Q&A: The Laws of Nature and the Teleological Argument
The Laws of Nature and the Teleological Argument
Question
Hello,
I’ll try to summarize the question.
Why assume that God, who is Himself something special and specific, existed all along, while the laws of nature, which are also special and specific, could not have existed all along?
Why assume that God does not need someone who designed Him, but the laws of nature do?
I heard you present two possibilities for explaining the special laws:
either there is someone who created them, or there are infinitely many random universes, and therefore according to Occam’s razor we choose the option that has a designer (God).
But what about the option that the laws of nature, like the designer, simply exist? According to that, we’ve saved one unnecessary assumption, and that is preferable according to Occam.
Answer
The laws of nature are not entities. Therefore it makes no sense to speak about their existence. Nor does it make sense to view them as the cause of anything. The laws describe reality, but they do not act within it. The law of gravitation describes the attraction of bodies to one another, but it is not the law that produces the attraction; rather, it is the force of gravity. Only entities produce things, not laws. Laws have a lawgiver—the same one who created the reality that the laws describe.
Why assume that God does not need a cause? I do not assume that. I infer it by negation: otherwise we arrive at an infinite regress.
Discussion on Answer
Then it is God. Except that if it is mechanical and inanimate, it is unlikely that it has no cause that created it.
As you said, the laws of nature describe reality. So one could hold that this reality existed all along.
Instead of saying that God always existed and that He created the laws that describe reality,
one could claim that the reality in which these laws hold existed all along.
According to Occam’s razor, the option without God is simpler and preferable.
In the previous comment, in the third line, instead of “but” it should say “one could.”
What you are really saying is that the world is eternal. We’re back to Aristotle. That is indeed simpler, but blatantly implausible (because our world is made of things that are not eternal). Newtonian mechanics is also simpler than quantum theory and relativity, and it has only one drawback: it is not correct. And of course physics also teaches us that the world is not eternal.
The same question, but instead of the laws of nature let’s talk about an inanimate object whose behavior is described by the laws of nature. How would the answer change?