How isn’t it a brute fact? It exists, it always existed and will always exist, and proof of it’s existence is it’s necessity.
Before I continue I’ll clarify my objection is to ontological brute facts, and you assert that an Uncaused Cause would be one.
I disagree. What is a brute fact? Something which exists as an exception to the principle of sufficient reason, which I would state as “everything has sufficient reason for why it exists.” Furthermore, this sufficient reason must be either intrinsic to the thing itself, or from another. The Uncaused Cause would (in order to not be an exception to the PSR) have to have its sufficient reason in itself and not from another.
I don’t know if this is the place to go down the rabbit hole, but few more points on that.
(1) Obviously, to be justified, we’d need to avoid arbitrary claims about why a thing does not have a sufficient reason in itself and not from another.
(2) Also, obviously we’d need to avoid arbitrary claims that a thing has intrinsic sufficient reason. We cannot just say “because it is.” That’d be the equivalent of a brute fact which we’re trying to avoid. In the case of God, I (and others) claim, rational arguments can be presented such that it is understandable that it has sufficient reason, once the relevant background is grasped. It is rationally justifiable and follows from the material, so is not an arbitrary claim.
(3) I’d like to distinguish (in my terminology, anyway) a distinction between
reason and
cause. Causes are a subset of reasons, specifically causes are reasons that come from another.
Goodness for me would be things like ‘life, health, and freedom’
Natural law theory finds its explanation in the natures of things rather than just brute fact assertions, whether we try to explain why the natures are at all or not. Those things are good, but goodness more broadly (in inorganic and organic things, non-living or living) is obedience to nature. Or more technically the fulfillment of the natural appetites/tendencies of things, the actualization of potency.
l wouldn’t call them evils, they are just bad
I suppose much of the public use of the word evil would either refer to something egregiously bad, something morally bad, or something malevolent. In the Thomist tradition they’re basically just synonyms, and not for anything malevolent or even related to moral agency. It just means some privation of something that should be in a thing.
