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Merely possible explanation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2010
Abstract
Graham Oppy has argued that possible explanation entails explanation in order to object to Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss's new cosmological argument that it does not improve upon familiar cosmological arguments. Gale and Pruss, as well as Pruss individually, have granted Oppy's inference from possible explanation to explanation and argue that this inference provides a reason to believe that the strong principle of sufficient reason is true. In this article, I shall undermine Oppy's objection to the new cosmological argument by arguing that it is logically possible that some truths are merely possibly explained.
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Notes
1. Oppy, Graham ‘On “A new cosmological argument”’, Religious Studies, 36 (2000), 345–353CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Oppy's objection is reproduced in idem Arguing about Gods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 131–132, and in idem Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 281–282.
2. Gale, Richard M. & Pruss, Alexander R. ‘A new cosmological argument’, Religious Studies, 35 (1999), 461–476CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. I follow the convention of intending but suppressing a necessity operator in front of every claim labelled in capital letters.
4. Gale, Richard M. & Pruss, Alexander R. ‘A response to Oppy, and to Davey and Clifton’, Religious Studies, 38 (2002), 89–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Alexander R. Pruss The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 234–235.
5. Oppy ‘On “A new cosmological argument”’, 346–348.
6. Ibid, 347.
7. Ibid
8. As an anonymous referee for Religious Studies, to whom I am grateful, pointed out to me, the claim that SDE plausibly fails also seems to challenge Gale & Pruss's argument in favour of the view that @'s explanation has to be a personal one; Gale & Pruss ‘A new cosmological argument’, 465. Their argument runs as follows. Let ‘@’ stand for the BCCF for the actual world and ‘#’ for the alleged explanation for @. We can conceive of only two sorts of explanation, personal and scientific. Suppose for reductio that # is a scientific explanation. A scientific explanation contains some law-like proposition and a proposition that reports the occurrence of some event. Such a proposition is contingent, and so # is contained in @. If so, since # must explain each and every contingent conjunct of @ as well as the conjunction as a whole, # has to explain itself. However, this is impossible because no scientific explanation can explain itself. Therefore by reductio, # is a personal explanation. It can be objected to this argument that the only reason to accept that # has to explain each and every conjunct of @ as well as @ as a whole is the belief that SDE is true. So if I am right that SDE plausibly fails, it appears that the new cosmological argument fails to establish that the explanation of the universe is not a scientific explanation, and thus does not establish that there is an orthodoxly conceived monotheistic God.
9. Gale & Pruss ‘A new cosmological argument’, 465.
10. On cases of pre-emption, see e.g. David K. Lewis ‘Causation as influence’, in John Collins, Ned Hall, & Laurie A. Paul (eds) Causation and Counterfactuals (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004), 75–106; and Hitchcock, Christopher ‘Prevention, preemption, and the principle of sufficient reason’, Philosophical Review, 116 (2007), 495–532CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11. Hitchcock ‘Prevention, preemption, and the principle of sufficient reason’, 524.
12. See Fabrice Correia ‘Grounding and truth-functions’, forthcoming in Logique et analyse; Kit Fine ‘Guide to ground’ (manuscript); and Benjamin Schnieder ‘A logic for “because”’ (manuscript).
13. Given our assumptions, its explanation is of type (i); see section ‘Explanations for conjunctive truths’.
14. It follows from the previous reasoning that, if q is contingent, then, in worlds where q is false, explaining why q is not explained does not suffice to explain why q is false and not explained. Here we would need a further explanation for the falsity of q, and this would be an explanation of why ¬q is true. It also follows from the previous reasoning that some unexplained truth could have been explained although it requires no explanation for its truth. But this is exactly what we mean when saying that atheism is a contingent truth: we mean that the universe could have been explained even though it need not be explained since it is not explained.
15. I am indebted to the participants to the eidos metaphysics seminar 2009–2010, to Fabrice Correia, Graham Oppy, and to an anonymous referee for Religious Studies for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.