If you're using Aristotle to explain causality, then you need a material cause though, don't you? That's what I'm getting at. You can't pick and choose which of the four causes to throw out, that's all. I don't disagree that creating from nothing is logically a-okay, but it doesn't fit in that concept of causality, so we can't use that concept of causality to prove that the universe needed a creator. You would need something other than Aristotle, right?
I cannot speak for everyone, but my personal understanding is actually that all four causes would need to be discarded when explaining something that reaches outside of created reality. I would not think of God as an efficient cause, or a final cause, or anything along those lines--causality as we understand it does presuppose that physical reality exists, so whatever brought both physical reality and the causal laws that appear to govern it into existence is beyond both. In that sense, God would not be bound by physical laws of causality, since they only exist because he wills them to.
Perhaps it would be useful to distinguish between explanations broadly and causality more narrowly. Some people claim that if physical reality did not come about through the normal laws of causality, then that exempts it from needing any explanation whatsoever, but I don't think that this is actually true. There ought to still be some ineffable explanation, even if it is outside of our experience of reality.
A second point that ought to be brought up is that there's a very interesting idea that shows up from time to time in Aristotelian philosophy called prime matter. Aristotelians tend to identify matter with potentiality--the ability to be shaped--rather than seeing it as a concrete, atomic reality. (Modern physics actually seems to vindicate this view, since the more we know about matter, the stranger it becomes.) If matter ultimately breaks down completely into pure potentiality, without form or substance, then I think you have to wonder what a material cause actually is. There's nothing problematic about
creatio ex nihilo if matter itself is ultimately just another piece of nothingness.
On an unrelated note, I have a question for you about something someone else said. I hear things like this all the time:
"If you go back far enough with cause and effect, there must be a first cause. The chain can't be infinite, or we would never arrive at the present day."
I'd really like to see a good defense of infinite regress being impossible around here, but no one really gets into it. What I'm wondering though is if this proposed problem is even a problem at all in the B-Theory of time. I've heard you mention a few times that you prefer it, so I figure you might already have thoughts on that.
Well, there are two types of infinite regresses: temporal sequences and what I'd consider more along the lines of a sequence of simultaneous causes. Temporal sequences are fairly easy: you're here because your parents were here, and they existed because their parents existed, ad infinitum. The second type of sequence is trickier, though the easiest example I can think of is to say that a bird is flying because it is capable of flight, and it is capable of flight because it has wings, and it has wings because its DNA is such that said wings developed, etc.
I don't really care about temporal infinite regresses, since I don't entirely believe in time at all, but I do have issues with simultaneous infinite regresses. For example, people like to say that the laws of causality are emergent and came into being at the very beginning of the universe. All fine and good, but the concept of emergence itself relies upon some notion of causality, so there need to be deeper laws of causality that would allow for traditional causality to emerge. Those deeper laws would need to be explained as well, so we would ultimately end up with an infinite simultaneous sequence of laws emerging from deeper laws emerging from deeper laws. I vaguely recall reading one of the theologian-scientists describe this concept in terms of
calibration, if I recall correctly. If reality is not calibrated a certain way, then that sort of simultaneous chain of causes doesn't simply bring itself into existence. I wish I could remember where I saw that--possibly Polkinghorne, though I don't own any of his books to go check.
I don't know if that helps at all. My postmodern scholasticism is a little bit out of control, lol, and my thoughts have become so labyrinthine that I'm not sure I can answer any question without accidentally changing the topic.