Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Do natural laws exist or not? Do they have any ontological reality? In Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview Moreland and Craig present three theories of natural law, “natural” here meaning mechanistic and therefore excluding both randomness and intelligent design. The first of these is descriptive; the other two, prescriptive. The regularity theory considers laws to be “generalized descriptions of the way things happen in the world.” (566) Laws merely describe what actually occurs, and it is our luck that what actually occurs is regular. Here laws are not real entities but are mind-dependent inductive generalizations resulting in mental categories of cause and effect.

This theory has the least scope as will become clear when we compare it with the other two.

“According to the nomic necessity theory, natural laws are not merely descriptive, but tell us what can and cannot happen in the natural world. They allow us to make certain counterfactual judgments, such as ‘If the density of the universe were sufficiently high, it would have recontracted long ago,’ which a purely descriptivist theory would not permit.” (567) Here the picture is of laws telling things how they must or cannot act; therefore by varying the now really existing laws we arrive at different universes. This picture, however, is misleading. Laws are not self-enforcing. If we accept nomic necessity, then laws must reside in the mind of and be willed by a lawgiver. If we assume that the lawgiver is God, then it is He who enforces the natural laws.

This theory seems to me to be less unsatisfactory, because it at least explains why there are regularities in the world.

The causal dispositions theory, championed also by Swinburne, is similar to the nomic necessity theory in that they endow laws with ontological presence. But unlike that second theory, laws reside not in the mind of the lawgiver but in the essences of things, such that each thing’s essence contains within itself a complete set of instructions regarding how that thing will interact with other objects in every conceivable set of circumstances. For example, dissolving in water is the property or, in the parlance of object-oriented computer programming, “method” of the essence of salt, and dissolving salt is a method of water. Note the mutual dependence of the properties and methods of the essences of things: salt dissolves in water and water dissolves salt. We can call on these methods as follows: salt.dissolveIn(water) or water.dissolve(salt).

The causal dispositions theory seems to me to be somewhat circular: salt’s essence is a set of everything that salt does under any conceivable set of circumstances, including, for example, dissolving in water. On the other hand, we say that salt dissolves in water, because its essence is such-and-such. Or, the essence of a man is described by what he does, where “what he does” refers to his every activity including thinking and feeling and acting — that is, both internal and external activities. At the same time people do what they do because of what they are. In practice the circularity does not matter: we run experiments to find out what a thing will do, and having determined that, ascribe the behavior to the essence of a thing and use the knowledge of the essence to predict how the thing will behave in the future.

This theory’s appeal is that it exalts what Whitehead would call “actual entities” by saying that the reality of their being is within them. They are not commanded by some higher being, such as God, slavishly obeying His decrees; on the contrary, they themselves know how to behave appropriately. They have the initiative and power and dignity of causation. They act on their own will, unfree though it is. All things then are good by their own goodness rather than God’s.