The reason I use the term in time is because time supposedly had a beginning or was finite in the past and started at t = 0. So perhaps one can reasonably argue that at that point it wasn’t within time or atleast marked the boundary of time and so perhaps the initial conditions of the universe occurred without cause.
Now, has anything after that occurred without a cause? More importantly, can something occur without a cause within time?
Note that by cause I mean a full sufficient cause or a full reason outlined for why it happened starting from the initial conditions of the universe.
The problem I am having is that once you are within time, it not only seems to be vague and mysterious how something could happen without a cause, but I’m having trouble even thinking of it as coherent.
Let’s take the example of a radioactive atom that decays at time t. Let’s assume it has no full cause for why it decays at that time instead of another time. Now, the entirety of the radioactive atom’s existence was within time in the sense that it occurred well after the initial conditions of the universe.
Now, there is a moment where it hasn’t decayed at t - 1. And then a moment t + 1 where it has decayed. If it decays at time t without a full cause, it means that there is some step along the way that seems to have occurred without a previous step determining it. No matter how you slice it, if it occurred without a complete causal series of events starting from the beginning of the universe, it is ultimately decaying at that time t for no reason. But decay is a physical process. It has a certain stimulus that occurs. What I’m being asked to believe is that a stimulus of some sort of physical nature is ultimately occurring…for no reason. The problem with this is that once you imagine a physical stimulus occurring you imagine a series of physical steps occurring. How can any of those physical steps within time occur without the preceding physical step determining it?
Now of course intuitions can go haywire but I can’t tell whether it is that or whether the lack of being able to imagine this in a coherent way should tell us something. A comparison I can think of is the notion of a timeless being like god. It may be impossible to sort of rule out as impossible but the whole notion of it seems so meaningless and vague and hard to imagine that even entertaining the idea seems like sophistry and evidence against it.
How does one navigate through the idea of something occurring without a cause in time?