Would you disagree with any of the above?
'fraid so.
One option is I can try to answer the question in its general form, which generally results in facile non-answers, like "Because of their various properties and the constraints of their environment," which turns out to answer all three of those questions equally well (or poorly).
I think it would be more helpful to explain why the properties and constraints of their environments led to the actual result, wouldn't it? Rather than describing what kind of explanation how a result might have, in general terms.
For example, buildings are made out of the materials we make them out of because we choose materials that won't collapse, people do what they do because (insert general theory of psychology here) and so on and so forth.
Or I can try to replace the general question with a series of representative specific questions, which I then try to answer, in the hopes of either thereby jointly exhausting the original set, or of thereby finding a general strategy for answering specific questions that I'm confident can be applied to members of the original set as I encounter them.
Of course, someone smarter than me might be able to skip the specific-questions stage altogether and construct such a general strategy or itemized explanation solely by analyzing the general question... but if I'm not that smart, I'm not that smart.
Apparently I'm even less smart, because I have no idea what you're saying here :(
You ask:
"Why is there everything? Including the things you assume exist when providing a naturalistic explanation of, say, penguins?"
If I try to answer that question generally, I get "Everything that exists, exists as a consequence of the way everything that existed a moment earlier existed, and all of that stuff existed as a consequence of the way everything existed a moment before that, and so on and so on." Which is unsatisfyingly general, as expected, but accurate enough. (Or, to quote Lorraine Hansberry: "Things as they are are as they are and have been and will be that way because they got that way because things were as they were in the first place!")
Right, but I'm asking for an explanation of that whole stack of turtles - not how an individual turtle stays up, or even how every turtle stays up, but why the universe is not in the counterfactual no-turtle state.
Maitzen makes a similar argument, which I rebutted in my earlier comment:
The closest he comes to answering the actual question is this...
At this point, defenders of supernaturalism might counter that naturalistic explanations must ultimately bottom out at brute, unexplained posits. But I see no reason naturalistic explanations can’t go forever deeper. One bad reason for concluding that they can’t is the notion that x can’t explain y unless x itself is self explanatory. I don’t see that notion as at all implied by our ordinary concept of explanation, which allows that x can explain y even if something else altogether explains x. Moreover, there are grounds for thinking that naturalistic explanations not only could but must go forever deeper. A common attitude among scientists is that the more they discover, the more there is yet to discover—the more they know, the more they realize they don’t know—a pattern there’s no reason to think won’t continue indefinitely. Indeed, scientific discoveries routinely raise at least as many questions as they answer. Biologists have described some 80,000 species of roundworm, for example, but suspect there might be a million species. More generally, having discovered organisms in places they didn’t think could support life, biologists now worry that they lack even a rough idea of the total number of species; knowing more shows us we know less than we thought we knew. Furthermore, history teaches, just when some scientists begin to think the explanatory end is in sight, a revolution comes along to open domains of further inquiry. Maxwell gives way to Planck and Einstein, and Hilbert gives way to Go¨del. Jonathan Schaffer usefully catalogues several other examples of this kind.
... which, naturally, misses the point. Yes, we can imagine something infinitely old and fractally complex existing - although there may be some technical reason why it's impossible, I don't know of any - but we can also, counterfactually, imagine it not existing, and declaring it's turtles all the way down does not explain why this counterfactual is not true (in fact, I think it probably is true, because blah blah complexity bah blah Occam's Razor.)
f I want a more satisfying answer, I either ask someone much smarter than me, or I start breaking it down into particulars. Why are there penguins? If my answer to that assumes that A exists, why is (or was) there A? Etc., etc., etc. In the hope of thereby finding a general strategy for answering specific "Why is there X?" questions that I'm confident can be applied to everything that exists.
The usual naturalist strategy for this is to describe how other things that exist result in X, but of course this fails when applied to everything that exists.
For example, buildings are made out of the materials we make them out of because we choose materials that won't collapse,
But that simply isn't an adequate explanation for why we build materials out of the materials we make them out of.
This can be easily demonstrated by listing the materials that go into the construction of any building in your town and ranking those materials by how resistant to collapse they are. You will find that lots of the materials involved -- glass, gypsum board, fiberglass insulation, etc, etc, etc. -- are not resistant to colla...
Where the mind cuts against reality's grain, it generates wrong questions—questions that cannot possibly be answered on their own terms, but only dissolved by understanding the cognitive algorithm that generates the perception of a question.
One good cue that you're dealing with a "wrong question" is when you cannot even imagine any concrete, specific state of how-the-world-is that would answer the question. When it doesn't even seem possible to answer the question.
Take the Standard Definitional Dispute, for example, about the tree falling in a deserted forest. Is there any way-the-world-could-be—any state of affairs—that corresponds to the word "sound" really meaning only acoustic vibrations, or really meaning only auditory experiences?
("Why, yes," says the one, "it is the state of affairs where 'sound' means acoustic vibrations." So Taboo the word 'means', and 'represents', and all similar synonyms, and describe again: How can the world be, what state of affairs, would make one side right, and the other side wrong?)
Or if that seems too easy, take free will: What concrete state of affairs, whether in deterministic physics, or in physics with a dice-rolling random component, could ever correspond to having free will?
And if that seems too easy, then ask "Why does anything exist at all?", and then tell me what a satisfactory answer to that question would even look like.
And no, I don't know the answer to that last one. But I can guess one thing, based on my previous experience with unanswerable questions. The answer will not consist of some grand triumphant First Cause. The question will go away as a result of some insight into how my mental algorithms run skew to reality, after which I will understand how the question itself was wrong from the beginning—how the question itself assumed the fallacy, contained the skew.
Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so, if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
Such questions must be dissolved. Bad things happen when you try to answer them. It inevitably generates the worst sort of Mysterious Answer to a Mysterious Question: The one where you come up with seemingly strong arguments for your Mysterious Answer, but the "answer" doesn't let you make any new predictions even in retrospect, and the phenomenon still possesses the same sacred inexplicability that it had at the start.
I could guess, for example, that the answer to the puzzle of the First Cause is that nothing does exist—that the whole concept of "existence" is bogus. But if you sincerely believed that, would you be any less confused? Me neither.
But the wonderful thing about unanswerable questions is that they are always solvable, at least in my experience. What went through Queen Elizabeth I's mind, first thing in the morning, as she woke up on her fortieth birthday? As I can easily imagine answers to this question, I can readily see that I may never be able to actually answer it, the true information having been lost in time.
On the other hand, "Why does anything exist at all?" seems so absolutely impossible that I can infer that I am just confused, one way or another, and the truth probably isn't all that complicated in an absolute sense, and once the confusion goes away I'll be able to see it.
This may seem counterintuitive if you've never solved an unanswerable question, but I assure you that it is how these things work.
Coming tomorrow: A simple trick for handling "wrong questions".