Faith and Philosophy

Volume 37, Issue 2, April 2020

Determining the Need for Explanation

Several theistic arguments are formulated as arguments for the best explana­tion. This article discusses how one can determine that some phenomenon actually needs an explanation. One way to demonstrate that an explanation is needed is by providing one. The proposed explanation ought to either make the occurrence of the phenomenon in question more probable than it occur­ring by chance, or it has to sufficiently increase our understanding of the phe­nomenon. A second way to demonstrate that an explanation is needed is to show that the phenomenon in question both violates our expectations and is particularly noticeable.