 The primary tenet of her metaphysics is the causal principle: it is necessary that a thing that begins to exist has a cause (hereafter “CP”). The argument for this contentious claim begins with a clarification meant to avoid the merely semantic connection of “cause” and “effect”. To grasp the conditions in which something begins to exist, one needs to abstract from familiar things except with regard to the capacity for existence. With this understood, it is a contradiction to suppose that something begins to exist if nothing else exists because 