Is God the Best Explanation Ender?
When thinking about the nature of explanation, there is a strong intuition that explanation should terminate somewhere, and that explanation should not terminate brutely (in something that just is without explanation) but in some principled way. In other words, that there should be some actually intelligible fundamental reason behind whatever we’re investigating. Intuitively, we feel if explanations either go on endlessly or end brutely, we might not have really explained anything at all, but either deferred giving an explanation or offered an illusory explanation. This intuition is captured by the following illustration of Edward Feser, “Suppose I told you that the fact that a certain book has not fallen to the ground is explained by the fact that it is resting on a certain shelf, but that the fact that the shelf has not fallen o the ground has no explanation at all but is an unintelligible brute fact. Have I really explained the position of the book? It is hard to see how. For the shelf has no inherent tendency to stay aloft – it is, by hypothesis, just a brute fact that it does so. But if it has no such tendency, it cannot impart such a tendency to the book. The ‘explanation’ the shelf provides in such case would be completely illusory.”[1]
If you feel this position is correct, and that explanations should terminate – that something should be an explanation ender – we can then turn our attention to asking another important question. What sort of thing could possibly be an explanation ender? This consideration is what has long motivated philosophical arguments for God. Many thinkers who affirmed God’s existence by way of philosophical argument weren’t apologists for some religion; they weren’t trying to “prove God” because they had some theological dog in the fight. Rather, they just realized that if anything could serve as the ultimate explanation ender without being radically absurd (like the brute fact position is), particularly in the order of why anything exists, that something would have to be a very special sort of thing, quite different from the stuff of everyday experience. Thinking deeply about the nature of such a possible explanation ender is the primary motivation behind classical theism — or so I contend.
Let us put the matter like this. Suppose certain features, categories, or aspects of the world always entail some extrinsic explanation, which is to say, they cannot explain everything about themselves (including why they exist) from within themselves. We could say their intelligibility (that is, how much we’re able to understand them) is restricted, hence they always prompt us to seek some external cause to make sense of why they are and/or why they have the attributes they do. Traditional philosophers have maintained many things are restrictedly intelligible – for example, changing things, composite things, qualitatively finite things, and so on. Changing things require a changer, or so philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas argued. Composite things require an extrinsic unifier, so philosophers like Plotinus argued. And qualitatively finite things require some extrinsic-efficient manufacturer that put those specific limits in place, rather than some other set of limits, or so various contemporary philosophers argue.
Regardless of whether one thinks these identifications of entities which are inherently restrictedly intelligible are correct, the point can still be made. If things such as these always point beyond themselves for some extrinsic explanation or source of intelligibility, then whatever could be an explanation ender – that is, whatever could possibly provide the ultimately explanation for everything else, and provide an explanation of itself, from within itself – could never be changing, composite, or qualitatively finite. Rather, if anything could be the ultimate explanation ender, it must escape (or better, transcend) these categories altogether. If must be unchanging, incomposite (absolutely simple), and qualitatively infinite. It must be completely intrinsically intelligible, meaning it must be able to answer all questions about itself, from within itself; which is to say, through its own nature. Of course, this is not to say we have direct access to such a reality; only that if any reality could provide the ultimate explanatory foundation, it would have to be a reality like that. From there, if one believes some reality must serves as ultimate explanatory foundation, this provides motivation for assuming that special reality exists, even if we cannot directly apprehend it. That reality, traditionally understood, is the God of classical theism.
PS - I attempted to make this point in my recent conversation with Trent Horn, as well.
[1] Five Proofs 150.