We’ve all heard of “brute facts,” even if the concept itself is a bit self-contradictory, at least in how it’s often used.

The phrase first caught my attention in Antony Flew’s book There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Working from the premise that the universe had always existed and thus didn’t need an explanation, Flew, as an atheist, believed that “as long as the universe could be comfortably thought to be not only without end but also without beginning, it remained easy to see its existence (and its most fundamental features) as brute facts.”

Though belief in an eternally existing universe had been around at least since Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), the notion came with numerous difficulties, including simple common sense: The universe does seem a rather vast and complicated state of affairs not to have some explanation for why it exists, much less in the form and manner it does.

Yet a “brute fact” is supposed to be what just is, without any explanation for it being as it is, or even for it being at all. It’s not that we don’t know what the explanation is, but that no explanation exists—period, which is why the appellation “brute fact” for the creation rings hollow. To say that the universe “just is” is akin to answering a child’s question about why the sky is blue with “It just is.”

When Flew came to believe that the universe was created, his “brute fact” turned out not to be so “brute” after all. Something more brutish, more fundamental to the cosmos, had to explain it. Some argue that theinitial singularity—a hypothesized infinite density during which space-time was infinitely shrunken—was the brute fact out from which the universe arose. Or that quantum foam, the supposed fundamental “fabric” from which the universe was created, is the most brutish of facts.

Whatever deep reasons buttress belief in these cosmogonic speculations (and they are speculations), and whatever the mathematical formulas used to describe them, such propositions as “initial singularity” or “quantum foam” hardly seem like “brute facts” (they might not even be “facts”). After all, why were they there, where did they come from, and why did they have the qualities (no matter how primal and basic) that they did to begin with? If nothing else, aren’t the individual numbers, letters, and signs in their equations more brutish than the equations themselves? And why those numbers, letters, and signs as opposed to others? Trying to explain the creation of the universe by such contingencies, no matter how basic or primal, merely pushes things back quite far but does not get us to the ultimate origin.

The principle of sufficient reason claims that nothing occurs without a cause. Some argue that quantum indeterminism, the idea that—at the level of subatomic particles—events happen only probabilistically, with no evident cause, refutes that principle. Perhaps. But what caused the universe at the quantum level to be probabilistic to begin with? A roulette wheel works on probabilities, but those same probabilities didn’t create the wheel and make it to work as it does in the first place. Quantum indeterminism, though complicating matters, doesn’t solve the problem.

The only brute fact that doesn’t need an explanation, but just is (because it always was), would be an eternally existent God. What else? Scripture says of Jesus that “all things were made; and without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3). Anything “made that was made,” that is, anything that once didn’t exist but then did, such as quantum foam or the initial singularity, couldn’t be brute facts. They have a cause that automatically removes “brute” from the phrase, leaving only “fact,” and the fact demands explanation. Unless you can live with an infinite regress, it has to stop somewhere, at an ultimate uncaused cause. And though we can’t “prove” this brute fact, the God depicted in Scripture is, surely, the most rational option.