You might think that there are oh so many things that need explaining. We still don’t really know where the virus came from. There are lots of folk who think they can explain this, or at least want us to think they can. It’s all down to the malevolence of the Chinese Communist Party we are told. Even if the CCP did not release the virus deliberately, they were up to no good in a lab in Wuhan, got sloppy, and it escaped. The rest is history. Now this might be the correct explanation for what transpired. But it is fair to say that outside of the CCP no-one really knows, and of course it would naïve to expect the CCP to be particularly forthcoming. For their part they’ve been keen to push a counter-explanation suggesting that it is all a CIA plot to tarnish China. Closer to home with over 50% of the UK fully vaccinated (ie over 30M people have now had two doses of vaccine), there are still those who pop up on the news saying they will not be vaccinated because no one has explained to their satisfaction how the vaccines work, and how they can be sure that they are safe. And notwithstanding the success of the vaccination campaign in the UK, no one has yet explained to Dominic Cummings satisfaction how Matt Hancock managed to keep his job for so long. So many people, in search of so many explanations, for so many different things. Someone is going to be disappointed. And all of this is before you get to explaining really tricky stuff like why are we here? Why is there a “here” in the first place? Did God really do it or was there nothing to “do”? I’ve been giving some thought to explanations.
The first odd thing about them is that they are not always required. In fact, in contrast to where I began, they are only really required on the odd occasion. There are lots of things that all of us don’t need, and don’t expect, explanations for. Despite the heroic mathematical efforts of Newton and his successors, I don’t really need someone to explain gravity to me. The basics I get. If I step off of a tall building, nothing good will come of it. It’s not so much that I would be happy with absolutely any explanation for why I would plummet to the ground (what philosophers call “folk” explanations), it’s more that I don’t feel in need of any explanation at all. In fact, I’m so not interested in gravity, it’s only when it is somehow thwarted that my interest is peaked and I’m likely to go in search of an explanation. This is particularly the case when on the basis of that explanation I might consider taking some risk or other. So while I’m not particularly interested in gravity, I am interested in what keeps aeroplanes in the sky.
However, it is worth pointing out that even in this case my interest only goes so far. I suppose if I was really that bothered I would have done a degree in aeronautical engineering (I actually did a degree in Physiology and then a PhD in Neurobiology). So as I’ve pointed out before, what I actually do is put my trust (or to use another word my faith) in the people who did do their degrees in aeronautical engineering, and have designed safe aeroplanes. Of course I do this in the full knowledge that because designing and building aeroplanes is a human activity it will be flawed, along with other activities like fuelling, operating and maintaining aircraft. But in the absence of evidence that aeroplanes fall out of the sky every day (which they don’t), I’m prepared to fly and so defy gravity, if only in a well explained and therefore well understood way (at least in principle if not actually in personal fact).
It seems that I am prepared to accept as a good explanation one that provides either me, or people I trust, with some suitable level of understanding. And the level of understanding required is likely to vary depending on the extent to which I might be risking something if the explanation turns out to be wrong. Any explanation that is likely to satisfy me is likely to satisfy you provided that we are prepared to run the same risks, have the same priorities and are prepared to trust the same people. But this is where the trouble starts. The levels of risk we are prepared to take may be different for perfectly understandable reasons. The levels of trust we are prepared to place in different individuals, groups, bodies or authorities is also likely to vary. So while I might be prepared to accept a given explanation, you might not. And in all of this, I haven’t yet mentioned what we would both likely think is the most important criterion that should be applied to any explanation – the extent to which it actually is the true explanation for whatever it is we want to explain. That of course is assuming that true explanations are ever possible at all.
Given this it should come as no surprise that intelligent people disagree even about when something needs and explanation. In a famous BBC radio debate in 1948 on the existence of God between Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell, they couldn’t agree on whether an explanation was required for the existence of the universe. Copleston thought that the existence of the universe, that there is something rather than nothing, just cried out for an explanation. But Russell replied "The Universe is just there, and that's all there is". All other things being equal, there probably is no objective way to choose between these alternatives. But in this case all other things are not exactly equal. For most of human history, and in most of the world today, most human beings appear to have felt and appear to feel that there needs to be an explanation for the existence of something rather than nothing, and that the explanation is to be found in outside the material and the natural. Now even although this observation is data of a sort, it doesn’t mean that this feeling is an accurate guide as to how things really are. It all may be an illusion, perhaps a psychological by-product of our so-called “big brains”.
However, there is a Biblical explanation for this intuition that there is something more going on than the stuff we can see, hear, touch, smell and feel. According to Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has put eternity into man’s heart” – it’s designed in, by a God who is there. Add to that inner intuition the external self-revelation of God through the created order of things (the “sort” of universe we find ourselves in), the specific revelation of God in the Bible, and the (admittedly fallible) experience of many thousand if not millions of believers over centuries. This points me to not just the existence of an explanation for who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re headed, but to what that explanation is. It seems to me that while explaining even hard stuff is hard, it is not impossible.
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