking for a cause. The categorial-vs-chronometric distinction is developed directly at [§5.1.6](<5.1.6 Intelligent Design.md>): what is foreclosed is a moment-prior-to-T from which T departed; what is admitted is a chronometric boundary as the first coordinate of T itself. Grim Reaper considerations constrain the shape of causal series; they do not relocate causation to the order's exterior.

A further reply is available, though the categorial response does not require it. Grim Reaper cases idealize location, propagation, and mechanism in order to isolate a causal-structural paradox. The idealization cannot be rejected merely because it omits ordinary physical realization; the relevant question is whether the causal stipulations are jointly satisfiable and whether their contradiction generalizes from the constructed series to every beginningless causal past. Physicality is a substance carrying causal power across T-succession through S-extension ([§1.4](<1.4 Three Conditions.md>), [§2.4.11](<2.4.11 The Frozen-World Test.md>)); a putative cause that occupies no region and transmits nothing across one is not a faint or limiting-case cause but no cause at all. The dilemma this poses to the causal-finitist deployment is exact. Either the reapers are genuine causes — located in S, carrying Φ, propagating at finite speed — in which case the impossibility the converging series generates is located in Spatiality and Physicality rather than in infinity or in causation as such: infinitely many physical signals converging on a single instant drive their spatial separation toward zero and their energy density without bound, a merely physical impossibility that establishes nothing about a metaphysically necessary First Cause. Or the reapers are the idealized spaceless triggers the paradox in fact stipulates, in which case what it proves impossible was never a causal sequence on the present account, and 'infinite causal sequences are impossible' mislabels a result about an unsatisfiable non-causal stipulation. A beginningless past is untouched on either horn: it is not a staggered swarm of located conditional agents racing to act inside a shrinking window, but the past-directed order of T itself, whose earliest coordinate is a boundary rather than an effect. The Grim Reaper thus constrains, at most, the arrangement of embodied causes; it does not reach the successional order those causes run within, which is the only thing the Kalām needed it to reach.

This verdict converges with the critical literature rather than standing alone. The unsatisfiable-pair diagnosis — Shackel's demonstration that Benardete constructions merely encode two jointly unsatisfiable conditions(Nicholas Shackel, 2005), pressed against causal finitism by Schmid and Malpass(Joseph C. Schmid and Alex Malpass, 2025) — locates the contradiction in the stipulation rather than in the infinity, and observes that purely non-causal Benardete variants (in which each reaper's action brutely correlates with its predecessors' rather than being caused by them) generate the paradox with no causal chain for finitism to sever. That non-causal variant is decisive here: if a swarm carrying no causal power at all yields the same contradiction, the impossibility was never a fact about causation reaching infinitely back. The present account agrees on the diagnosis and adds only that the past-directed order of T is not a Benardete series to begin with, so nothing in the family bears on whether that order has a first coordinate.

Loke(Andrew Ter Ern Loke, 2017) presses a further refinement: the only coherent transition from a timeless cause to a temporal effect is free agential initiation, so the first cause must be personal. The refinement inherits the structural reply already given. A 'timeless cause' stands outside T by hypothesis, and standing outside T is standing outside the conditions under which causing has content; a free agent who initiates temporality must persist as the same agent across the initiation (Substance), distinguish its pre- and post-initiation states (Space), and stand in a before-and-after relation to the effect it initiates (Time). The personal-agent refinement does not escape the structural conditions; it concentrates them. Loke's argument is a contribution to the personalist question deferred to [§5.1.4](<5.1.4 Argument from Simplicity.md>), not a distinct way past the present response.

Morriston presses two further objections the account can absorb. The first is inductive: the causal principle that anchors the Kalām, that whatever begins to exist has a cause, draws its support only from cases of rearrangement within the order, so its warrant does not extend to an absolute beginning of the order itself.(Wes Morriston, 2000); (Wes Morriston, 2002) The account does not lean on this objection, since its own reply is categorial rather than inductive, but the objection reinforces from a second direction that the causal idiom is at home within the order and strains when lifted outside it. The second objection is sharper against the personalist fix: a timeless agent's producing a first effect is itself a transition from not-creating to creating, and a transition is a succession, so the agential initiation Loke and Craig invoke reintroduces the very order it was meant to precede.(Wes Morriston, 2000); (Wes Morriston, 2013) That is the structural reply already given, reached from the opposite side: the transition presupposes Time, Space, and Substance rather than delivering them from outside.

A corollary follows if the theist absorbs Morriston's point rather than resisting it. The standard absorption denies the transition outright: God's willing of the world is timeless and immutable, so there was never a state of not-creating for the first effect to succeed. The absorption then leaves one exit from necessity: a willing immutable in fact yet able to have been otherwise, the necessity of supposition Aquinas distinguishes from absolute necessity (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.19.3, I.19.7. The exit keeps the world contingent, but at the price of a modal contrast (a possible circumstance in which the changeless willing is absent) that nothing in the timeless picture grounds; whether that contrast survives divine simplicity is the modal-collapse question pressed at [§4.4.9](<4.4.9 Modal Collapse Objection.md>) and engaged at [§5.2.1](<5.2.1 Divine Simplicity.md>). The theist who declines the exit, identifying the timeless willing with the necessary divine essence so that no modal distinction remains between what God is and what God wills, delivers the present account's conclusion in theological dress: there is no vantage, temporal, volitional, or modal, at which God exists and the world does not, and obtaining in every circumstance is necessity under its ordinary modal name. Those premises yield a necessary natural order directly: □(T∧S∧Φ) with a divine middleman attached. And the middleman contributes nothing to the necessity itself, since it is the modal closure of the willing, not any further feature of the agent, that closes off every circumstance lacking a world. What remains in dispute on that horn is not whether the order is necessary but whether its necessity needs an owner, and that is the personalist question already deferred to [§5.1.4](<5.1.4 Argument from Simplicity.md>).

*Second.* The contingency-of-the-whole move grants, with Koons (Koons, Robert C., 1997), that an infinite past is possible. The series still consists entirely of contingent beings, events that did not have to happen. A series of contingent beings, even an infinite one, is itself contingent. The contingency of the whole demands a necessary cause outside the series. That cause is God.

The move trades on two senses of *contingent*. Individual events may be contingent even if the structural possibility of an order is necessary. It does not follow that this particular total history is necessary. Koons's argument gets traction if the Big Conjunctive Fact or total series is itself a contingent fact requiring explanation, whether or not it is an additional concrete object over and above its members. But a succession is not a thing over and above what succeeds; it is just the parts in the order they take. And that order obtains within a necessary framework whose conditions are what make succession possible at all. Member-level contingency is real. Whole-level contingency, treated as a further fact requiring a further ground, is a misattribution: a property that belongs to what sits inside the framework has been exported to the framework holding them. Hume's *Dialogues* IX (David Hume, 1779) and Paul Edwards (Paul Edwards, 1959) diagnosed the underlying slip as a fallacy of composition, treating a property of the parts (contingency) as a property of the whole, and the diagnosis is sound and worth crediting. The reply does not, however, rest on the Hume–Edwards explanatory principle that explaining each member thereby explains the conjunction, the very inference Pruss's contingency argument is built to reject. Its load-bearing move is the one already made: whole-level contingency is a misattribution because the order obtains within a necessary framework, and the demand for an external ground of the series-as-a-whole has no coherent target once ∅ and a necessitating Nature are both foreclosed ([§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>)). Koons's mereological premise is precisely what is supposed to rescue the argument from the composition charge; denying that the whole is an entity over and above its members withholds that premise without leaning on the Hume–Edwards inference. What Koons locates at the top of his derivation (necessary ground) is already present at the bottom, as T, S, and Φ. The accounts share a destination. This one arrives without the mereological premise that the series is an entity additional to its elements, a premise Koons himself flags (Koons, Robert C., 1997), §3 as load-bearing and contestable.

*Third.* The PSR appeal presses, with Pruss (Pruss, Alexander R., 2006), that every contingent fact requires a sufficient reason. The entire sequence of contingent events is itself a contingent fact: it could have gone differently in countless ways. Its sufficient reason must be a being whose existence is not itself contingent, and whose nature explains why this history rather than another obtains. That being is God.

The PSR question splits into two the reply must keep apart. Read as 'why an ordered history rather than none at all?', it presupposes ∅ as the contrast, and ∅ is no contrast: [§2.7.2](<2.7.2 Incoherence of ∅.md>) closes it on independent modal and temporal grounds, and sufficient reason bottoms out where alternatives run out, which is at the roles that make alternation possible. Read as 'why this configuration rather than another?' — Pruss's Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact, the conjunction of all contingent configurations of Nature — the alternatives are genuine and the PSR does real work: rival configurations compete within the structural conditions, and each contingent fact keeps its contingent explanation there.

What does not follow is the further step, that the conjunction as a whole requires a necessary explainer outside Nature. The book denies that this demand automatically requires an explainer outside Nature. But the alternatives are not exhausted by ∅ and a Nature that necessitates every configuration: a theist may posit a necessary personal ground whose contingent intention explains one history without necessitating it. That proposal must face the grounding, freedom, and modal-collapse burdens developed in §[§5.1.1](<5.1.1 Rasmussen's Foundation Argument.md>)–5.2.1 rather than being eliminated by the PSR split alone. The dissolution does not run through the Hume–Edwards principle that explaining each conjunct explains the conjunction, the inference Pruss's argument is built to reject; it denies that the external demand has an automatic target, as [§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>) develops in full.

Hume anticipates the move in *Dialogues* IX (David Hume, 1779): Cleanthes' reply to Demea is that if a necessary being must be posited at all, the material universe itself is a candidate, and the theist offers no non-theological ground for disqualifying it. The present argument completes Cleanthes' gesture. The 'necessary material universe' Cleanthes floated was not specified enough to bear the weight; □(T∧S∧Φ) specifies it. The Humean cosmological option the *Dialogues* left undeveloped is the one the structural account takes up. Pruss's own defense of the PSR against Humean attack (Pruss, Alexander R., 2006), chs. 2–7 is uncontested here; the present argument simply does not conscript the principle into service outside the domain where it has purchase. The standard critical literature presses harder, rejecting the principle rather than confining it: Rowe (William L. Rowe, 1975) argues that the PSR is not rationally compelling and can be denied without irrationality, and Mackie (J. L. Mackie, 1982) presses both the causal principle and the demand for an explanation of the totality as unmotivated once every member has been explained. The reply here needs neither rejection. It grants the PSR full force within the structural conditions and withholds only its application to them, a narrower and less contestable claim than the outright refusal Rowe and Mackie mount.

A kindred deflationary move presses from the opposite side: the call for a first cause is a pseudo-question, Rundle (Bede Rundle, 2004) and Grünbaum (Adolf Grünbaum, 1998) argue; 'why is there something rather than nothing' has no grip because no coherent answer-space exists. The role account agrees with half of this and rejects the other half. It agrees that 'what caused the structural order?' terminates, because the idiom of causation applies within that order rather than to it. It rejects the dismissal of the further question 'why is the order necessary rather than absent?', because that one does have an answer: §[§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>)–2.8 give it. The cosmological demand is not empty; it is a question with a structural answer where theism has given a theological one. Rundle and Grünbaum close the inquiry without resolving it; the present argument resolves it without closing it.

Kant frames the deepest version of the critique. The cosmological argument extends causality beyond the field of possible experience, where alone the concept has warrant, and so misapplies a category whose jurisdiction is the world of appearances (*Critique of Pure Reason* (Kant, I., (1781) 1998), A603/B631); Kant presses further that the argument covertly relies on the ontological proof it claims to do without. The First Antinomy sharpens the impasse (*KrV* (Kant, I., (1781) 1998), A426/B454): equally compelling cases can be built for a first beginning in time and against one, which for Kant shows the question has outrun the conditions under which causal reasoning stays legitimate. The account agrees that causation does not apply to the order as a whole, and for a recognizably Kantian reason: the idiom belongs to what occurs within the field, not to the field itself. It parts from Kant on the status of the conclusion. His verdict is epistemic, that reason cannot settle the question and must fall silent; the verdict here is metaphysical, that the question is malformed, because the order is necessary (§[§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>)–2.6) and its necessity has a structural ground rather than a causal one. Where Kant reaches a limit of knowledge, the account reaches a categorial boundary.

One objection cuts across all three forms and is the family's most resilient. Schopenhauer(Arthur Schopenhauer, 1813) named it the Taxicab objection: the Principle of Sufficient Reason is hired to carry the argument as far as a first cause and then waved off once the destination is reached, the terminus exempted from the very demand that powered the regress. Oppy (Oppy, Graham, 2006) presses the contemporary form as a symmetry: whatever explanatory privilege the theist claims for the divine terminus, whether necessity, self-explanation, or brute factuality, the naturalist can claim with equal right for the universe or its fundamental laws, so the demand for a cause of the order underdetermines the theological answer. The objection lands against any account that stops by fiat. It does not land here. The account exempts nothing: it grants the structural order no standing waiver from a demand that otherwise applies, but denies that the demand was ever well-formed against the order, since causation relates elements within the order and the order is not one of its elements. The symmetry Oppy exploits is real, and it is conceded rather than resisted, because it is not met by making the necessary ground simpler or more unified than a physical candidate. It is met by locating necessity in T, S, and Φ themselves (§[§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>)–2.6), which are neither a divine terminus nor a rival physical one but the conditions any candidate terminus, divine or physical, would have to instantiate. The taxicab is never hired, so there is no fare to dodge.

A note on division of labor. Several adjacent theistic moves belong to neighboring sections and are deferred there rather than redeployed here. The personalist extension (why think the necessary ground is a mind rather than a set of structural roles?) receives its dedicated engagement in [§5.1.4](<5.1.4 Argument from Simplicity.md>) (Swinburne's simplicity argument) and [§5.1.1](<5.1.1 Rasmussen's Foundation Argument.md>) (Rasmussen's Mind-Grounding Isomorphism). Divine simplicity as the classical counter-ground runs through [§5.2.1](<5.2.1 Divine Simplicity.md>). The Thomistic *per se* causal series and the Aquinas/Feser/Kerr pure-actuality response are handled in §[§5.1.3](<5.1.3 Simultaneous Causation.md>) and 5.2.1. The Boethian eternal present is [§4.2.1](<4.2.1 The Changeless Ground.md>). The worry that structural necessity propagates to Spinozan modal collapse is [§4.4.9](<4.4.9 Modal Collapse Objection.md>). The PSR as a standalone rationalist demand (distinct from its deployment here as a first-cause lever) receives its fullest engagement in [§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>). The present section confines itself to the specific demand that the order require a cause; the surrounding terrain is covered in those sections.

A final consideration turns the objection back on the conditions of its own statement, a move called retorsion: the call for a first cause presupposes what it is calling on to be caused. The asking unfolds across moments, the words occupy relational positions, and the thought persists across its articulation and transmission: an objection to the necessity of T, S, and Φ raised within T, S, and Φ. The obvious reply is that enacting the structure while demanding its cause shows only the structure's actuality in the world where the demand is issued, not its necessity. Granted, but modal necessity does not need to be closed here; §[§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>)–2.6 did that. This section defends the sufficiency of that closure against calls for an additional explanatory step. What the retorsion shows is that every idiom in which the call can be issued (temporal succession, spatial articulation, substantial persistence) is parasitic on the very order the call purports to require a cause for. Causation explains moves inside the field. It cannot explain the field: not because the field is mysterious, but because 'cause' is a relation between elements of the field, and the field is not one of its own elements.

*What converges.* Each of the three forms concedes the very order it means to extend: the Kalām traversal treats the past as a finished road Now had to travel down, a spatial metaphor that does not map onto successional order, where Oppy's Hilbert deflation blocks the rearrangement absurdities and any finite past boundary is a feature within T rather than an event outside it; the contingency-of-the-whole move concedes a necessary framework and then misassigns member-level contingency to it, committing the fallacy of composition Hume and Edwards diagnosed; and the PSR appeal either presupposes ∅ as a contrast the structure forecloses or, in its Big-Conjunctive-Fact form, demands an external necessary explainer the PSR split alone does not deliver ([§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>)), leaving the personal-ground variant to the burdens of §[§5.1.1](<5.1.1 Rasmussen's Foundation Argument.md>)–5.2.1, with sufficient reason bottoming out where alternatives run out.

The narrower point (that individual causal sequences admit further explanation) stands; the argument does not contest it. What the argument contests is the step beyond: the assumption that the order through which sequences run is itself a sequence, that the language of causation lifts from elements to their ground, and that the call for a first cause can be satisfied by anything other than what makes calls, causes, and sequences possible in the first place. The regress objector runs on Nature while asking what Nature rests on. It does not rest on anything; it is what makes resting on possible at all. With the First Cause demand answered, [§5.1.3](<5.1.3 Simultaneous Causation.md>) turns to the mechanism classical theism offers the First-Cause picture: the *per se* series of simultaneous causation. Swinburne's probabilistic recovery of the inference — theism pressed as a simpler hypothesis than its rivals — is [§5.1.4](<5.1.4 Argument from Simplicity.md>).


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← [5.1.1 Rasmussen's Foundation Argument](<5.1.1 Rasmussen's Foundation Argument.md>) | [5.1.3 Simultaneous Causation](<5.1.3 Simultaneous Causation.md>) →
