Necessity Doesn't End Explanation

Could a Pop Tart be a necessary part of existence? If so, would it need to be explained?

Discovering that something is necessary does not end the need for explanation. Rather, what marks the end concerning the explanatory hunt of the existence of something is not its modal status as contingent or necessary but its nature as either dependent or independent. It is obvious there can be dependent-necessary realities – Aquinas was aware of this fact and called such realities necessary through another. However, Aquinas thought the basement of reality, the root of all that is real, the most fundamental entity and ultimate explanation of everything, had to be something that was necessary through itself, something that had an independent nature.  

In my book The Best Argument for God I offer the following thought example. Suppose that God exists and by nature is necessitated to bring about anything of extreme value. Now suppose (highly plausibly) that a black and white Pop Tart is of extreme value. That black and white Pop Tart would then be a necessary being, something that reality had to include, because it was entailed by the existence of God. Nevertheless, that does not preclude it from having a deeper explanation, which it does. Both the Pop Tart and its necessity are explained by God plus whatever axiological principles we invoke.

In a recent article Joshua Sijuwade critiques Graham Oppy’s claim that things that are necessary do not require explanation by offering counterexamples. One is like what I wrote above, the other two are mathematical examples. Kenny Pearce, in his own exchange with Oppy, provides counterexamples concerning moral truths, where certain necessary moral truths are explained by (dependent upon) more fundamental moral axioms. The point is it is not particularly hard to come by falsifications of the idea that necessities don’t require explanation.

There is, moreover, the deeper issue of what sort of thing could be necessary through itself, that is, of what sort of thing could have an independent nature. If we sign on with Aquinas’s metaphysics, then what we need is something whose essence just is its existence, and once we accept that we can unpack the traditional suite of divine attributes through conceptual analysis.