TO EXPLAIN SOMETHING MEANS TO IDENTIFY
A REAL CAUSE, OR CAUSES.
Religious folks sometimes suppose they are in the business
of describing an ultimate reality. Scientific people often can be
satisfied with a more modest goal: to provide a workable model
that allows rational predictions of proposed parametric conditions
of some experimental setup on however grand or small a scale.
To suppose that one knows about ultimate reality is to subscribe to the
attitude that "It used to be thought that..., but we now know that...."
which is unhelpful for a sceptical scientist in my view.