What I am saying is simply that what THEY were saying (as well as many people of today) is their word “cause” and your word “cause” don’t mean the same thing.
You are thinking in terms of the materialist, “Cause-Effect” = physical causation - “event A led to event B”
They are thinking in terms of reasoning/logic, “Cause-Effect” = analytical causation - “premise A led to conclusion B”
Ontology is the juncture between the mind and physical reality. An ontology is a map of what is perceived as reality, an under-standing, bases for belief and decisions. And your beliefs are an issue of your ontology, your inner mental map. Your map is used to verify what is or isn’t true. It is built partly by what you witness yourself and largely upon what others have explained. Discreet objects, terms, words, and causal relationships are all determined by either your first hand deductions or what others have convincingly told you about. When something fits into your map of reality well, you believe whatever it was whether from seeing it or from hearing about it.
Because you believed A, B becomes true for you. Your belief in A caused your belief in B.
The Cosmological argument is all about WHY a person would believe in something called “God”. And due to the premises that a person already believes, the conclusion of believing in God becomes apparent. Thus the premises are the cause of the belief. And the belief becomes the ontological reality, the map of what is = “map of reality”.
And when you say that X is true, you are saying that “in accord to my map of reality, X is what is out there as physical reality.” You do not say, “in my ontology, I believe in this made up entity and pretend it is true”. No, you say, “Because of my understanding, I know that it is true.”
Thus arguments cause belief which cause your understanding from which you proclaim what is real. And if your map is coherent with experience and comprehensive, what is real is what you believe… because of the premises in your map. To those with accurate maps, what the map holds as entities is what is real. The universe itself has no discreet entities. The universe is just a bunch of noise gathered a little more here than there and constantly flowing and intermixing.
Atoms are only atoms because of your ontological construct for such tiny noises. There is nothing in the real physical universe that exactly fits your map, so your map is used to determine true vs false, not physical reality itself because you can never know enough physical reality.
Truth = “Fits in my map.”
Thus the cause of “Truth” is the set of premises and logic applied to deductive observation and reports from others, not physical reality itself. Physical reality merely makes it easier or harder for you to adjust your map (aka “Truth”) to match it. But the Truth is determined by your premises, the “First Cause” of your belief which is then appended by further deductive observations or rumors.
And your First Cause (initial premise) is “What is, is what is” which later got translated as “I ma that I am” (exact same lettering in ancient Hebrew) and that is what they are calling “God”, the first cause of everyone’s “reality”.