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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The version of the PSR used by traditional defenders of the cosmological argument is inadequate because it fails to provide the best explanation for the universe.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.The best explanation required of a sound cosmological argument is an absolute explanation, where everything is explained completely and there are no brute or contingent facts.
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    • 2.Pruss and Swinburne reject absolute explanation for complete explanations, where the effect is explained fully by the cause but no explanation of the cause at the time of occurrence is required.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Leibniz's original PSR demands that sufficient reason explain why things exist rather than not, requiring explanation of existence itself, not merely causal antecedents.
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    • 2.A complete explanation that leaves the explainer's own existence as a brute fact violates the very explanatory demand that motivated invoking the PSR in the first place.
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    • 3.Pruss's 'complete explanation' terminus generates an explanatory regress problem identical to the one it was invoked to solve, rendering it question-begging as a stopping point.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Van Inwagen's principle of explanatory loyalty holds that truncating an explanatory schema mid-application undermines the rational force of the schema's initial deployment.
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    • 2.If contingent facts about a necessary being's nature remain unexplained, the cosmological argument trades one set of brute contingencies for another without genuine explanatory gain.
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    • 3.Rescher's coherentist account of explanation requires that ultimate explanations be self-sustaining, meaning the explanans cannot itself introduce unexplained contingency.
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    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.