Brute facts are unavoidable, or the art of confusing your own ignorance with the structure of reality

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The original article, published on November 2, 2016 on a blog that has since disappeared, is reproduced below for reference, followed by my critique.

Original article: "Why Brute Facts Are Unavoidable" (click to expand)

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Why Brute Facts Are Unavoidable

If you're a naturalist like myself you have most likely come to the conclusion that the existence of the universe (or multiverse, if there's more than one universe) is a brute fact. A brute fact is a fact that has no explanation in principle. It's a fact that cannot have an explanation. There are many facts that do not have explanations, but can in principle. These are not technically brute facts, but are just unexplained facts. They can be explained, at least in principle, and many of them will be explained eventually. There is another category of unexplained facts that can be explained in principle, but not in practice. For example, a fact for which all the evidence proving it is destroyed might leave us no possible way to explain it, even though it would be in principle explainable if we just had access to the evidence. These are what you can call epistemic brute facts.

So we have three categories of facts here defined as such: (1) a brute fact: a fact that has no explanation in principle, (2) an epistemic brute fact: a fact that cannot be explained in practice but can in principle, and (3) an unexplained fact: a fact that can be explained both in principle and in practice but simply isn't. In addition to this there are three positions one can take on brute facts: (1) brute facts are impossible, (2) brute facts are possible but they don't exist, or (3) brute facts exist.

Now many theists argue that not only do brute facts not exist, they are in fact impossible. That is, they entail some sort of contradiction that prevents their existence. Many theists will also often try to argue that their worldview has no brute facts, and not only that, they can logically explain their worldview in terms of necessity. This is usually done by some sort of argument that attempts to conclude their god's necessary existence, along with the tacit assumption of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), which says that for every fact, there is a reason for its existence. Needless to say, the PSR and brute facts are not compatible.

What is an explanation is also important. An explanation is generally defined as a statement or account that makes something clear. It makes something understandable, intelligible. For example, the explanation of the existence of the human species is that we evolved over millions of years from another species of hominids. Explanations tell us the how and why a thing came to be, or exists at all. It is to me an open question whether or not all explanations are causal explanations. In other words, when we say X explains Y, are we always just saying X causes Y? Now I have written that causality exists differently from how it is commonly understood, but on my definition things are still explained in the traditional cause and effect notion. You just have to understand these relationships a bit different.

In this post I'm going to challenge several often heard claims about brute facts. One, that brute facts are logically impossible, and two, that believing in a god allows you avoid brute facts, by arguing that not only are brute facts possible, they are indeed unavoidable.

Claim 1: Brute facts are impossible

A theist I sometimes debate with recently wrote a post claiming brute facts are impossible because he argues, "explanatory chains are essentially ordered series. An essentially ordered series is a series wherein each member derives whatever efficacy it has from higher members--unless it is the highest member--such that if a member is lost, all the lower members will also be lost." I'm going to argue why this is in fact totally absurd. [1]

For a series to be essentially ordered, the whole chain relies on the existence of the first or highest member, which itself has to either have its own explanation in another thing, or instead be logically necessary. And the claim is that all lower members of the chain derive their intelligibility from the first member.

But this is nonsense. First, intelligibility means capable of being understood. We can understand certain things without the full explanation of everything in the chain. In science, for example, explanations in one field or domain sometimes do not rely on other fields. Explanations can exist within their respective domains and don't necessarily need other domains to make sense of them. You do not need to know a shred of quantum mechanics in order to understand sociology, or psychology. If the quantum world was a total mystery to us, we wouldn't lose any of our fundamental knowledge in these fields. You can therefore think of explanations in science using the analogy of a building, whereby each explanation of science can exist on its own floor, starting with the foundation of physics, and moving on up into chemistry, biology, and on into the social sciences. In fact, in science you sometimes can't extend knowledge from one domain to another because emergent phenomena is sometimes unavoidable. If you want to explain things in higher fields, information from the lower fields is sometimes useless. And this is even true inside the same level of science. At large scales of the universe we use general relativity to make it intelligible, and we were able to do this without knowledge of quantum mechanics, which is technically more fundamental. The two theories are in fact incompatible with one another: knowledge from general relativity doesn't explain the quantum, and vice versa.[2] They each explain their respective domains and make elements within them intelligible without the other.

So this notion that explanations are essentially ordered and that everything in the chain becomes unintelligible unless there is a logically necessary and self explained first member, or that the first member is explained by something else, is absurd. Anyone with basic knowledge of how science works or explanations work knows that you don't have to explain the whole chain in order to make each part intelligible. (The brute fact itself can also be partially intelligible, because if the fact in question is a physical thing, it can be measured and described in terms of age, shape, color, or other characteristics, even without the reason why it exists being known in principle.)

The absurdity of this claim is furthermore supported by the notion of epistemic brute facts. From the perspective of intelligibility, an epistemic brute fact is no different from a brute fact. It is a fact that cannot be explained. If an explanation chain terminates in an epistemic brute fact, we will in practice never be able to explain the first member of the chain, and so why shouldn't all the members of the chain be rendered unintelligible as well? There should be no difference. So if an epistemic brute fact doesn't negate intelligibility of the lower members of an explanatory chain, neither should a brute fact. To say otherwise would have to commit you to the notion that all members of a chain must be understood in order to explain any one part of it. The bottom line is this: explanatory chains are not essentially ordered and if that is the only argument against the possibility of brute facts, it fails to show brute facts are impossible. Brute facts therefore are logically possible because they entail no internal contradiction.

Finally, there are other claims like "everything we know of has an explanation, and if brute facts were true, science would be impossible, so therefore there are no brute facts." Claims like this are wrong on so many levels. First, accepting that brute facts are possible is not saying that most things don't have explanations. They do. When we observe something in the universe, we should always look for an explanation using tools like science. And it turns out, using science, we've been able to understand a great deal about the universe, our planet, and life on our planet. The claim I'm making is that at least one fact has no explanation. This can be true and everything in the universe can have an explanation, in the same exact way everything in the universe can have a cause, but not the universe itself. Science is totally compatible with brute facts existing. In fact, most people claim science can't answer the "ultimate questions" of existence — which I claim are brute facts. Second, just because everything we've been able to explain has an explanation, that doesn't mean everything else will. To say so makes the inductive fallacy, in addition to starting with a circular premise. So claim 1 has no argument that justifies it.

Claim 2: If god exists there are no brute facts

There is a famous trilemma in philosophy called the Münchhausen trilemma which states there are only three options when providing an explanation or proof of a given situation:

The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other
The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum
The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts

When explaining something and you go down the line of the explanatory chain you will eventually have to resort on one of these three methods. Either your explanation will be circular, it will require an additional explanation ad infinitum, or it will terminate in an axiom which itself has no further explanation. This is identical to a brute fact, the only one that doesn't lead to absurdity. Now the theist will likely claim here that they have an argument that shows their god is logically necessary. But consider this. The traditional notion of god in classical theism is that of a timeless, changeless, immaterial mind, who also must be infinitely good, infinitely wise, and can do anything logically possible. This last point is important because we must establish that god cannot transcend logic. For example, god cannot create a rock too heavy for him to lift if he's omnipotent. That would be logically impossible.

But if these properties are all so, then all of god's will and desires must exist timelessly and eternally in an unchanging, frozen state. That would mean that god timelessly and eternally had the desire to create our particular universe, and not some other universe, or no universe. God doesn't think in temporal order, as we do, weighing the pros and cons of each option, with the possibility we could have decided differently. No. God's desire to create our particular universe was eternal and unchangeable, just as his entire mind is. Here's why this is a problem. Our universe is not logically necessary; it didn't have to exist. Every theist would agree with that (that's why they claim god had to create it). But if our universe is not logically necessary then there's no logically necessary reason god had to desire it be created it. Nothing compelled god to do so or even desire to do so. So why then does god exist timelessly and eternally with the desire to create our universe, and not any other universe, or no universe at all, if each of those other options are just as logically possible, and yet also not logically necessary?

Another way to put it more succinctly is this: Why does god timelessly and eternally exist with desire X rather than desire Y, when neither desire X or Y are logically necessary or logically impossible?

Logical necessity cannot explain this scenario. There is no way to show in principle why god had to timelessly and eternally exist with the desire to create our particular universe, and not one just slightly different, or even radically different, or no universe at all. The theist would have to show that it was logically necessary for god to desire to create our universe in order to avoid eventually coming to a brute fact. He can try and say "It's because god wanted a relationship with us," but that wouldn't answer the question at all. Why did god want a relationship with us? Is that logically necessary? Could god exist without wanting a relationship with anyone? And still, even if god wanted a relationship, why did he have to desire this particular universe? There are an infinitude of logically possible universes god could have desired that would allow him to have a relationship with someone else that for no reason god didn't timelessly and eternally exist with the desire to create. A theist can also try to argue that "our universe is the best of all possible worlds, and therefore god had to desire it." But this claim is absurd on its face. I can think of a world with just one more instance of goodness or happiness, and I've easily just thought of a world that's better.

The theist is going to have to eventually come to a brute fact when seriously entertaining answers to these questions. Once he acknowledges that there is no logically necessary reason god had to timelessly and eternally exist with the desire to create our particular universe, and that god could have timelessly and eternally existed with a different desire, he's in exactly the same problem he claims the atheist is in when he says the universe is contingent and could have been otherwise, and therefore cannot explain itself. Hence, even positing a god doesn't allow you to avoid brute facts. There is no way to answer these questions, even in principle, with something logically necessary. They are all going to have to terminate eventually with the honest admission that "it just is," and no further explanation is possible. So therefore, at least one brute fact must exist, and that's exactly my view. Once you admit this, you admit that brute facts are not only logically possible, but logically necessary.

The Münchhausen trilemma, along with this dilemma, show that brute facts not only make sense, they're unavoidable even if we posit god. Thus we could argue more formally:

The traditional notion of god in classical theism is that of a timeless, changeless, immaterial mind, who also must be infinitely good, infinitely wise, and can do anything logically possible.
All of god's will and desires must exist timelessly and eternally in an unchanging, frozen state.
That would mean that god timelessly and eternally had the desire to create our particular universe, and not some other universe, or no universe.
Our universe is not logically necessary; it didn't have to exist, and god didn't have to create it.
The theist would have to show that it was logically necessary for god to create our particular universe in order to avoid eventually coming to a brute fact.
There is no way to answer this question, even in principle, with something logically necessary.
Thus at least one brute fact must exist even if god exists.

This argument is made even stronger once one considers eternalism and how that makes traditional temporal notions of creation impossible. On eternalism god would have to eternally coexist with our universe, even though our universe's existence wouldn't be logically necessary, and there wouldn't be a logically necessary reason god had to eternally coexist with it. It could have been different. So just as in logic and ethics, in metaphysics you will eventually terminate in a brute fact and no worldview is going to be able to avoid that.

Let me leave you with a joke I just thought of:

Q: Why are brute facts unavoidable? A: They just are.

[1] If you've read my critique of chapter 3 of Edward Feser's book The Last Superstition, I quote him as saying a series of causes is essentially ordered if "the later members of the series, having no independent power of motion on their own, derive the fact of their motion and their ability to move other things from the first member". (93)

[2] It certainly is the case that knowledge of quantum mechanics has helped us understand how stars form via nuclear fusion, but once you scale out to the macro the effects of quantum mechanics give way to general relativity.

There are articles that mark you. Not because they're good, but because they're dangerous: well-written enough to impress, wrong enough to mislead, and confident enough to discourage any challenge. The article "Why Brute Facts Are Unavoidable," published in November 2016 on an atheist blog that has since vanished, is one of those. It made me panic for a considerable time. And when I say panic, I mean really panic, the kind where you reread the same paragraph at three in the morning wondering if Thomas Aquinas got everything wrong.

He didn't. The article, however, did. And now that I've taken the time to understand why, I'm going to dismantle it, piece by piece, with the sincere gratitude of someone who learned something by scaring himself.

What is the article about?

The article defends two theses:

Brute facts are logically possible. A brute fact is a fact that has no explanation in principle, not just a fact we don't yet know how to explain. The author maintains that nothing in logic forbids the existence of such facts.
Even if God exists, brute facts are unavoidable. The author uses the Münchhausen trilemma and an argument about divine desire to show that theism doesn't eliminate brute facts: God cannot explain why He wanted to create this universe rather than another.

The conclusion: brute facts are not only possible but necessary. The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is false. Theism solves nothing. Move along.

It's well constructed. It's poorly thought out. Let's see why.

First confusion: epistemic intelligibility and ontological intelligibility

The central argument against essentially ordered series is this: in science, you can understand sociology without knowing quantum mechanics. Therefore explanatory chains are not essentially ordered. Therefore you don't need a first member grounding the intelligibility of the whole chain.

This argument rests on a massive confusion between two senses of the word "intelligibility."

Epistemic intelligibility is our ability to understand something. It's a fact about us, about our minds, about our methods. And it is perfectly true that we can understand sociology without knowing quantum mechanics. Our disciplines are organized in relatively independent layers, and that's a good thing, because otherwise we couldn't know anything without knowing everything.

Ontological intelligibility is the fact that a thing is intelligible, meaning that it has a reason for being, an explanation in the very structure of reality. It's a fact about the thing, not about us. And this intelligibility does not depend in the slightest on our ability to access it.

The author blithely slides from the second to the first. He shows that we can understand things without understanding their foundations, and concludes that things don't need foundations. It's like saying: "I can read a novel without knowing the author, therefore the novel has no author." The ability to read is one thing. The existence of the author is another. Our ignorance doesn't abolish causality.

And the building analogy is delicious, because it refutes its own argument. A building, says the author, has independent floors. Magnificent. But remove the foundations and all the floors collapse, whether they're "independent" or not. You can study the third floor without knowing about the basement, certainly. But the third floor exists because the basement supports it. Epistemic independence does not imply ontological independence. That is exactly Thomas Aquinas's point, and the author illustrated it unwittingly.

Second confusion: essentially ordered series

The author claims that essentially ordered series are "absurd" because scientific explanations function through independent domains. This argument reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what an essentially ordered series is.

An essentially ordered series is not a temporal chain of past causes (that's an accidentally ordered series). It is a chain of simultaneous and hierarchical causes, where each member depends currently on the higher member for its causal efficacy.

The classic example: a hand pushes a stick that pushes a stone. The stick moves the stone only because the hand moves it right now. If the hand stops, the stick stops, and the stone too. Each member of the series has no independent causal power: it derives it entirely from the higher member.

This is not a chain of scientific knowledge. It is a chain of current ontological dependence. The author is attacking a straw man: he refutes the idea that our knowledge must be total to be valid (which nobody defends), while the argument is about the fact that contingent beings depend currently on a being that sustains them in existence.

The question is not: "Can we understand chemistry without understanding physics?" (answer: yes, partially). The question is: "Would chemistry exist without physics?" (answer: no, categorically). And it is this ontological dependence, not epistemic, that essentially ordered series describe.

Third confusion: epistemic brute facts and ontological brute facts

The author introduces the notion of "epistemic brute fact": a fact that has an explanation in principle, but whose explanation is inaccessible to us in practice (for example, because the evidence has been destroyed). Then he argues: from the perspective of intelligibility, an epistemic brute fact is identical to a real brute fact. If one doesn't destroy the chain's intelligibility, neither does the other.

This is yet another confusion between epistemology and ontology, and here it is particularly glaring.

An epistemic brute fact has an explanation. We simply can't access it. The explanation exists, in the structure of reality, independently of our ability to discover it. The explanatory chain is complete ontologically, even if it is incomplete epistemically.

A real brute fact has no explanation. There isn't one. Nowhere. Neither in reality, nor in any accessible or inaccessible structure. The chain stops, not because we can't see what comes next, but because there is nothing next.

To say these two situations are identical "from the perspective of intelligibility" is to say that a wall and a mirage are identical from the perspective of visibility. Both block the view, certainly. But one has something behind it, and the other is nothing at all. The fact that we can't see the difference from our side doesn't mean there is no difference. It is, once again, the confusion between what we can know and what is.

The Münchhausen trilemma: a scarecrow

The author invokes the Münchhausen trilemma as if it were a coup de grâce. Every explanation, he says, ends either in a circle, an infinite regress, or an axiom, and an axiom is a brute fact. Therefore brute facts are unavoidable.

The problem is that the Münchhausen trilemma concerns propositional justification (how we justify our beliefs) and not ontological explanation (why things exist). These are two entirely different questions.

The epistemological question is: "How do you justify this proposition?" And yes, every chain of justification ends in premises that are not themselves justified by other premises (first principles, axioms). That's the trilemma, and it is real in the epistemological domain.

The ontological question is: "Why does this thing exist?" And the Thomistic answer is not an arbitrary axiom. It is a being whose essence is existence (ipsum esse subsistens), which means that its existence is explained by its own nature. This is not a brute fact (a fact without explanation), it is a self-explanatory fact (a fact whose explanation is internal).

The distinction is crucial. An axiom in mathematics is posited without demonstration, accepted as a conventional starting point. The necessary being is not "posited" like an axiom: it is concluded as the necessary terminus of a demonstration (the Five Ways). And its nature as a necessary being means that asking "why does it exist?" amounts to asking "why does that-which-cannot-not-exist exist?", which is a question that contains its own answer. This is not a brute fact. It is the exact opposite of a brute fact.

The author treats the necessary being as if it were a brute fact in a Sunday suit. He hasn't understood the difference between "without explanation" and "whose explanation is its own nature." It's like confusing "this object has no color" and "this object is transparent": in both cases you don't see color, but the reasons are radically different.

Divine "desire": the real error

Here is the heart of the article, and this is where the error is most interesting. The argument goes:

God is eternal, immutable, and his mind is in a "frozen" state.
God eternally has the desire to create this universe, and not another.
This universe is not logically necessary (it could have not existed).
Therefore God's desire to create this universe is not logically necessary.
Therefore there is no explanation in principle for this desire.
Therefore it is a brute fact.
Therefore even with God, brute facts are unavoidable.

The argument is formally valid. But it rests on a false premise and a major conceptual confusion.

The false premise: God has "desires" separate from his nature. The author imagines God as a human mind frozen in time, with discrete mental states (desire X, desire Y) that could have been different. But classical theism does not conceive of God this way. The doctrine of divine simplicity holds that God has no parts, no properties distinct from his essence. God's will is God. God's intelligence is God. These are not separate components that can be swapped around. To speak of God's "desire" as a contingent mental state among other possible ones is to project onto God a human psychology that classical theism explicitly rejects.

The conceptual confusion: the author conflates "having an explanation" with "being logically necessary." This is the gravest error in the entire article, and it infects the whole argument.

The PSR does not say that every fact has a logically necessary explanation. It says that every fact has a sufficient reason. And a sufficient reason can be a free act. Freedom is not arbitrariness. When you choose to write a poem rather than paint a picture, your choice has an explanation (your reasons, your motives, your nature), even if it is not logically necessary. You could have chosen otherwise. That doesn't make your choice a brute fact. It makes it a free act, which is an entirely different metaphysical category.

Likewise, God freely creates this universe. His creative act is explained by his goodness (He communicates the good) and his freedom (He is not constrained). It is not logically necessary, but it is explained. The author doesn't see the difference between "not necessary" and "not explained," and it is this confusion that holds his entire argument together.

Let me reformulate: the author asks "why did God want to create this universe rather than another?" The Thomistic answer is: because his goodness, which is identical to his essence, is rich enough to communicate itself in multiple ways, and He freely chose this one. This requires no brute fact. It requires a free being, which God is, and which the author refuses to see because he has equated "explanation" with "logical necessity."

The error on the PSR

The entire strategy of the article rests on a version of the PSR that no serious thinker defends.

The author assumes that the PSR requires that every fact be logically necessary, meaning that the opposite of every fact entails a contradiction. If that were the case, then indeed everything would be necessary, there would be no contingency, no freedom, and the universe would be a frozen block of logical necessities. And indeed, the divine choice to create this universe is not logically necessary. Victory for the author!

Except that's not the PSR. The PSR says: for every fact, there is a sufficient reason for that fact. A sufficient reason can be:

The nature of a thing (water boils at 100°C because that's its nature).
An efficient cause (the glass is broken because I dropped it).
A free act (I wrote this post because I chose to).

None of these reasons is "logically necessary" in the author's sense. The glass might not have fallen. I might not have written this post. God might not have created this universe. But all of these facts have a sufficient reason. The sufficient reason for creation is God's free goodness. It's not a brute fact. It's a free act of a necessary being.

The author erected a straw man by dressing the PSR in a requirement of universal logical necessity that nobody, not Leibniz, not Thomas, not any serious philosopher, has ever defended. Then he knocked down that straw man and declared victory.

Science and brute facts

The author claims that science is "totally compatible" with brute facts. This is technically true, but trivially true, and it proves nothing.

Science doesn't pronounce on brute facts because science doesn't pronounce on metaphysics. Science seeks empirical explanations for empirical phenomena. The question of whether, at the bottom of reality, there is an unexplained fact or a necessary being is a metaphysical question that science can neither pose nor resolve. To say "science is compatible with brute facts" is to say that science is compatible with a thesis on which it has nothing to say. It's about as informative as saying music is compatible with integral calculus.

And the inductive argument ("we've always found explanations, but that doesn't prove everything has an explanation") is curiously self-destructive. If induction doesn't justify the PSR, it doesn't justify the laws of physics either, nor the regularity of nature, nor the reliability of science itself. The author saws off the scientific branch he's sitting on in order to cut the metaphysical branch the theist is standing on. That's a high price to pay.

What the article really reveals

This article is a perfect example of what I call involuntary metaphysics. The author claims to reject metaphysics (the PSR, essentially ordered series, the necessary being), but he does metaphysics in every paragraph. He has a theory of explanation. He has a theory of necessity. He has a theory of contingency. He even has a theory of God (a frozen mind with interchangeable desires), which he uses to refute theism.

The problem is that all of his metaphysics is bad. Not bad in the sense of "I disagree," but bad in the sense of "it rests on identifiable conceptual confusions." He confuses epistemology with ontology. He confuses logical necessity with sufficient reason. He confuses freedom with arbitrariness. He confuses divine simplicity with a frozen human psychology. And each of these confusions is necessary for his argument to work. Remove a single one, and the edifice collapses.

That's why the article is dangerous. Not because it's right, but because you have to know all of that to see that it's wrong. And most readers, including me when I first read it, don't know it. The article impresses because it exploits the reader's ignorance, not because it demonstrates its thesis.

The final word

Brute facts are not unavoidable. They are not even possible, if one correctly understands the PSR and the nature of the necessary being. The article's argument rests on a series of conceptual confusions that, once identified, drain it of all substance.

But I am grateful to its author. Because it was in wrestling with his arguments that I learned to distinguish epistemology from ontology, logical necessity from sufficient reason, and divine freedom from human arbitrariness. These are distinctions that Thomas Aquinas mastered in the thirteenth century, and that I had to relearn in the twenty-first. Which goes to show that a bad argument is sometimes more formative than a good one.

And to those who, like me, panicked reading this article at three in the morning: breathe. Read Feser. Read the Summa. Read Leibniz. The answers exist, they are rigorous, and they have been there for centuries. You just have to look for them, which, I grant, is harder than reading a blog post, but infinitely more satisfying.

'ticatho