This doesn't explain anything. One of the major concerns most creationists have with the theory of evolution is that it involves undirected mutations. How does the First Cause change that? Extreme determinism?
I don't think determinism has nothing to do with it. Wolfram and others have demonstrated that great complexity can arise in systems that have very simple rules (laws) and initial conditions. "First Cause" would have to consist of very simple rules and initial conditions.
I was speaking to Physicist yesterday about Bell's Inequality experiments, and I asked him "where do each of the photon pairs get their 'instruction set' from?" And he corrected me, saying that the entire point is that the photons do not have an instruction set. I got to mulling that over. Then realized that maybe they do have an "instruction set" of a certain kind -- the instruction set is the summary of how each proton goes about satisfying all the rules and regulations placed on its behavior by natural laws. That is, the instruction set isn't "in" the photon. But the photon has no choice but to follow it, once its state has been "measured." (Which sounds deterministic, but the initial observation that causes local state vector collapse is itself a stochastic event.) Once measured, the nonlocality rules (part of the totality of physical law) specify what the state of its photon twin is, wherever that twin might be in the universe.
That "instruction set" -- physical laws -- is analogous to the Aristotelian First Cause.
I still may not have mastered these concepts. But Physicist (hopefully) will correct me if still haven't achieved clarity on the issue.
BTW Wolfram, as you probably know, thinks that the role of natural selection is overstated in accounting for all the complexity we see in biological forms. He suspects that something else is going on besides. What that is, I don't know. Maybe he doesn't either. But I gather he thinks we ought to look for it.