Q&A: Can Laws of Nature Exist Randomly
Can Laws of Nature Exist Randomly
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask whether a law of nature can exist without a lawgiver.
I’m not speaking about the idea that the laws are special in a way that creates a person or something like that, but about the very fact that laws exist at all—that every piece of matter acts in the same way as another.
I saw a few responsa here on this topic, but I didn’t find an answer in them, and I also didn’t see any discussion of this question in the notebooks.
I’d be glad to hear the different sides of the issue.
Answer
There aren’t any especially sophisticated sides here. After all, we’re dealing with intuitions. A common assumption is that there are no laws without a lawgiver. But the fact that different objects behave similarly is not necessarily a law in the usual sense. It could also stem from their nature being the same. Still, if that behavior is governed by something (like the law of gravity—the attraction of objects with mass, which is governed by the force of gravity), then that entity probably does require a creator.
This discussion is connected to the second notebook (there the discussion is about a cause for the existence of objects, but there too it has nothing to do with the complexity or uniqueness of the thing being discussed).