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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from the Laws of Nature

Form

As used by Richard Swinburne (the argument from "regularities of succession") and popularly by John Lennox and Frank Turek:

  1. The universe is governed by consistent, universal laws: the same physics holds in every galaxy and at every time.
  2. Laws require a lawgiver. A law is a prescription, and a prescription requires a mind that prescribes. Alternatively, in Swinburne's form: the regularity of nature is improbable on naturalism, since there is no reason for mindless matter to behave uniformly, but expected on theism.
  3. Therefore there is a divine lawgiver who imposes and sustains the laws.

My Positions

  1. "Law" is an Equivocation. A law of nature is a description of how things behave, not a rule they consult. The lawgiver version trades on the legal sense of the word, in which a law is a command, and then imports the commander. Nothing in physics is prescribed; electrons do not obey the Schrödinger equation, the equation describes electrons. Remove the metaphor and the argument says "things behave regularly, therefore someone told them to", which is Reification.
  2. The regularity of nature is a presupposition of enquiry, not a finding that needs a cause. Any investigation, including theology, assumes that the world will behave tomorrow as it did today (My Presuppositions). I cannot explain why the world is regular, and neither can the theist: either God's nature is itself regular, in which case there is a regularity left unexplained, or God's will is arbitrary, in which case the laws could change at any moment and we are back to a brute fact with a name attached (Münchhausen trilemma).
  3. A universe without regularities would contain no one to notice. Stable chemistry, stable stars, and brains capable of asking the question all require that the same rules hold from place to place and moment to moment. That we find ourselves in a regular universe is not surprising (Anthropic). It is the only kind of universe that could be found.
  4. The laws may be necessary, or may be the only way things could be. We do not know whether the laws of physics could have been otherwise. If they are necessary consequences of a deeper structure, premise 2's improbability vanishes. Swinburne assigns a low probability to regularity on naturalism without a distribution over possible universes, which is to say he assigns it (Fine-Tuning Argument).
  5. The theist wants the laws and their suspension. The same apologist who argues from the uniformity of nature to God argues from miracles, which are violations of it, to the same God. A lawgiver who sustains the laws moment by moment and breaks them on request is not evidence of regularity; he is a standing threat to it.
  6. Even granted, the conclusion is Deism. A source of regularity is a very long way from a person who cares about anything.

Notes

Helen Beebee's "non-governing" conception of laws (2000) sets out the position I hold: laws are the best systematisation of what happens, in the tradition of David Hume and David Lewis, and the question "what makes things obey them?" has a false presupposition. Sean Carroll's The Big Picture (2016) gives the physicist's version. The theistic form, that laws are God's habits, was put by Nicolas Malebranche in the 1670s and has the consequence that every event is God's direct act, which creates more problems for the theist than it solves (Theodicy).

Sources

  • Swinburne, R., The Existence of God (2nd ed., 2004), ch. 8
  • Foster, J., The Divine Lawmaker (2004), the strongest philosophical defence
  • Beebee, H., "The Non-Governing Conception of Laws of Nature", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000)
  • Carroll, S., The Big Picture (2016)
  • Lennox, J., God's Undertaker (2007), for the popular form

Also see