I kind of agree with you regarding First Cause, in so much as the universe has always existed. I guess people love bumper-sticker slogans.
The question then is, does said universe require an overarching force of cognition, all-knowingness, a force of guidance and I have left a couple of blanks for you to drop other nonsensical descriptors in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ?
I think there is an ordering principle that has imbued Purpose, Will and direction into this likely, great cyclic system for the production of sentient life. Let's call it God.
Why did I, I mean why do we have children has crossed my mind so many times. Why do we die, why do we have two genders, why do we continue to age, but they all tie back to origin of life stuff.
What are the chances of a universe being self-causing and that's what you are suggesting. We might say that a perturbation in a quantum vacuum caused pre-matter to materialise. These quarks then organised themselves into there connections associated with their nature. They then formed hydrogen atoms according some other nature and gravity just happened to become a reality that went through all those various processes of supernova, etc, to construct the building blocks of life and when habitats were made life popped out of some primordial habitat.
I mean, there are so many opportunities for such a system to fail but it did not. Some daggy piece of RNA had within it the potential to become every teeming life-form throughout the universe and this was all a result of nothing doing something in the most complex and extraordinary ways.
And with all this adaptive power it chose death, ageing, a need to breed via sexes and old age, and also had the temerity to produce a creature so removed from its nearest cousin the chimp that it is clearly the mother of all evolutionary overshoots, which is completely contrary to evolution.
I don't think humans could exist unless purpose and will are imposed upon us from an external source, not invented by us and you dismiss the universal acceptance of spiritual, religious beliefs that powered every age, every culture, every gathering of humans no matter how isolated, which demonstrates the external force.
We didn't get so clever so as not to believe, we just became cynical and untrusting of religious forms that did their best to inoculate people away from spiritual pursuits.
The start of the universe is thought to be a set time in the past and the start of life lends itself to many wonderful hypotheses, but we have not come close to cracking the egg. The universe is eternal and so might life be and the whole thing just keeps rolling around, breath in, breath out, hello again.
I don't know, but the answer is likely to be way out of what we can conceive as reality. There is another reality associated with it all that humans are locked out of.
