[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[emjay]

Why create a rule with the intention of immediately breaking the rule while asserting that no other thing could..similarly, break that rule or satisfy it's conditions?  Is there any particular reason, for example, that there aren't dozens or millions of things that are at the end of their respective and discreet causal chains?

Basically, it seems to me, that there are only two conclusions that can be drawn from all this, if we accept the concept of a essentially ordered series and it's application to the world as per, say, Belaqua's Sun example. Basically, given any physical thing we could think of in the universe, it's going to track back, or perhaps more accurately, down, in an essentially ordered series, first to whatever we'd deem the most fundamental aspects of the known universe (just call that a placeholder... eg 'fundamental particles' for simplicity... so it doesn't matter if we know (yet or ever) what they are or not), and then, potentially, to a further sustaining cause beyond that, ie the first cause as referred to by Aquinas. I say 'potentially' though because that's the two conclusions I see here... either:
a) that the buck stops with the fundamental particles themselves... that they are the first cause, in which case they would have to be eternal/uncaused to fit the description/meet the requirements of the first cause, or
b) that the first cause is beyond that, namely Aquinas' first cause.

Is that similar to what you're saying here (ie why can (a) not be the case?)... it seems kind of similar, but granted I think we both can agree I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to logic, or indeed physics - that's not being self-deprecating, just realistic - so I may be, and probably am, way off base, and that there's subtleties or angles I'm not seeing here, but just saying how I see it as it stands. But that's part of what I was hoping to get out of this thread/subject, not just understand the argument, but also see how my obvious betters addressed it, once everyone was on the same page what the argument actually was.