I’m not actively denying causality before the beginning, I’m asking why one would assert causality should necessarily apply. Since we don’t know the answer, all we can say is “We don’t know the answer”. That is science. To push beyond that to assert that there is some form of logic that can impose an answer is to move into philosophy, if not outright into theology itself.
Where I rest my laurels, as it were, is simply on the fact that there is no way of knowing what happened before time began, or even, at a more basic level, if that is even a coherent and sensible concept. That’s where my problem with invoking a prime mover comes from. Without knowing whether one is even necessary, it seems to be a less parsimonious explanation than “nothing caused the universe”. That’s not to say that there’s any more evidence for my statement than “God made the universe”, it’s just that I have yet to be convinced of the necessity.
On either side of the debate, I’m afraid our world views are all colored by fairly human prejudices. The world we observe obeys a pretty strict causality (though QM can to some extent flip cause and effect to some degree) and so we build philosophies, religions and even scientific theories based upon those notions. But reality is not bound in even the tiniest degree by our beliefs or prejudices, and I see no grounds to make assertions about an epoch that, if it existed at all, may have been so radically different from anything we understand, or can even imagine, that all the grand proclamations and prognostications since the first human stared up at the stars and began musing about where he came from, somehow carry any weight.
