Illustrating the burden of proof - pay me!

[LadyForCamus]

I think you've got the telescope the wrong way around.  While some phenomenon appear to have explanations, and the more salient the explanations may differ, that's totally unrelated to whether things necessarily must have explanations.  Additionally it's far from clear to what things the PSR should apply and why, and for which things it need not apply.  God will fall on one side or the other of that line for no objectively describable reason.  So as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing intuitively obvious about the many forms of the PSR.  That some things do in fact have explanations grants no credit toward the principle that all things need explanations.  And if you think about it, how can such things bottom out except in an infinite regress of explanations because there's always going to be a layer deeper that you can go.  Take elementary particles.  If quarks are the smallest unit of substance, the PSR seems to demand that there be a smaller unit that explains quarks or else there's a violation of the PSR.  When a philosophical principle starts dictating how the world composes itself, the principle needs to go.  I'm pretty sure reality isn't going to step aside for it.

That would be a fair critique. How does one decide what needs explaining and what doesn't? Again, not much different than saying certain claims have a high burden of proof, some very little, and some not at all. Changing the evidentiary standard in proportion to the questioner's incredulity isn't very principled IMHO.

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I’m certain that the bottom, in the eyes of the theist, is God. But I’ve yet to hear a rational justification for why the principle doesn’t apply to him/her/it.

What is the rational justification for saying anything "just is what it is"? I do not have an answer but it seems theoretically possible, and worthy of discussion, to discern between what is necessary versus what is merely possible or impossible.

I agree that it’s an interesting discussion. That’s why I asked how/where god fits in here. You deferred the discussion for another time. Unless I misunderstood which part of my post that was in reference to. In which case, apologies ahead of time for the confusion.