What Sort of Explanation Is God?

Some people wonder what sort of explanation God is supposed to be. This is an important question and the answer depends on what natural theological approach one takes.

Generally, an explanation is that which removes mystery, by answering some sort of why question (think Aristotle’s Four Causes). While explanation has an undeniable psychological element, this ultimately reflects a deeper ontological aspect. That ontological aspect is often but not always productively causal.

My parents partially explain my existence in a productively causal way. However, the explanation for why there are no square circles is because the notion is contradictory, and contradictions are impossible. This is a genuine explanation — we are still getting a reason why — but a non-causal one.

When it comes to natural theology, an explanation may be searched out in the following ways. If we are taking the traditional metaphysical approach of moving from effect to cause, we are really locating the necessary condition for something.

For example, the necessary condition for contingency, it is argued, is necessity itself. Or to put the matter differently, we might ask how contingency is possible, and the cosmological argument provides an explanation – as something which removes the mystery of contingency – by causing us to see that there must be something which has always existed and which exists of its own accord, otherwise no contingent thing could exist (see Part 1 of The Best Argument for God for a development of this argument). This is not an etiological (scientific) explanation, but it is nevertheless a substantial ontological explanation, even if questions remain.

People occasionally complain about this natural theological method for producing conclusions that are much too general, but that of course does nothing to undermine its legitimacy. I notice some effect and from that effect I infer that something else, whatever that is, must be the case, otherwise the effect would not be. What I infer may be exceedingly general at first, but that does not render my inference non-explanatory, insofar as some mysterious aspect is still removed (i.e., how is that possible?).

Suppose that I turn the water on, but it fails to come out of my garden hose (let us further suppose that I know my water system is working generally). Immediately, I infer that something must be blocking it. I infer the existence of something with a blocking power.

Now, I have no idea whether that something is a golf ball, a knot, etc. But I do know that there exists something with the power to produce that effect, otherwise the effect would not be. This is general — and to some extent minimal — but it is not trivial.

Granted, I may not be able to move further in understanding the nature of the explanation in many instances, aside from the fact that something exists which has the power to produce the relevant effect, but in other instances, and particularly when it comes to natural theology, I actually can move further in understanding the nature of the cause by understanding what must be true about it to produce the relevant effect – for example, that it must have necessary existence (to explain contingency), or be purely actual (to explain change), etc. In this sense, reasoning about God is somewhat unique.

Interestingly enough, we can often know more about the ultimate cause than we can about proximate causes through effect-to-necessary-condition reasoning. While I cannot know that it’s a golf ball blocking the water flow just by knowing something must exist which can block the water flow (it may be an onion), I actually can know that God – that is, of classical theism – is the ultimate cause of the contingent order just by knowing something must exist which can impart existence to any contingent essence without requiring existence to be imparted to its essence (and thus its nature must be pure existence as such, of which there can only be one such entity).  This is the traditional project of “unpacking” the divine attributes from effect-to-cause reasoning, a project that I engage substantially in TBAFG.

Either way, all of that is genuinely explanatory, even if inferential, because significant discoveries about fundamental reality are made and significant mystery – perhaps the most significant mystery – removed, even if questions remain.

On the other hand, if we follow the more contemporary approach in natural theology of worldview comparison, then explanation often concerns degree of expectation. This is a common sense understanding of explanation as well. For example, I see something mysterious, like a puddle of water, and wonder how it got there. I then entertain various scenarios (hypotheses) that might make the occurrence of that puddle probable, and then fix my mind on what seems the most likely, such as my sprinkler turning on. Again, questions remain. I don’t know the mechanics of how a sprinkler system work, but I don’t need to know those mechanics to know the sprinkler system is a genuinely good explanation of the puddle, all things considered. When I compare the likelihood of seeing the phenomena under consideration if my sprinkler system turned on vs. other possible scenarios, such as a rain storm, I see the sprinkler as the better explanation, because it is the sort of cause more likely to produce that effect. In this case, not just the existence of wetness but a restricted area of wetness (which I would not expect if it rained).

The application to natural theology here is fairly straightforward. When thinking about the nature of God, how likely is it that we would expect to see the sorts of large-scale features of reality if God exists vs. if God did not exist? Features such as contingency, stability, order, consciousness, rationality, suffering, etc. Again, see my book for my extended take on this.

Whereas with the previous natural theological method we were moving from effect back to necessary condition, with this contemporary comparative method we are thinking about the nature of some cause and contemplating how likely it is to produce the effect under consideration in comparison to other competing possible causes. While this method is more susceptible to error than the former, because it is inherently probabilistic, it is nevertheless able to afford truly genuine forms of explanation, insofar as it allows us to remove important mysteries about the world. It illumines our intellect.