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Collection Highlights

Idealization and the Laws of Nature Billy Wheeler

The Concise Laws of Human Nature Robert Greene

Laws of nature First Edition. Edition Ott

Divine Action, Determinism, and the Laws of Nature 1st

Edition Jeffrey Koperski
After the Virus: New World Order 1st Edition Simon Archer

Three Laws of Nature A Little Book on Thermodynamics R.

Stephen Berry

Conservation Concepts Rethinking Human Nature

Relationships 1st Edition Jax

Believe and Receive Use the 40 Laws of Nature to Attain

Your Deepest Desires First Edition Melissa Alvarez

The Mind of God and the Works of Nature Laws and Powers in
Naturalism Platonism and Classical Theism 1st Edition
James Orr
Rethinking Order
 Also available from Bloomsbury

God and the Meanings of Life, T. J. Mawson

Nothingness and the Meaning of Life, Nicholas Waghorn
 Rethinking Order

After the Laws of Nature

Nancy Cartwright and Keith Ward

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published 2016

© Copyright to the collection Nancy Cartwright, Keith Ward, 2016

Nancy Cartwright and Keith Ward have asserted their right under the Copyright,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 9781474244060

ePDF: 9781474244053
ePub: 9781474244084

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cartwright, Nancy, editor.
Title: Rethinking order : after the laws of nature / edited by Nancy
Cartwright and Keith Ward.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015034813| ISBN 9781474244060 (hb) | ISBN 9781474244053
(epdf) | ISBN 9781474244084 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Order (Philosophy) | Philosophy of nature. | Cosmology.
Classification: LCC B105.O7 R46 2016 | DDC 117--dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034813

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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Contributors ix

Introduction Keith Ward 1

Part 1 The Historical and Philosophical Setting 5

1 The Rise and Fall of Laws of Nature Eric Watkins 7
2 The Dethronement of Laws in Science Nancy Cartwright 25

Part 2 New Modes of Order in the Natural and Social

Sciences 53
3 From Order to Chaos and Back Again Robert C. Bishop
and Roman Frigg 55
4 Multiple Orders in Biology Eric Martin and William
Bechtel 75
5 Realism, Pluralism and Naturalism in Biology John Dupré 99
6 The Making and Maintenance of Social Order Eleonora
Montuschi and Rom Harré 119

Part 3 Free Will after the Laws of Nature 141

7 Freedom and the Causal Order T. J. Mawson 143
8 From Laws to Powers Steven Horst 157

Part 4 Divine Order 185

9 Order in the Relations between Religion and Science?
Reflections on the NOMA Principle of Stephen J.
Gould John Hedley Brooke 187
vi Contents

10 Concepts of God and the Order of Nature Keith Ward 205

11 From Order to God Russell ReManning 223

Conclusion Nancy Cartwright 233

Index 237
 Acknowledgements

After the John Templeton Foundation, which gave us funds to study

the big question of concepts of order that do not rely on laws of
nature, then left us to carry on the research as the emerging ideas
suggested, the participants in the Order Project would most like to
thank the project administrator, Rebecca Robinson, who ensured that
facilities, time and arrangements for conducting the research and
disseminating it were all in place where and when needed.
 Contributors

William Bechtel is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the

Center for Chronobiology at the University of California, San Diego.
His research explores issues in the philosophy of the life sciences,
including systems biology, cell and molecular biology, biochemistry,
neuroscience and cognitive science. He has published several books,
including Discovering Cell Mechanisms: The Creation of Modern Cell
Biology (Cambridge 2006) and Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical
Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience (Routledge 2008), as well as
numerous articles in journals such as Philosophy of Science, Biology
and Philosophy and Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and
Biomedical Sciences.

Robert C. Bishop is Professor of Physics and Philosophy as well as the

John and Madeleine McIntyre Endowed Professor of Philosophy and
History of Science at Wheaton College. His research involves history
and philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of
social science, philosophy of mind and psychology, and metaphysics.
He has authored a book, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences
(Continuum 2007), as well as several articles published in Analysis,
Philosophy of Science, Foundations of Physics and Studies in History
and Philosophy of Modern Physics, among other journals.

John Hedley Brooke taught the history of science at Lancaster

University from 1969 to 1999. In 1995, with Geoffrey Cantor, he gave
the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow University. From 1999 to 2006 he
was the first Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the
University of Oxford, Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre and Fellow
of Harris Manchester College. After retirement, he was designated
x Contributors

‘Distinguished Fellow’ at the Institute of Advanced Study, University

of Durham (2007). He has been the President of the British Society
for the History of Science, of the Historical Section of the British
Science Association, of the International Society for Science and
Religion and of the UK Forum for Science and Religion. Among his
books are Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991,
2014), Thinking about Matter (1995) and (with Geoffrey Cantor)
Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (1998).
His most recent book, co-edited with Ronald Numbers, is Science and
Religion Around the World (2011).

Nancy Cartwright FBA is Professor of Philosophy at the University

of Durham and at the University of California, San Diego. She is
former president of the Philosophy of Science Association and the
American Philosophical Association (Pacific) and a member of the
German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) as well as a MacArthur
fellow and Fellow of the British Academy and of the American
Philosophical Society (the oldest US academic honorary society).
Her research interests include philosophy and history of science
(especially physics and economics), causal inference, objectivity and
evidence-based policy. She has authored several books, including
The Dappled World (Cambridge 1999) and Evidence-Based Policy: A
Practical Guide to Doing it Better, with Jeremy Hardie (Oxford 2012),
as well as numerous articles published in venues such as the Journal
of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and The Lancet.

John Dupré is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University

of Exeter, and Director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life
Sciences. He has formerly taught at Oxford, Stanford and Birkbeck
College, London. His publications include: The Disorder of Things:
Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (1993); Human
Nature and the Limits of Science (2001); Humans and Other Animals
 Contributors xi

(2002); Darwin’s Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (2003);

Genomes and What to Make of Them (with Barry Barnes, 2008); and
Processes of Life: Essays on the Philosophy of Biology (2012). He is a
former President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science
and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science.

Roman Frigg is Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and

Social Science, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director
of the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series at the London
School of Economics and Political Science. His current work focuses
on predictability and climate change, the foundations of statistical
mechanics and the nature of scientific models and theories. He has
published several articles in journals such as Philosophy of Science,
Erkenntnis and Synthese.

Rom Harré is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Georgetown

University and former director of the Centre for Philosophy of
Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics
and Political Science. His current research is in social psychology
though he worked for a long time on topics in metaphysics and the
philosophy of science. He has published a large number of books,
including Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrödinger’s Cat (Oxford 2009), as well
as numerous articles in both philosophy and psychology journals.

Steven Horst is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Wesleyan

University. His research is in philosophy of psychology, moral
psychology and metaphysics. He has published two books, including
Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist
Philosophy of Science (Oxford 2007), and several articles that
have appeared in Synthese, Minds and Machines and Philosophical
Psychology, among other journals
xii Contributors

Eric Martin is Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy of

Science in the Honors College at Baylor University. His research is in
general history and philosophy of science, philosophy of biology and
the relationship between religion and science. He has, among other
articles, authored an article on ‘Evil and Natural Science’ with Eric
Watkins, for the collection Oxford Philosophical Concepts: Evil – A
History, edited by Andrew Chignell (Oxford forthcoming).

T. J. Mawson is a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Peter’s College,

Oxford University. His research interests are the philosophy of religion,
philosophical theology and moral philosophy. He has published two
books, Belief in God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion
(Oxford 2005) and Free Will: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum
2011), and a number of articles in journals such as Religious Studies,
the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and Think.

Eleonora Montuschi is Associate Professor in the Department of

Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at the University of Venice and
Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. She is a philosopher of the natural and social
sciences working on scientific objectivity, the theory and practice of
evidence and methodological issues of the social sciences. She has
published a book, The Objects of Social Science (Continuum 2003), as
well as various articles in journals such as Axiomathes, Theoria and
Social Epistemology.

Russell ReManning is Reader in Philosophy and Ethics at Bath Spa

University. His research is in theology, the philosophy of religion, the
relationship between religion and science and the thought of Paul
Tillich. He has edited several books, including The Oxford Handbook
of Natural Theology (Oxford 2013) and The Cambridge Companion to
Paul Tillich (Cambridge 2009).
 Contributors xiii

Keith Ward FBA is a Professorial Fellow at Heythrop College after

having held positions at Cambridge University, Gresham College
(where he was the Gresham Professor of Divinity), Oxford University
(where he was Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ
Church) and the University of London (where he was Professor of the
History and Philosophy of Religion), among others. He was ordained
Priest of the Church of England in 1972. His research is in theology,
history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, metaphysics and the
history of religions. He has published numerous books, including
Kant’s View of Ethics (Blackwell 1972), Rational Theology and the
Creativity of God (Blackwell 1984) and Comparative Theology in five
volumes (Oxford 1994–2000 and SCM Press 2008).

Eric Watkins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California,

San Diego. His primary area of research is Kant’s philosophy. He
also works on early modern philosophy (Leibniz, Newton, Hume),
German idealism (Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel) as well
as on the history of philosophy of science. He has authored Kant
and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge 2005) and edited The
Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical
Perspectives (Oxford 2013), among others. He has also published
numerous papers in journals such as the Journal of the History
of Philosophy, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science and
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
 Introduction
Keith Ward

This book has one central argument. The argument is that the
classical Newtonian worldview of a universe made of material
particles governed by absolute and unbreakable laws of nature is
obsolete. Of course, this has been known since the first formulations
of quantum mechanics in 1925, but its implications have rarely been
taken to heart by the general educated public. Also, this revolution
in our understanding of the universe is not just a matter of quantum
physics. Even more basically, it is a matter of our understanding
of the basic laws of nature, and of how nature comes to have the
sorts of order, integration and organization that it does have. That
understanding has changed, and this book tries to show how it has
changed. To put it in a brutally simple way, there are no absolute and
unbreakable laws of nature whatsoever which determine exactly how
all things will happen, so that, as the French physicist LaPlace put it,
if we knew the initial physical state of the universe, and all the laws
of nature, we would be able to predict everything that would ever
happen.
Albert Einstein was never able to accept this. He is reported to
have said ‘God does not play dice with the universe’, and he believed
with fervent faith that there must be deterministic laws underlying
our observed universe, even if we humans would never be able to
use them to make absolutely correct predictions. I think we should
applaud Einstein’s faith – it is just the sort of thing that makes truly
2 Rethinking Order

great scientists – but we have to say that it was probably mistaken. We

can even say that there was never a very good reason to think it was
correct. Why should there be unbreakable deterministic laws, after all?
We, the writers of this book, do not think there are no laws of
nature at all. The physical world is highly ordered, and manifests
organized complexity at many levels. It is not all chaos and accident.
But the principles of order in nature are much more local, diverse,
piecemeal, emergent and holistic than the old model of one absolute
set of laws (which would be, basically, the laws of the ‘master science’,
physics) dictating the behaviour of fundamental particles in such
a way that, in principle, the behaviour of all complex biological,
personal and social entities can in principle be deduced from them.
This view can be expressed in two main ways. We can say that
there are laws of nature, but those laws are not what we thought –
not absolute, unbreakable and forming a closed causal system that
can completely explain everything about the world. Or we can say
that ‘law’ is not the best model for explaining the order that exists
in nature. Perhaps a different model like that of ‘power’, ‘capacity’ or
‘disposition’ might be a better one. Objects might, for instance, have
various capacities which may be realized or frustrated in different
local contexts, and which are sensitive to novel background condi-
tions which have never existed before.
Nancy Cartwright has been influential in urging such a view,
which she often presents by speaking of ‘science without laws’. She
certainly does not mean that nature is without order – though that
order may be less all-encompassing than we think – but the term
‘law’ (which is, after all, a metaphor) might not be the best term for
describing that order, especially if laws are thought to be unbreakable,
universal and completely explanatory of all that occurs in nature. All
of the writers of this book broadly agree with her, though of course
they do not all believe exactly the same things. So we are arguing for a
new perspective on the way nature manifests order and intelligibility.
 Introduction 3

What difference will this change of perspective make? There will

be many specific differences in particular sciences, but the most
obvious overall change will be the collapse of the model of science as
one unified and totalizing programme for answering every possible
question about the universe. It will undermine a view of physics as
the one master-science to which all others reduce in the end. It will
destroy the view of the physical universe as a closed causal system
into which talk of human freedom and dignity fits only with great
difficulty, and which God can only interact with by breaking God’s
own inviolable laws of nature. It will enable us to see the universe
as open, entangled, emergent and holistic, rather than as a piece of
clockwork which follows a set of blind impersonal laws. The universe
will be open and emergent, in that it does not run down eternally
pre-set rail tracks, but inherently contains the potential for new
creative endeavours. It will be entangled and holistic, in that the
causal inter-relations and influences between entities are many and
varied, and not reducible to just one sort of quasi-mechanistic form
of causality. The emergence of new systems and contexts will have
causal influence on the ‘lower’ and simpler component parts of those
systems.
People will still take various views of whether there is objective
purpose in the cosmos, on whether or not there is true human
freedom and responsibility and on whether or not there is a God or
something like a God. But the new perspective will enable those who
see signs of objective purpose and value in the universe to feel that
their views resonate positively with much state-of-the-art thinking in
the sciences, and it will make it easier to see the universe as ‘friendly’
to both mind and consciousness, rather than that they are unantici-
pated and accidental by-products of mechanistic processes.
These are radical changes in our view of the universe. But this
book aims to show that they are not the result of either unreasoned
and sentimental faith or purely abstract theory. The change of view
4 Rethinking Order

comes from hard thinking about the actual practice of the natural
sciences as well as in philosophy and theology. No one person has
the competence to cover all these fields with authority. So we have
sought to find experts in physics, biology, social science, philosophy
and theology who can contribute to our argument in their own way.
Nevertheless, we have sought to construct a book which pursues
its argument with one voice and in a systematic way. To that end,
between each chapter a short editorial link has been inserted which
makes explicit what is being asserted at each stage, and how it builds
up into one continuous and cumulative case.
The book arises out of a four-year project sponsored by the
Templeton Foundation. Sad to say, there are those who think that
such sponsorship is a sign of intellectual weakness. We can firmly
state that at no time has there been any attempt by Templeton to
make us choose writers they like or whose views they agree with, or
to influence any of those views. All the writers (who have various
moral and religious opinions) formed their views long before they
had heard of Templeton, and we all believe that these views are
exciting and important. We are therefore very grateful for Templeton
Foundation sponsorship, which has enabled us to meet and develop
our views by dialogue and discussion in ways that would otherwise
have been very difficult.
 Part One

The Historical and

Philosophical Setting
 1

The Rise and Fall of Laws of Nature

Eric Watkins

Editorial Link: The book begins with a chapter by Eric Watkins which
sets the historical context for the discussion of laws of nature, and sets
out some of the alternative models for understanding order in nature
which subsequent chapters will examine in more detail. KW

It is a basic fact, if not about the world itself, then at least about us,
that order is crucial. Whatever our specific commitments may be,
and they obviously vary considerably, we are deeply committed to
some notion of order. Whether that is a natural order, a moral order
or a divine order, we firmly hold onto the idea that reality is, must
or, at the very least, ought to be ordered in some way. The contrast
concept – disorder or, if taken to the extreme, chaos – has undeniable
negative connotations for us, as is clear from the dismay caused by the
inconvenient placement of an ‘out of order’ sign. This kind of negative
attitude towards the lack of order is common, not only in the mass of
papers strewn across my desk, but also in the fundamental structure
of our social lives, since chaos and disorder are destructive of our most
basic abilities and opportunities, and the corresponding demand for
‘law and order’ is undeniable even for the most liberal-minded person.
It is also a basic fact, though now historical in character, that our
conceptions of order have shifted in fundamental ways over time.
Indeed, part of the point of historical inquiry is to determine how
order took different shapes at different times. For example, what
8 Rethinking Order

nature, or the natural order, was understood to be was radically

different after the discoveries of seventeenth-century scientists such
as Galileo and Newton than before. Not only did they replace a
geocentric with a heliocentric astronomy such that human beings
were no longer firmly entrenched at the centre of the universe,
but, more generally, they also rejected qualitative explanations of
the world in favour of mathematically precise quantitative descrip-
tions of matter in motion, a change in the practice of science that
has been with us in one form or another ever since. Indeed, histo-
rians of science have argued that these radical shifts concerning
our fundamental conception of what nature is, and how it can be
described properly, were tantamount to a Scientific Revolution. It
is plausible to think that another such shift occurred with Einstein’s
groundbreaking discovery of special and general relativity theory
and with the emergence of quantum physics in the twentieth
century. The consequences in these cases are a radical change in our
very conception of the spatial-temporal fabric of the universe and
a different understanding of what the ultimate constituents of the
world are, e.g. with strings rather than things.
What is striking in both of these cases, but in others as well, is that
a radical change in our overall conception of nature and of our place
in the world occurs due to a change in some very specific part of it,
in this case, in the details of particular scientific theories. That is, a
few very detailed modifications force a broader change at a much
higher level of generality, which affects our most basic understanding
of the world and our place in it. Indeed it is only when these broader
changes occur that we say not simply that we’ve discovered some new
feature of the world, but that the very order of the world is different.
It is thus important to appreciate that our conception of the world
includes both more general and more specific levels and that, at least
in some cases, the former depend on the latter in fundamental ways
and not always in a manner that is immediately transparent to us.
 The Rise and Fall of Laws of Nature 9

What this constellation of basic facts suggests is that, to understand

our current situation properly, we must constantly be attuned both to
the very specific changes that are happening at an ever-accelerating
pace in our globalized world and to the broader implications that they
might have for our more general conception of the order of things.
But what do I mean when I refer to ‘our more general conception of
the order of things’? After all, there are many different kinds of order,
and this is true even when order is considered at a very general level:
one can speak of a spatial order, a temporal order, a logical order or
even, for that matter, a pecking order. What is common to them all
is that they indicate some kind of abstract principle of organization,
some way in which a plurality of things of one kind are related to each
other in a way that we find to some degree intelligible or harmonious.
This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive characterization, but it
does capture at least some core elements of the notion and will suffice
for current purposes.
In this chapter, I propose to discuss five different kinds of order
– the natural order, the moral order, the political order, the divine
order and the human order – and to consider (i) how fundamental
shifts have occurred over the past several centuries that involve these
kinds of order and (ii) what implications that has for our current
understanding of the world and our place in it. More specifically, I
will consider how each of these kinds of order deploys a particular
notion of law, since it has traditionally been maintained not only that
there are crucial dependency relations between these different orders,
but also that a particular conception of law is at the heart of these
orders and their dependencies. What will emerge from the discussion
is that our current attitude towards these different kinds of order and
their inter-relations is neither inevitable nor obviously coherent. As
a result, these reflections offer us new perspectives on our present
situation and on the possibilities that lie before us.
10 Rethinking Order

Modern conceptions of law in the natural, moral and

political orders

The idea of a law of nature is very familiar to us today, given that

discovering the laws of nature is one prominent goal of scientific
inquiry. However, when one takes a broader historical view of
things, it is quite striking that the idea of a law of nature was hardly
mentioned at all in the natural philosophies of the ancient and
medieval worlds and became prominent only in the early modern
period with the onset of the Scientific Revolution. The idea originally
took shape in the attempt to discover laws of motion in particular,
which would describe the behaviour of a specific range of inanimate
bodies, but given the success that leaders of the Scientific Revolution
had in discovering such laws in the realm of mechanics (culminating
in Newton’s Principia), it was no great surprise when they did not
rest content with providing explanations of inanimate objects, but
expanded the scope of their search so as to encompass the laws of
nature in general. Specifically, proponents of the Enlightenment were
especially keen on the attempt to discover laws that would govern
the behaviour of human beings, which would form an integral
part of a science of man that would run parallel to the science of
nature. Indeed, such laws would be essential to making good on
the Enlightenment’s call for social progress, especially among the
emerging middle class, whose dramatic gains in literacy and power
during the eighteenth century made possible the fruitful application
of scientific knowledge to both their professional and personal lives.
Though early modern natural philosophers offered a variety of
proposals regarding the proper formulation of the laws of motion in
particular and of the laws of nature in general, there was widespread
agreement about the core notion of a law of nature. The basic idea
was that a law of nature is a principle that would govern what would
 The Rise and Fall of Laws of Nature 11

happen in nature by determining what the next state of the world

would be in light of the previous state of the world. The scope of a
law of nature was supposed to be quite broad so as to encompass
any thing of a given type, regardless of the particular state that
it happened to be in. Thus, the laws of motion were supposed to
govern the behaviour of all inanimate bodies, regardless of how fast
or slow they might be moving and in what direction. As a result,
this meant that a law of nature was often explicitly understood as an
exceptionless regularity for a particular kind of object. It was also
typically presupposed that laws governing bodies must be describable
in mathematical terms, since that allowed for a much higher degree
of clarity and precision in calculations and predictions than previous
accounts were capable of. Given this conception of a law of nature,
the laws of nature are fundamental to what happens in the world
and, as a result, the overall task of natural science was to formulate
the smallest number of laws that would explain the largest number
of phenomena. The extraordinary status of Newton’s law of universal
gravitation in science derived from its extraordinary success at this
task, since it was a single law that determined all motions of both
celestial and terrestrial bodies with an unsurpassed degree of mathe-
matical exactness.
Though laws of nature were thus considered fundamental to
scientific explanations of natural events, almost no one in the early
modern period thought that the laws were absolutely fundamental.
It was widely held that the laws of nature depended on God in some
way. It is important to note that the basic motivation for claiming
that the laws of nature depend on God was not necessarily or exclu-
sively theological, even if many at the time thought it obvious that
Scripture should be read as entailing the dependence of everything,
including laws of nature, on God. The strictly philosophical line of
thought runs as follows. If one asks why a certain event has occurred
in nature and is told that it followed from a law of nature, the next
12 Rethinking Order

question is inevitably why that particular law of nature exists. Now it

sometimes happens that one law of nature depends on another (e.g.
by being a more specific instance of it), but once one has reached the
basic laws of nature, it is clear that nothing within the natural world
could explain why these most basic laws exist. After all, the most
basic laws are supposed to explain the events that occur in nature,
not be explained by them. At the same time, even these most basic
laws have particular features that are such that one can, at least in
principle, imagine other possibilities. (For example, we can speculate
about what the world would be like if Planck’s constant had been
twice as great or if F=ma2 instead of F=ma.) And if one can imagine
other possibilities, then it seems appropriate to call for an explanation
of why these laws exist, and not any others. At this point, if one is
already committed to the existence of God on other grounds, as many
early modern natural philosophers were, the most expedient expla-
nation would be to assert that the laws of nature must be grounded
in God.
Now the question of how exactly the laws of nature could or should
depend on God was hotly contested at the time, with three main kinds
of answer vying for acceptance. One option, articulated by René
Descartes, is as follows. If God is an absolutely perfect being, that is, a
being endowed with all possible perfections, including omnipotence,
omniscience and omnibenevolence, it is plausible to think that God
must be immutable. If God were to change, that change would have to
be either from better to worse or from worse to better, but neither of
these options is compatible with God’s absolute perfection, since God
is supposed to be perfect at all times. But if God is immutable, then
the way in which he creates and sustains the world in existence from
one moment to the next cannot change either. Insofar as the laws of
motion are principles that describe how the world changes from one
moment to the next, they are simply descriptions of the immutable
ways in which God creates and sustains the world. As a result, the
 The Rise and Fall of Laws of Nature 13

laws of nature can seem to follow from God’s immutability. This line
of thought finds support in the fact that Descartes’s laws of motion
include a conservation law, which asserts that the same quantity of
motion must be preserved throughout all changes.
A second option, developed in detail by Nicolas Malebranche,
a priest in Paris who was otherwise sympathetic to Descartes, is
that the laws of nature derive from God’s simplicity. If it is better
to bring something about in a simple rather than in a complicated
way, it is clear that simplicity is a perfection. If God has all perfec-
tions, God must have the perfection of simplicity. Now insofar as the
laws of nature are supposed to be constituted by a small number of
principles that have universal scope, it is clear that the laws of nature
are consistent with the simplicity that pertains to the ways in which
God creates the world and maintains it in existence. While one might
think that God could repeatedly choose anew how the world should
be at each moment in time so as to be able to make adjustments
as needed, this would obviously be a complicated and potentially
ad hoc decision process. It is both simpler and better reflective of
God’s infinite wisdom to have God decide once and for all on a small
number of general policies that exist for all cases at all moments in
time. Insofar as the laws of nature are the simplest possible policies
by which God determines what happens in the world at each and
every moment in time, it is plausible to maintain, Malebranche
thinks, that the laws of nature derive from God’s simplicity and
wisdom.
A third option, described by Gottfried Leibniz, who was a fierce
opponent of Newton, is that the laws of nature derive from God’s
omnibenevolence. If one focuses on God’s goodness, then it is clear
that the world that God creates must be the best. For if God could
have created a world that is better than the one he did in fact create,
he would have been an underachiever. But since God’s omnipotence
rules out the possibility that he did not have the power to create the
14 Rethinking Order

best world and his omniscience rules out that he might not have
known about all of the possibilities that he has the power to create,
it is clear that the deficiency that would result in the creation of a
sub-optimal world would have to lie in a lack of goodness. However,
since God’s goodness is maximal, it is clear that God cannot be an
underachiever by creating a world that is less good than it could have
been. Now if the best world contains laws of nature, as our world
seems to, then God’s goodness must be responsible for these laws,
especially insofar as it is obvious that a perfect being would act in an
orderly way. Although we can imagine lawless worlds, they would,
Leibniz thinks, be disorderly disasters of random events, nowhere
near as good as the orderly world God decided to create due to his
benevolence.
Despite the interesting differences between these three concep-
tions of how the laws of nature might depend on God, the similarities
are striking and important. The most important similarity is that
whether the laws derive from God’s immutability, his simplicity or
his goodness, they all depend on characterizing God as a perfect
being, since these features are either perfections or immediate conse-
quences of perfections. Further, insofar as God uses the laws of
nature to impose order on what happens in nature, the laws of nature
are crucial to defining what the order of nature is. That is, whatever
happens according to the laws of nature is eo ipso a natural event and
part of the regular order of nature. The flip side of this is that any
exceptions to the laws of nature are irregularities, deviations from
the order of nature that require special explanation. Thus, instead of
thinking of apparent exceptions to the natural order as monsters or
freaks of nature that do not admit of explanation, the early moderns
viewed such events either as following from laws of nature in ways
that we do not yet fully understand, or else as miracles – that is,
supernatural events that were caused directly by God for special
reasons. Many early modern thinkers held that the special reasons
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