128 struggling with the worldand constants of nature represent an exception to the principle that
time rules all. It fails to take to its ultimate consequences the thesis that
the universe has a history.
In this history, there was, according to one interpretation of what we
now know about the history of the universe, a moment when tempera-
ture and energy had extreme although not infi nite values, when the
phenomena were excited to higher degrees of freedom than they came
to exhibit in the later, cooled- down universe, when the structural dis-
tinctions among the components of nature had not yet emerged (or, if
they had existed earlier in diff erent form, and had ceased to exist), and
when the distinction between states of aff airs and the laws governing
them failed to hold. Th e laws may then have evolved more rapidly, to-
gether with the phenomena.
Our approach to the most general tasks of explanation in natural
science improperly extends to the whole history of the universe the
forms of explanation that we have developed to understand the work-
ings of the cooled- down universe, the universe at the moment of its
history in which humanity lives. Similarly, it mistakenly enlists in the
work of cosmological explanation— that is to say, the explanation of the
universe as a whole and of its history— styles of explanation that we
have developed to deal with parts of nature. Only in that local study
can we successfully distinguish between a confi guration space of phe-
nomena governed by unchanging laws and the stipulated initial condi-
tions of that confi guration space. Th ese two misguided projects— going
from the explanation of the cooled- down universe to the explanation of
the whole history of the universe and from a region of the universe to
the universe as a whole— jointly contribute to a failure to recognize the
inclusive reality of time.
Our conventional beliefs about causality equivocate, in a similar way,
about the reality of time. Th ey imply that time is real but not too real. If
time were not real, causation, as we conventionally understand it, would
not exist. Eff ects must come aft er causes. Without time, causation can
be reduced to logical implication: eff ects become as simultaneous with
their causes as the conclusions of a syllogism are with its premises. If,
however, time is inclusively real, and the laws of nature can at least in
principle evolve, discontinuously, together with the phenomena that they
govern, our causal explanations no longer have immutable warrants.