What Can Explain Itself—and Everything Else?

Many of us believe everything makes sense. But what does that really mean?

Here’s a belief I think most of us share: everything makes sense.¹ In other words, everything is intelligible.²

However, it’s clear that not everything makes complete sense on its own. What I mean is, not everything can answer every coherent question about itself, just by itself (i.e., by the information inherent to its nature as the kind of thing it is). This is why most things are hetero-explicable—their intelligibility depends on other things that cause or determine them in certain respects.

If we believe that everything makes sense, then not everything can be hetero-explicable—not everything can have restricted intelligibility (meaning it can answer, at most, some but not all coherent questions about itself, internally or from itself). At least one thing—perhaps more—must be auto-explicable. This means it not only explains itself but also ultimately explains everything else. It is the source to which all the other hetero-explicable things can be traced. It is the source of ultimate intelligibility; something that, if we could fully grasp it, could answer every coherent question that could be asked about itself, from within itself (based on the information inherent to its nature).³

But what could be auto-explicable? Clearly, nothing from ordinary experience. Things in ordinary experience may seem auto-explicable in that their nature explains what they are, including some of their necessary features—for example, a mountain has valleys because that’s part of what it means to be a mountain—but this doesn’t explain why they exist, why they occur, or why they occupy a specific region of space-time (or have certain individuating or contingent features).

Here’s where I start to sound like a broken record: if we’re going to find something truly auto-explicable, it must lack features that limit intelligibility—features that suggest something external is needed to make sense of it. These limiting features include qualitative restrictions, finitude, compositeness, mutability, and, of course, contingency. When one thinks deeply about each of these, it becomes clear—at least to me—that they impose intelligibility limits. Anything that exhibits these features cannot be the Ultimate Intelligible Reality (UIR). Thus, whatever is auto-explicable, whatever the UIR is, must be unrestricted, qualitatively infinite, incomposite, immutable, and necessary (i.e., God).⁴

1. Can this be proven, or is this perhaps the primordial act of faith? Something to think about!

2. This doesn’t mean that everything is intelligible to us. Perhaps our abilities are too limited to attain the answer to every coherent question that could be asked. Rather, the claim is simply that there is an adequate answer to every coherent question, even if only God is able to grasp them all.

3. See Chap. 19 of Lonergan’s Insight for a brilliant argument for why only the God of classical theism—as absolutely simple—can fulfill this role.

4. This follows a basic idea—obvious, I think—that if whatever is hetero-explicable ultimately requires something auto-explicable, the latter must be different in kind from the former. This is why Aristotle believes all mutable realities must trace back, or twist up, to some immutable reality, etc.