Unity of the Explanandum, Unity of the Explanans: An Audit of Explanatory Transitions in Arguments for an Ultimate Origin

Arguments for an ultimate origin—kalām, contingency, and metaphysical grounding—are frequently treated as a single inference, exposed to a single objection. This article maintains that such homogenization is a mistake and proposes, in its place, an audit of explanatory transitions. Drawing on the contemporary theory of origin explanation, which analyses origin phenomena as bottlenecks in expanding causal networks (MALATERRE, 2026), and on the literature on causal selection (ROSS, 2018; GLENNAN, 2026), four senses of unity that are habitually conflated are distinguished: unity of the entity, genealogical unity, causal unity, and explanatory unity. Well-documented cases of natural genesis—the multiple origins of multicellularity, evolutionary transitions in individuality, eukaryogenesis, genomic reticulation—show that none of these senses implies the others. From this follows no refutation whatsoever of a single metaphysical ground, but rather a requirement: every passage from one explanatory structure to another calls for an independent bridge premise, formulated and defended (the Principle of Explanatory Type Integrity). Two dimensions of the bridge are further distinguished—type, when the explanatory relation changes, and scale, when only the domain changes. Applied to kalām, contingency/the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and grounding, the audit discriminates: the three arguments distribute these bridges in different ways and display unequal sensitivity to the science of origins. The same audit is applied to naturalism. The result is modest and methodological: the science of origins does not adjudicate the metaphysics of origin, but it disciplines the inferences that are meant to be drawn from it.

DIETRICH, Pablo. Unity of the Explanandum, Unity of the Explanans: An Audit of Explanatory Transitions in Arguments for an Ultimate Origin. Zenodo, tradução do autor, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23820983.