How Theism Reduces Brute Facts to Zero
Last night I was talking with a friend about cosmological arguments at the bar. (Make of that what you will). He brought up the skeptical challenge that theism has brute facts, too — ours is just God instead of the universe. He wasn’t pressing the argument himself (he’s a theist), he was just repeating something he’s heard.
I told him that while some theists may admit this, no classical theist should admit this. Because it isn’t true. Here’s how classical theism can reduce brute facts to zero.
Borrowing from Kenny Pearce:
Step 1) Show explanations may ultimately terminate in a single autonomous fact (= a fact for which it makes no sense to ask “why?”) to satisfy the principle of sufficient reason.
Step 2) Show that real definitions (= statements of essences) are good candidates for autonomous facts. For example: it makes no sense to ask why a bachelor is an unmarried male. That’s just what a bachelor is!
Step 3) Show that if we could grasp God’s essence we could just see — a priori — God’s necessary existence (and God’s freedom). Hence Aquinas’s claim that God’s existence is self-evident to God (who grasps his own essence) but not to us (who are incapable of grasping God’s essence). In other words, Step 3 is arguing that there is a sound modal ontological argument, and that God exists (and is free) would be part of the real definition of God = an autonomous fact.
Step 4) Argue that the cosmological argument provides ground for believing there is a sound ontological argument and that God has the features described therein.
Let’s look at each of these four steps.
An autonomous fact differs from a brute fact in the following sense: A brute fact is not just that for which we don’t see the reason for its existence (that is simply a mysterious fact) but that for which there is no reason for its existence, at all. It still makes SENSE to ask why this (allegedly) brute fact exists; it’s just that there is no answer to the question. Brute facts “are just there, and that’s all!” — no intelligible explanation to be found.
There are major issues with allowing brute facts into one’s ontology, one of the more serious being that it invites empirical — if not self-defeating — skepticism. If God favors it, I may have a paper published soon which explores this issue in detail, but for now, one may wish to review Pruss and Koon’s argument.
However, God’s existence (according to classical theism) is not brute since, as philosophers like Leibniz and Aquinas would hold, God carries the reason for his existence intrinsic to himself. Whereas everything else points beyond itself to an extrinsic cause for an intelligible answer to the question of its existence, God’s explanation is “internal” and has to do with his “special” self-subsistent nature. In other words, God is what can ultimately satisfy the principle of sufficient reason, which says anything which exists has a reason for its existence, either due to some external cause or its internal principle(s).1 In short, whatever is has that whereby it is (= an act of existence), either through itself or from another.2
This invite the question if there is something about the definition of God — that is, something about God’s nature — such that if we could grasp it we could see that it would no make sense to ask why God exists (and is free). If so, this would make “God” an autonomous fact that could provide an extremely satisfying terminus to our explanatory framework. The PSR would be satisfied, brute facts eliminate, modal intuitions preserved, and we’d have a foundational theory with enormous predictive/explanatory success. (Just so long as we have some answers to the PoE, what other hesitation could remain???)
An autonomous fact — as already stated — is something for which it doesn’t make sense to ask why. As Pearce explains, “The most obvious candidates are the various sorts of definitions. Thus although the fact that the English word ‘bachelor’ means an unmarried male admits of a historical/etymological explanation, the fact that bachelors are unmarried males needs no explanation. If there are such things as Aristotelian ‘real definitions’—definitions not of words but of things—then these are likewise good candidates for autonomous facts. Real definitions would be statements of essences, and they would not require further explanation.”
Pearce continues, “after we have posited God in order to explain History, we see that our explanation can bottom out in autonomous facts, and therefore give us a maximally satisfying explanatory structure, only if the real definition of God has certain features. This gives us reason to hypothesize that the real definition of God does have these features, i.e., that there is a sound ontological argument. Because we do not have independent grounds for believing the premises of this ontological argument, we cannot use it to establish the existence of God. This does not, however, prevent us from using it to explain God’s existence and, indeed, God’s necessary existence.”
So… the contingent finite universe is explained by God’s act of will; God’s act of will is explained by God’s reasons and God’s freedom; God’s reasons and God’s freedom are explained by God’s existence and having those reasons and freedom; God’s existence and having those reasons and freedom is explained by God’s real definition = an autonomous fact = no brute facts.
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This connects well with Lonergan’s master argument for God found in his Insight, namely: If reality is completely intelligible (= there exists the complete set of answers to the complete set of questions that can be coherently asked), God exists. Reality is completely intelligible. Ergo, God exists.
This is Maritain’s preferred formulation of the PSR. Very Thomistic!