A very brief overview of thoughts on causality.
Aristotle recognized four types of cause: the material cause (what something is made of), the formal cause (essentially, its shape), an efficient cause (whatever immediately produced the thing), and a final cause (the purpose for which it is intended).
Today, the efficient cause is the only one that is commonly called a 'cause' at all. The shape is seen as being more of an accident and the material isn't seen as causal at all, but a condition for the causality.
Aristotle also thought that any sort of change at all (including motion) required a force to act, causing the change. Now, our ideas of force are quite different. Aristotle also believed that everything has a 'natural place' towards which it will prefer to move (so, heavy things move naturally to the center of the Earth).
Medieval Islamic thought debated whether there could be *any* causality other than the will of God. To even allow causal influence to humans was seen as infringing on the absolute power of God. it was envisioned that God recreates the universe between instances of time and there is NO necessary link between say, cotton being in a fire and it turning black and burning.
Medieval Europeans developed the notion of 'natural laws' which are dictated by God, and which all matter follows. This lead, of course, to the drive to find and understand those laws. They had great difficulty understanding, at a fundamental level, why an arrow continues in motion after leaving the bow.
Newton came along and offered a new set of physical laws that overturned the Aristotelian concepts on many points while providing a deeply mathematical description of how matter moves. This view of physics lasted until the early 20th century.
Hume pointed out that there is no way to establish causality beyond any doubt and that what is usually regarded as a causal link is, in reality, simply the close association of phenomena in time and place. In a sense, Hume was agreeing with a point made by the Islamic philosophers.
Kant wrestled with the critique of Hume, offering his own ideas about causality, but it seems most modern philosophers consider him to have failed in solving the basic problems.
In the 20th century, Russell said that the term 'cause' should be eliminated from the philosophy of science as being unnecessary. Instead, natural laws should be used instead.
Quantum mechanics arose as a non-causal, non-realist description of atomic phenomena. Even today, I think the philosophical implications of that have yet to be absorbed.
Finally, relativistic physics drastically changed our ideas about space and time and along with them, our understanding of things like causality. In this it only makes sense to talk about causlaity inside of the universe.
