Introduction

Everyone wants to know how the present situation-and thus their current conditioncame about. Everyone needs to understand their own existence as individuals in society. And since people sense that histories consist in chains of cause and effect, they usually want to know how things began, in a sense what the first ‘cause’ was. Of course, the very first cause was the Big Bang at the origins of the universe and any subsequent cause always has causes preceding it, resulting in a chain of causes and effects which form a trajectory in time.