My working definition of explanation is the provision of new facts to bring the world back to expectation. For example, when I wake up in the morning, I expect to see my car sitting in the driveway. If, one morning, I were to wake up and see that my care is absent from the driveway, I would likely experience the confusion (and sometimes alarm) that one does when the world fails to conform to expectation. If I were to then recall a new fact (new to my immediately occurrent thoughts), it could have the effect of bringing the world back to expectation. “Of course, my car is not there, as usual, because I left it with the mechanic yesterday and received a lift home from my wife!” I might be heard to exclaim. The recollection of these facts, in bringing the world back to an expected baseline of normalcy, has served the function of explaining it and, thus, so I suppose, this is what explanation is.
This definition is somewhat tested by the situation in which someone is asked to explain something that the asker already understands completely, such as when a teacher asks a student to explain something in order to gauge the student’s understanding. The teacher expects the student to give a set of facts that are also entirely expected, so that there is no sense in which the student has explained something to the teacher by providing new facts that return the teacher’s experienced world back to an expected baseline of normalcy. However, part of the skill of being a teacher is to imagine oneself in a situation of having less knowledge than is the case, in order to effectively assess what needs to be done to move students from one level of understanding, concerning a subject, to the next, more informed level. So, in assessing a student’s understanding by requiring the student to explain, the teacher imagines being at the student’s initial level of understanding, where some experience of the world would appear problematic and unexpected, and therefore what belief in new facts would be required in order to bring the world back to a baseline of normalcy for someone in that relative state of ignorance. The student is then tested to see whether she both accepts the world situation as unproblematic and expected, and is able to specify the facts that make the difference between a student being confused or unsurprised by the world situation in question.
Of course, there are different categories of explanation, depending on the categorisation of the facts that do the job of bridging the gap between the world experienced and the world expected. For example, facts of logical necessity yield logical explanations, facts about persisting physical regularities yield causal explanations, and facts about normal mental processes (whether universally or culturally normal) yield motivational explanations of personal behaviour. As to how many categories there are, whether those categories are circumscribed by principled demarcations, and whether some are reducible to others, these questions are not of immediate interest to me. I am immediately interested in the problem presented by the seemingly available categories and the desire to understand the actions of an omnipotent being, as the God of classical theism is supposed to be.
Let’s set up the problem. We want an explanation as to why an omnipotent God would have done something, such as planting a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in a place where a couple who have been warned not to eat the fruit of such a tree have been given to live. Setting to one side the question of the moral implications of God planting the Tree, we simply want an explanation of the act of planting the Tree, i.e. an answer to the question, “God, why did you plant that tree there?” The answer will not be a logical or causal explanation, because an omnipotent being would not be logically or physically necessitated to so act. More likely, we are looking for a motivational explanation. We want God to exhibit beliefs and desires considered to be normal for someone of God’s putative character, which would also normally result in the planting of the Tree in all the relevant circumstances. However, we do not consider it normal that God would have a brute or basic desire to plant the Tree, which is to say, God just really had a hankering to put the Tree and the couple in the same locale and nothing more can be said of it. That does not meet our expectation of the way people, who are of the kind that we imagine God to be, think and desire. It confuses us and we, therefore, seek an explanation.
Unfortunately, such an explanation would require two things of God that will not be the case: a desire that we expect of such a person and circumstances that require God to resort to certain instrumental means in order to achieve ends that satisfy that reasonable desire, where those means involve the planting of the Tree. We cannot have such an explanation, because God is omnipotent and need not have recourse to means in order to satisfy any desire. So, if God uses means, then those means must be something also desired as an end in themselves, which probably means that they cease to be characterisable as means, at all. One response to this problem is to shrug and say that God’s ways are not our ways. This has certain appeal to me as someone for whom the Principle of Sufficient Reason has never seemed intuitive, and who sees God as providing ultimate explanations – the explanatory buck stops, here! However, this is unsatisfying to many, so I wish to explore another approach.
The approach could be dubbed narrative explanation. One way that we expect the world to be is for events to follow a narrative structure: an initially stable state of affairs followed by a destabilising upheaval developing and culminating in a climactic event that resolves the instability by transforming the situation and participants into a new, stable state of affairs. This is more simply known known as orientation, complication and climax/resolution. It is now common, after poststructuralism’s influence on anthropology and psychology, to view this tendency to impose narrative structure upon our experiential world through an anti-realist lens, which means that the universe is just one thing after another and does not develop in episodes of rising and falling tension. We are driven by psychological and cultural imperatives to frame and organise our experiences in terms of discrete narratives, but there is no objective matter of fact about such things. So, for example, attempts to explain history in terms of grand narrative arcs that objectively describe the inevitable development of human civilisation or socio-evolutionary stages are well out of fashion.
Even so, conforming to a narrative structure can still provide an explanation as to why an author would write a story in a certain way, not just in the sense of a motivational explanation (we expect authors to write audience-pleasing narratives in order to get published), but in the more direct sense that the author shares our basic sense of narrative structure and, so, we expect the story to be written accordingly. If we are orientated to a protagonist’s situation at the beginning of a story, we assume that these details have been foregrounded because they are relevant to the way in which the situation will be destabilised by complications, and in this sense, the destabilising events explain the preceding orientation by satisfying that expectation. Similarly, we assume that the resolution will feature the situational and character development needed to return to narrative stability, and in that way explain the meaning of the preceding tension or conflict by satisfying that expectation. Hence, all events of the plot are explicable if they take their place in a recognisable narrative structure. Contrastingly, if an author writes a story without an apparent source of narrative tension or conflict, we become confused and start asking about for an explanation as to what the author and publisher were thinking. Maybe the narrative is subtler and more literary than the pulp thrillers to which we are accustomed. Maybe there is some sophisticated artistic or experimental literary reason that we are being asked to work through this grindingly boring wad of words. In any event, it is only when a narrative structure is not apprehended that explanation in terms of the author’s motivation becomes a consideration, because the world of our experience has failed to meet our expectation having regard to internal narrative elements alone.
It is suggested that the actions of an omnipotent deity can also be explained via narrative explanation. An all-powerful God is analogous to the author of fiction, in the sense that each has complete power over the created world, notwithstanding that one is real and one is imaginary. Neither has the need of means to realise their will within their created world. Furthermore, if an author of fiction plants a tree of forbidden fruit nearby characters who might desire to eat of it, then that creative choice is explained by the narrative tension and conflict that will be caused when those characters succumb to temptation. Cannot the creative choices of an omnipotent deity be explained in the same way? The obvious response to this question is that the author of fiction messes with the lives of fictional people, while the Deity messes with the lives of real people. However, that is an objection to the moral culpability that God may or may not have for involving real people in a narrative of suffering, albeit before a happy ending. That is a separate question, and one which I addressed in this prior post. It is not an objection to the assertion that the planting of the Tree is explained by the strife and glory that follows in a grand narrative of humanity’s fall from, and eventual reinstatement to, a position of divine favour. The ultimate ‘why’ of any story becomes clear with the sense of an ending and, thus, the completion of a narrative structure. That is explanation enough for all that came before, whether or not there is any ancillary purpose of the author in writing it, or benefit we might receive by reading it.
Theocentric Posthumanism 