Some Flaws in Creationist Epistimology
Creationists reason as if there were a binary choice:: Currently Accepted Scientific Theory vs. Biblical Literalism. This dichotomy is irrational, and it's at the heart of why nobody who understands science takes Young Earth Creationists very seriously in intellectual terms
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Except that we now know almost every one of the founding assumptions here to be untrue.
In the case of all but the most microscale phenonomena, causes need not be independent of their own effects because feedback loops are not only possible but quite common in Nature. In the case of the most microscale phenomena (quantum effects) causes do not have to antecedent to effects -- strict temporal sequence breaks down at the quantum scale (in fact, causality itself is a bit fuzzy way down there).
There is and never has been any good reason to assume that a cause must be "equal or greater in complexity and power" to its effects -- that was Scholasticism's bias in favor of formal hierarchy speaking there. There are several ways for causes to be much smaller than their effects -- from very simple ones of resonance and accumulation (both different manifestations of the same process, since resonance is the accumulation of energy over time and accumulation as in crystalline growth an example of the resonance of a molecular structure). If you pass the result of a reiterative process through a natural selection filter (such as the one operating in planetary system formation) really minute causes (the accretion of dust and gas in a nebular cloud) can produce tremendous effects (vast orbital-resonance synchronized star systems).
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I know all about feedback loops, and they do not illustrate that an effect can cause itself. If the loop is taken as an entire system, it can seem that way. But taken individually, each effect initiates a new cause: E1 is also C2 which brings about E2, E2 is also C3 which brings about E3, etc. There still has to be a C0.
Although it does appear that quantum effects can work backward in time, that isn't what I meant by "antecedent." I mean logically antecedent, which in our day-to-day existence always coincides with temporally antecedent, but conceivably need not. If you don't get what I mean then it will take me some time to explain it.
Your examples of lesser causes, even if we limit ourselves to material cause, are easily explained as being partial causes. Let us say that a tiny pebble begins rolling down a snow-covered mountain, turns into a huge snowball, and crushes a house at the bottom of the hill. Did the pebble alone crush the house? Of course not -- it couldn't have done so without the accumulation of snow, and of kinetic energy. So the destruction was caused by the entire process and all its elements, not by the initial trigger alone.
But if we are talking about the universe -- again, whether a "multiverse" system or no -- it cannot have come into existence by a process of accumulation, because by definition, there is nothing outside it from which it could have been built. The first cause must have had plenary power of creation (I beg pardon for the anthropomorphism), without relying upon pre-existing matter.
that was Scholasticism's bias in favor of formal hierarchy speaking there
Ad hominem.
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