[sciborg2]

No God, No Laws

My thesis is summarized in my title, ‘No God, No Laws’: the concept of a law of Nature cannot be made sense of without God. It is not as dramatic a thesis as it might look, however. I do not mean to argue that the enterprise of modern science cannot be made sense of without God. Rather, if you want to make sense of it you had better not think of science as discovering laws of Nature, for there cannot be any of these without God. That depends of course on what we mean by ‘laws of Nature’.

Whatever else we mean, I take it that this much is essential: Laws of Nature are prescriptive, not merely descriptive, and – even stronger – they are supposed to be responsible for what occurs in Nature. Since at least the Scientific Revolution they are also supposed to be visible in the Book of Nature, not writ only on stone tablets nor in the thought of God.

My claim here is that neither of these features can be made sense of without God; this despite the fact that they are generally thought to provide some autonomy of the world order from God. I will focus on recent accounts of laws of Nature and describe how the dominant ones fail without the efforts of God; I shall also outline one alternative that tries to make sense of the order of Nature and the successes of modern science without laws of Nature and without immediate reliance on God.

[Wilshire]

I did not read the whole thing, really just the part you quoted, but it seems interesting.

Was it a decent paper?

[sciborg2]

I thought so. 

Though I'll probably have to give it another read I think Cartwright elucidates the problem with "natural laws" quite well. As Wigner said in The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences:

"The preceding discussion is intended to remind us, first, that it is not at all natural that "laws of nature" exist, much less that man is able to discover them."

[Wilshire]

I was a bit underwhelmed

 I was just hoping for a better argument for why empirical science fails is all. The author just makes way too many assumptions and arguments from ignorance.

[Kellais]

I only got to page 12 and gave up. If that counts as a paper... oh my. A lot of blah blah and talking-in-circles if you ask me.

[sciborg2]

I was a bit underwhelmed

 I was just hoping for a better argument for why empirical science fails is all. The author just makes way too many assumptions and arguments from ignorance.

But Cartwright wasn't arguing at all for the failure of empirical science. She's an atheist after all, not a apologetic.

It's precisely her atheism that makes her disbelieve in natural laws.

Not sure why you think she made arguments from ignorance either.

[sciborg2]

A follow up on the topic of accounting for natural laws:

Frozen Accidents: Can the Laws of Physics be Explained?

But what are these ultimate laws and where do they come from? Such questions are often dismissed as being pointless or even unscientific. As the cosmologist Sean Carroll has written, “There is a chain of explanations concerning things that happen in the universe, which ultimately reaches to the fundamental laws of nature and stops… at the end of the day the laws are what they are… And that’s okay. I’m happy to take the universe just as we find it.” Conventionally, the job of the scientist is to simply assume the laws and get on with the job of applying them to real problems. But in recent years physicists have been excited by the prospect of unifying laws from different branches of the subject into a sort of final super-law, and this has encouraged speculation about the nature of the laws themselves.

There has long been a tacit assumption that the laws of physics were somehow imprinted on the universe at the outset, and have remained immutable thereafter. Physical processes, however violent or complex, are thought to have absolutely no effect on the laws. There is thus a curious asymmetry: Physical processes depend on laws but the laws do not depend on physical processes. Although this statement cannot be proved, it is widely accepted.

There is, however, a subtlety. Physicists have discovered that the laws of physics familiar in the laboratory may change form at very high temperatures, such as the ultra-hot environment of the Big Bang. As the universe expanded and cooled, various “effective laws” crystallized out from the fundamental underlying laws, sometimes manifesting random features. It is the high-temperature versions of the laws, not their ordinary, lab-tested descendants, that are regarded as truly fundamental. The laws of physics as we know them may just be “frozen accidents.”

[sciborg2]

Another article on this subject:

Is the Search for Immutable Laws of Nature a Wild-Goose Chase?

"Four iconoclastic thinkers are challenging the assumption of scientists from Newton to Einstein: That there is one set of laws that perfectly describe the universe for all time."

If you're reading this Royce - too bad your boy Sheldrake didn't get a mention as he's been talking about inconstant constants before it was hip. 

[Royce]

If you're reading this Royce - too bad your boy Sheldrake didn't get a mention as he's been talking about inconstant constants before it was hip.

Lol. Yeah he brings that up a bit in "The science delusion" book, how all these "constant laws" are not really constant. I think he generally irritates people, especially rigid academics, and I think that is because he is somewhat committed to weirdness. Academics do not like weirdness:) He does not prove anything in his book though, he just plays the uncertainty card on materialist reductionist ways of thinking.

I really do not know how I feel about Sheldrake. Nothing is really certain....., ok....., and then what?

[sciborg2]

The Evolution of the Laws of Physics - Lee Smolin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QIJtICy-vE

[sciborg2]

Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen?

...The conviction that laws somehow give us a full accounting of events seems often to be based on the idea that they govern the world's substance or matter from outside, "making" things happen. If this is the case, however, then we must provide some way for matter to recognize and then obey these external laws. But, plainly, whatever supports this capacity for recognition and obedience cannot itself be the mere obedience. Anything capable of obeying wholly external laws is not only its obedience but also its capability, and this capability remains unexplained by the laws.

If, with so many scientists today, we construe laws as rules, we can put the matter this way: much more than rule-following is required of anything able to follow rules; conversely, no set of rules can by themselves explain the presence or functioning of that which is capable of following them.

It is, in other words, impossible to imagine matter that does not have some character of its own. To begin with, it must exist. But if it exists, it must do so in some particular manner, according to its own way of being. Even if we were to say, absurdly, that its only character is to obey external laws, this "law of obedience" itself could not be just another one of the external laws being obeyed. Something will be "going on" that could not be understood as obedience to law, and this something would be an essential expression of what matter was. To apprehend the world we would need to understand this expressive character in its own right, and we could never gain such an understanding solely through a consideration of external laws.

So we can hardly find coherence in the rather dualistic notion that physical laws reside, ghost-like, in some detached, abstract realm from which they impinge upon matter. But if, contrary to our initial assumption, we take laws to be in one way or another bound up with the world's substance — if we take them to be at least in part an expression of this substance — then the difficulty in the conventional view of law becomes even more intense. Surely it makes no sense to say that the world's material phenomena are the result — the wholly explained result — of matter obeying laws which it is itself busy expressing. In whatever manner we prefer to understand the material expression of the laws, this expression cannot be a matter of obedience to the laws being expressed! If whatever is there as the substance of the world at least in part determines the laws, then the laws cannot be said to determine what is there.

All this gives you some indication why so many scientists, when stepping back from the rather messy reality of their daily work and considering the character of their science, show such great reluctance to reckon with the substance of the observable world. They much prefer to conceive the explanatory value of science in terms of abstract laws — equations, rules, algorithms — which naturally remain gratifyingly lawful in an uncomplicated way. The world disappears into a vague notion of "whatever gives material reality to the laws"...