Of Brute Facts and Uncle Andrew

Yesterday I quoted the maxim “from nothing, nothing comes”; it’s actually a philosophical principle that goes back to the ancient Greeks (notably Parmenides), and it’s more typically stated in Latin: Ex nihilo nihil fit. And what it means is that “nothing”—pure, philosophical nothingness—cannot be the cause of anything coming to be. Parmenides used this to argue that change must be an illusion, because any change involves something coming to be that previously wasn’t. Sure, it seems that there’s a red apple now, where there used to be a green one; but there was no redness before, and since nothing comes from nothing the apple couldn’t have changed color.

Aristotle addresses this argument in the first chapters of his Physics; he points out that the redness doesn’t in fact come out of nothing, but out of the potency of the green apple to ripen. The potency to be is one kind of being; actual being is another. All change is the actualization of some potency.

But I digress.

Ex nihilo nihil fit is closely related to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which is stated in various ways; I’ll state it as, “Everything that exists has a reason for its existence.” If nothing comes from nothing, then everything that comes to be has to come from something.

Now, this seems intuitively obvious, but in the rarefied heights of philosophy you begin to hear of something called a brute fact. A brute fact isn’t a particularly ill-behaved fact (then again, maybe it is); it’s a fact that cannot be explained, that has no explanation even in principle.

For example, the universe is sometimes termed a “brute fact”. That’s a philosophical statement that says, “Yes, the universe exists; but it just exists. There’s no reason for it to exist. There’s no explanation for it; it just exists.”

One can be forgiven for thinking that when someone says, “X is a brute fact,” what he’s really saying is, “I cannot explain X in my system of thought.” This is, in fact, how the term is practically used by scientists, whether they realize it or not: it’s a way of saying, “Physics doesn’t give an explanation for the existence of X.” But often enough that gets combined with the philosophical principle that science is the only true way of knowing, and you’re back to straight up philosophical brute facts again. But for most scientists, I expect, brute facts are a form of humility: “I can explain many things, but not that.”

The ones that surprise me are the philosophers. There are materialist philosophers who genuinely think the universe is a brute fact. There are philosophers who think that subjective consciousness—what you feel like in your head—is brute fact, that it cannot be explained…in fact, that it doesn’t make sense. (At that, they are better than the ones whose insist that consciousness doesn’t really exist.)

But whatever brute fact X might be, it truly doesn’t make sense in their philosophical systems. So much the worse for their philosophical systems, say I, but they won’t let go of them. I’m reminded of Digory’s Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew. Arriving in the land that will be Narnia, he is faced with Aslan, singing the world into being. But of course lions can’t sing. Uncle Andrew doesn’t want a lion to sing, and he tries to shut it out:

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to. And when at last the Lion spoke and said, “Narnia awake,” he didn’t hear any words: he heard only a snarl. And when the Beasts spoke in answer, he heard only barkings, growlings, bayings, and howlings. And when they laughed—well , you can imagine.

I often ponder Uncle Andrew when I’m reading about contemporary philosophy.

Now, for extra credit: we Catholics say that God simply is; He didn’t come to be, He just is, and He is the cause of everything else. Why isn’t the existence of God a brute fact?

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