A cosmological argument from the Hume-Edwards Principle

The Hume-Edwards Principle (HEP) says:

1. If you’ve explained every item in a collection, you’ve explained the whole collection of items.

This sounds very plausible, but powerful counterexamples have been given. For instance, suppose that exactly at noon, cannonball is shot out of a cannon. The collection C of cannonball states after noon has the property that each state in C is explained by an earlier state in C (e.g., a state at 12:01:00 is explained by a state at 12:00:30). By the Hume-Edwards Principle, this would imply that C is self-explanatory. But it plainly is not: it requires the cannon being fired at noon to be explained.

But I just realized something. All of the effective counterexamples to the Hume-Edwards Principle involve either circular causation or infinite causal regresses. We can now argue:

2. HEP is necessarily true.

3. If circular causation is possible, counterexamples to HEP are possible.

4. If infinite causal regresses are possible, counterexamples to HEP are possible.

5. So, neither circular causation nor infinite causal regresses are possible.

6. If there is no first cause, there is a causal circle or an infinite causal regress.

7. So, there is a first cause.

Similarly, it is very plausible that if infinite causal regresses are impossible, then causal finitism, the thesis that nothing can have an infinite causal history, is true. So, we get an argument from HEP to causal finitism.

Dialectically, the above is very odd indeed. HEP was used by Hume and Edwards to oppose cosmological arguments. But the above turns the tables on Hume and Edwards!

Objection: Not every instance of causal regress yields a counterexample to HEP. So it could be that HEP is true, but some causal regresses are still possible.

Response: It’s hard to see how there is sufficient structural difference between the cannonball story and other regresses to allow one to deny the cannonball story, and its relatives, while allowing the kind of regresses that are involved in Hume’s response to cosmological arguments.

Final remark: What led me to the above line of thought was reflecting on scenarios like the following. Imagine a lamp with a terrible user interface: you need to press the button infinitely many times to turn the lamp on, and once you do, it stays on despite further presses. Suppose now that in an infinite past, Alice was pressing the button once a day. Then the lamp was always on. Now I find myself with two intuitions. On the one hand, it seems to me that there is no explanation in the story as to why the lamp was always on: “It’s always been like that” just isn’t an explanation. On the other hand, we have a perfectly good explanation why the lamp was on n days ago: because it was on n + 1 days ago, and another button press doesn’t turn it off. And I found the second intuition pushing back against the first one, because if every day’s light-on state has an explanation, then there should be an explanation of why the lamp was always on. And then I realized this intuition was based on somehow finding HEP plausible—despite having argued against HEP over much of my philosophical career. And then I realized that one could reconcile HEP with these arguments by embracing causal finitism.