It has become the custom to regard the hypothesis of causality in physics as so self-evident a necessity that no one even thinks of subjecting it to critical scrutiny. The extent to which this hypothesis represents extrapolation beyond the factual situation known by experience is seldom noticed; the usual defense of this standpoint is exhausted by the assumption that no exact natural sciences would be possible without it. We propose to demonstrate in the following essay that a quantitative description of natural phenomena is possible without the hypothesis of strict causality: a description that accomplishes everything that is achievable by physics and that furthermore possesses the capacity to solve the problem of the difference between past and future, a problem to which the strict causal hypothesis has no solution.