Originally posted by knightmeister
I think so. The ultimate truth to me is when we scrape something down to it's bare bones , right down to it's core. For example , the ultimate truth of all biology could be said to be carbon (maybe we could go further) but there must be a point where we can go no further and explanation stops , science then stops as well and rational enquiry too.
I don't really care for your terminology. But I think I understand what you are talking about in this thread. I think at bottom you are inquiring about the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which shoulders some common formulations of the Cosmological Argument. Unless you have some better statement of the PSR, let's take it to be the following:
PSR: There must be an explanation of the existence of any being and of any positive fact whatever.**
So, your principal question in this thread seems to boil down to whether or not we should accept the PSR. Or, would there be anything wrong with stating, contrary to the PSR, that there is at least some brute fact or being that has no explanation? Personally, I see no good reasons to accept the PSR, and I don't see anything wrong with the existence of a brute fact.
That might be "unsatisfactory" on some level, but the alternative seems even more unsatisfactory to me. The alternative seems to be to recognize "either explained by another/others or explained by nothing" as a false dichotomy. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument might say that "explained by itself" is another possibility. The PSR could hold if there exists some self-existent being whose existence is explained by itself. This seems to be a core element of many theistic concepts -- that God is a self-existent being in that his existence is accounted for or explained by his very nature. I am not sure if I am misreading you, but you seem to be suggesting that God's existence would have to be brute and explained by nothing. However (and not that I agree with them in the slightest, but), some would argue with your sentiment that "Surely if ultimate truth can be explained then it stops being ultimate because we have found a reason for it to exist. Then it would not be ultimate truth any more but the truth that explains the ultimate truth would become the ultimate truth instead". They would probably say that in your noting this problem of regress, you are somehow missing the possibility of self-existence: that God's existence IS explained -- but explained, they would say, by his very own essence. To me, what you say seems to preclude the PSR (again, I might be misreading you); whereas, this particular theistic conception doesn't seem to preclude the PSR.
But at any rate, I don't see how the idea of self-existence makes any sense whatsoever -- it makes less sense to me than a brute fact. How could existence be part of essence? I think such a notion would have to fall to considerations that show that existence is not a first-order predicate. But if the self-existence idea doesn't fly, then I think we are left with entertaining brute, unintelligible articles of reality. For example, even if one were to say that each and every being is explained by some set of other beings, stretching back in infinite regress, I think that still simply won't satisfy the PSR. I think we are left failing to provide non-ersatz explanation for at least one otherwise brute fact: that there are and always have been dependent beings (dependent in that their existence relies on causal activity of other beings).
So I'm not really sure how to read you here. But if your contention is that there are not good grounds for accepting the PSR, then I agree. If your contention is that there exist at least some brute articles of reality, I think I would also agree. But I would have thought that you take God to be "self-existent" in the way described above, such that in principle you have full explanation. Or maybe you are smarter than I give you credit and you already understand this "full explanation" to be illusory? 😛
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**This is how WL Rowe states it in
The Philosophy of Religion, 1978.