Two notes on the uncaused cause.
First,it has been a principle It has been an unassailable philosophical and logical position since the Greek philosophers that there can not be an uncaused cause. It was Occum who posed the notion that a thing stands alone, without precedents or antecedents. I do not remember that his position had much merit with the likes of Kant, Hegel, Locke and their ilk.
Second, I distinctly remember one of my theology profs insisting that there can be no uncaused cause in the universe. I guess I took that as an Aquinian proof of God.
Anyway, that is an idea that I have not seriously challenged for 40 years. Can you point me to some literature?
Not really. It's more of an assumption, with a bit of support from our everyday experiences. The logic of it was quite successfully assailed by Hume, and later, Kant - essentially, what Hume did was show that arguments regarding causality all tended to simply assume causality, effectively begging the question. Anyway, given what we know of quantum mechanics, any such proof has now been rendered empirically false.
Second, I distinctly remember one of my theology profs insisting that there can be no uncaused cause in the universe. I guess I took that as an Aquinian proof of God.
Well, if that was 40 years ago, that would have been about the time that Bell developed the inequalities eliminating hidden-variable theories, so I suppose we can't fault your theology prof for not being up to date on the cutting edge of particle physics. Anyway, the first-cause argument has other problems as well, but first and foremost these days is that there are uncaused events happening right around you all the time. When an atom decays, nothing inside or outside the atom causes it to go boing - it just does, all by itself, essentially because it can. And not only is it uncaused, it's completely random as to when it does.
This is a testable prospect, by the way, and the test for this was first proposed, as I said, in the mid-60's, partly in response to Einstein's objections to the state of quantum mechanics - it was later carried out in the early 1980s by some French physicists, and subsequently by many others. As a result, it is known that there are no unknown "hidden variables", no deterministic mechanisms inside or outside an atom that causes it to decay - it just goes boing, and that's that. And Einstein was wrong.
Anyway, that is an idea that I have not seriously challenged for 40 years. Can you point me to some literature?
What sort of literature - Hume, Kant, or QM? The good doctor can probably give you better QM references than I can, so I'll leave that to him ;)