Why are there laws of nature ?
The universe contains many laws which govern how the universe operates e.g. laws of physics. The question that is puzzling me right now is why are there laws in the first place and why is the universe not lawless instead ?
Because laws are harder more complex and elegant to formulate than if there was no laws at all, why are they in nature ?
If it was lawless thered probably be no life and no one to ask these questions
Because laws are harder more complex and elegant to formulate than if there was no laws at all, why are they in nature ?
If it was lawless thered probably be no life and no one to ask these questions
Comments (137)
Are there laws of nature?
I am more inclined to say that there are regularities in nature that we pay attention to.
"Laws" sounds like there's a universally true statement about nature.
Or something along those lines, however we parse that. It's confusing because we're talking in vague terms now.
I can understand the belief that the universe contains many laws which govern how the universe operates, like the laws of physics. But my antidote to your question is to ask if you're puzzling over something false -- perhaps there are no laws of nature, after all.
Well the universe behaves mostly in an intelligible manner where like you say there are certain regularities in it, why should this be the case ? These regularities are often elegant and sometimes complex would it not be easier to have not developed such regularities and patterns ? From the motions of the planets to the microscopic elegance of atoms, up to the point of life itself which is astounding compared to non-living things. The universe holds these secrets, these laws which were only beginning to discover.
We did not invent these laws we simply discovered them, thanks to newton and the rest of the physicists that came after him including Einsteins famous e=mc2.
The fact that the universe behaves in an orderly and intelligent fashion should be questioned, no ?
Yes!
I'm attempting to probe your thoughts, not dismiss them.
Was going to say the same thing. Language used makes implications which may not be accurate. There are also the infamous "laws" of logic, or as I prefer to call them the logical axioms.
I also find the word 'creation' problematic when referring to nature, as it implies a creator; just as laws imply a lawmaker. It all sets up language to back the worldview of the Islamic or Christian apologist.
All of what we know is contingent human understanding, which in 200 years time may well look very different.
This asserts there are laws and asks why.
Quoting Moliere
This asserts two things: that there are regularities and that we pay attention to these regularities.
So could laws just be language about the regularities that grab attention? In other words, arent you basically assuming the same thing Kindred assumes, but calling it attended to regularities as opposed to laws? Once you write about a regularity, arent you codifying the regularity into law? Laws are words about regularities.
So you answered your own question in a way by asserting there are regularities that grab attention.
If it makes it easier I can rephrase the question why does the universe behave in an orderly way ? For example, the motion of the planets around the sun? This of course is due to the law of gravity governing such motions but without calling it a law why should this be the case why dont the planets for example just stand still in fixed location in space ?
At present, I tend to believe that the idea that the universe behaves in an orderly way reflects a human tendency to project patterns and impose coherence where there may be none inherently. What we call "order" is not something we discover in the universe but something we attribute to it through our descriptive practices. I dont think we ever access a world as it is apart from interpretation; what we take to be real or empirical is shaped by historically contingent terminology and shared frameworks of understanding. These frameworks are always provisional or tentative, useful for communicating, and predicting, but not revealing some deep, necessary structure of the universe. Any sense of order is thus not a property of the world itself, but of our current ways of making sense of it, which remain open to continual revision.
So according to you the universe is neither ordered nor disordered, its just the way it is and where we as human beings are able to descriptively apply laws to it does not imply that the universe actually posses those laws, therefore those laws are simply anthropic bias?
I would disagree, I think the universe is intelligently ordered despite our observations that is so, we simply happen to affirm independently that it is.
Is it? "Due to..." that is
The law of gravity governs the motion of the planets? Does the law cause the movement of the planets? How can a law cause such a thing?
Isn't what we call a "law" here just a description of how the planets indeed move?
And if the other laws are also just descriptions of what happens, then the answer to "why are there laws of nature?" is just "Becasue that's how we describe what happens".
A law is a description. Good.
Quoting Banno
That follows. We make the descriptions, and can call them laws. Good.
But then, doesnt the question just become why do we describe things, in the way we describe them and not some other way?
Kindred reframed his question to the question I think you just begged.
Kindred reasked:
Quoting kindred
So now, we can say we make laws out of descriptions. There appears to be some kind of structure to these descriptions weve made. Call them law-like, descriptions. Why are these descriptions orderly, or, describing something a certain way to function as descriptions?
Quoting Banno
Id say no. The movement causes the description, or law. But either way, why is the law OR the movement described, orderly?
This is still unanswered. Next step is still precarious..
"Ordered" implies an agency at work giving the universe features. Is there an organizing agency at work? God?
Matter and energy must behave they way they do. We observe them doing what they have no choice in doing--like a planet orbiting a star; like electrons in one atom interacting with atoms in another atom; like a bird laying an egg. From their behavior we devise rules which are only useful to us. Stars and birds continue on as always.
As for an orderly universe, I'm not so sure about that. At the moment of the Big Bang, matter, energy, and space began. It was not a perfect arrangement. There were clumps of stuff in the mix; matter and antimatter began to cancel each other out imperfectly -- which is why we are here; there was no flash -- there was no light at all for quite a while. The galaxies are not evenly distributed, nor are the stars in the galaxies. The momentum of universe-expansion seems to be building, rather than subsiding or being steady. And all that's just physics.
Would politics be the cluster-fuck it is in a nice, intelligently ordered universe?
God made the world in six days flat
On the seventh He said, "I'll rest"
So He let the thing into orbit swing
To give it a dry run test
A billion years went by
Then He took a look at the whirling blob
His spirits fell as He shrugged
"Ah well, it was only a six-day job"
As a strict matter of fact, most if not all laws that govern the world we live in dissipate during at least one known and observable phenomenon, a black hole, as example. People like to say "oh no it's actually just the same law but because X Y Z is different, it's just more dramatic or pronounced" even though it's clearly not. People are silly like that.
So. One might wish to not be so "gung ho" with your initial assertion and argument. Things work here the way they do because that's just how they do here. Elsewhere? As to what lies beyond? That's a bit outside of philosophy, wouldn't you say? :smile:
Don't even get me started on the Singularity. It's far too early in the evening.
You could frame this in information theoretic terms. You can sum up laws very simply, they have a low algorithmic complexity. Whereas, if behavior was random, such a summary (data compression) would be impossible. But there are vastly many more ways to appear random than ordered, so order begs for an explanation, since it is prima facie unlikely given a non-informative prior.
You could think of it in terms of how much Leplace's Demon would have to remember outside of initial conditions as well, in classical terms.
Im please youre pleased. :cool:
At the risk of completely ruining this moment, how would you respond to this question:
When the descriptions we make actually work, that is, work to describe something to another person, where does the order come from in that scenario?
It seems to me it must come, in part, from the world being described. Which brings me back to Kindreds question: wherefore the order?
Edit to add:
I actually care more about what is the order than why is the order, and am more interested to say that there is order in the world, and Ive described it.
Order is prima facia unlikely, given a non-informative prior.
Im not sure I follow a non-informative prior.
Are you talking about a teleological cause? Meaning without telos or any prior information, (since in this argument, the descriptive information comes after the moving thing described) ordered movement is unlikely?
I dont think Ive gotten that far yet. I think that can be true or not as a separate question.
Order may be unlikely without the answer to why the order is there, but I think Im still just confirming that the order is not only in my description, but drawn from that which it describes, namely, the world.
All I know so far (or all I am assuming here in the argument) is that there is order in my description and my description is of the world. And I am asking at this point, is the order in my description so ordered because it is a description of an ordered world. I dont know where the order in the world comes from (yet), and dont think I need to know (yet). I just know where the order in my description comes from, namely, the world.
Good questions. Id guess that humans are pattern seeking, meaning making machines. We see connections everywhere and this often helps us manage our environment. Even when those patterns or connections later, sometimes much later, turn out to be bogus. Whether that be astrology, the cause of thunder or the sun revolving around the earth. Patterns and meaning dominate human thinking and activity, and some of it works pragmatically for us for a time.
It's simply human behavior.
It comes from us being aware of our surroundings and simply from survival skills. Reasoning, logic and putting things into cause and effect is the method how we have become a totally dominant species in this World. Now we can harness everything, be they other animals, plants or natural resources to serve our species. Now I would argue that other animals do use also logic, can count up some number in a very rudimentary way etc., but they lack totally the systemic approach we humans have to this thanks to our advanced language system to communicate complex issues to each other. Whales and dolphins can communicate about things like where food is, but their "language" is a simply communicating tool.
Because this is the very useful way we model reality, we start calling things as "laws of nature". Yet in the end, it's simply the way we reason things.
As an electrical engineer (who routinely makes use of my understanding of the regularities of nature to design things that I wouldn't have any reason to expect to work if such regularities were illusory) I find your perspective a bit mystifying. Knowing somewhat, about the zillions of clockwork like operations in physical systems that enable us to interact with people all around the world on TPF, it seems particularly ironic to me, to have such skepticism towards orderly behavior in nature.
Of course, I can't expect someone without my background knowledge to see things the same way, but I still find it somewhat baffling that you hold such a perspective.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't have anything to say about a "deep necessary structure of the universe", but do you have any explanation for why scientific frameworks would be useful for predicting if there were no reliable regularities to how things occur in nature which are described by such frameworks?
That's a good question. Also, why do we believe the universe will continue to behave in an orderly way? How do we know there isn't some principle at work whereby the universe becomes chaotic tomorrow. How do we even go about calculating the odds of such a thing? But we all act like it's a low probability event. Is it really?
If it was a high probability event then you wouldn't be here!
Not necessarily. It could be the case that the universe becomes chaotic at exactly a point in time that coincides with tomorrow for reasons we're not aware of. That could be a high probability event. The fact that it hasn't happened wouldn't change the probability.
Not only do we act like it's a low probability event, we believe it too. No one is scared the universe will kill us all in the next minute. We believe that's very unlikely, but how do we know?
We don't know, but so what?
:up:
I guess we can take "laws of nature" to be abstractions/generalizations of sets of observations. We call them "laws" while they're verified, unless/until they're falsified. Sometimes we use falsification to delineate their domain of applicability.
No regularities seem chaotic. It would be difficult to learn from evidence (or experiences, assuming there could be any).
Anyway, the warrant of the scientific methodologies means that such laws are descriptive, not pre/proscriptive. The model isn't the modeled. That may seem feeble, yet science remains the most successful epistemic endeavor in human history; without science this comment wouldn't be communicated worldwide over the Internet in near real-time using complex electronic devices, we wouldn't have GPS to help us navigate, suffering from cholera wouldn't be all-but eradicated, we wouldn't be exploring Mars with rovers, type 1 diabetes would be a death sentence, ...
The laws are around because we come up with them. Maybe we could say that nature lends itself to description because of embedded similarities?
I think that's a better question.
I'd say it's because we noticed something that fits with our notion of orderliness.
In a way what I'd say is that there is no more mystery to the regularities of nature than there is to any other description. Why is the red cup red? Why are the regularities I care about regular?
Because we went looking for them and whenever something didn't fit within our notion of orderliness -- usually specified by technological achievement to do what we've done before, but better -- we threw it out.
Rather than an ontological mystery I'd just say "Cuz that's what you went looking for, and found it" -- so sure there are regularities in nature. But to go so far as to say these regularities are laws seems to interpret nature in the form of our government -- where there's some body which creates laws that follow the subject-predicate form and our guesses in science are trying to match what those laws passed by that body "says".
Be it a book of nature ala Galileo or the Mind of God ala Kant there's some order in nature which is mind-shaped, but not ours, and we're trying to "match" that mind-shape with our mind-shapes in order to comprehend nature as a whole.
At least, these are the sorts of thoughts that come to mind when someone says "law of nature" -- there are no laws of nature in the manner that you mean. There are some regularities we notice, but we never comprehend the whole such that we can "match" the shape that reality is with our mind.
Nothing. It's just interesting.
In the 17th century, it seemed natural to think of the rational regularities and mathematical principles of the universe as Divine Laws, by analogy with the political & civil laws of royalty-ruled human societies. They imagined animals & savages as lawless, ruled by internal impulse instead of external regulations. But some modern thinkers have posited that nature has just accidentally fallen into regular habits that seem law-like to us law-abiding humans. But that no-reason postulation is just as unverifiable as the divine law notion.
Isaac Newton set the example by defining three laws of motion, plus gravitation & thermodynamics. And our modern science would be stuck in the dark ages without such understanding of a logical structure to the natural order. So, whether you call that structure "laws" or "habits" or "regularities", without such reliable forces & logical limits, the Big Bang would have been a flash-in-the-pan, like 4th of July fireworks. Therefore, regardless of how you imagine the lawmaker, the notion of natural limits on causation & change provides a framework for understanding how & why the world works as it does.
But the natural anarchy notion, applied to the non-human world, would make modern Science a blind groping in the dark. So, like it or not, we rational humans seem to be born into a logically-organized world, not a meaningless maze of unpredictable random change. But any answer to your "why?" question will be contentious due to our differing worldviews (frameworks). :smile:
"Natural anarchy," or the idea that societal order can arise without imposed governance, is a complex concept explored in various anarchist philosophies. It suggests that humans and other living things naturally tend towards cooperation and mutual aid, and that societal structures like government are artificial impositions that disrupt this natural order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_anarchism
Yes indeed.
The universe is shaped like the consummation of a human male and a human female.
I think electrical description is particularly prone to seeing the world like a clockwork mechanism -- but it's a good example to get at what I'm thinking. The digital nature of electricity is very much something we constructed. There were regularities there of some kind, of course, but before we shaped copper into circuits with strict yes/no conditions they were not. We had to go out and look for them, imagine what might be and make guesses with some kind of shared criteria for evaluating those guesses over generations.
We wanted electricity to behave like pressure pumps. It was imagined to flow from the positive to the negative, and that description was close enough to purpose.
But now we believe that the flow from positive to negative is, in fact, the opposite -- at least in terms of the description of the flows of electrons.
But back then that didn't matter.
It's in this way that we can observe a regularity which we observe but which is not, strictly, true of the world -- and we can get by all the while feeling like we really do know what it's all about.
We could, though that might still start looking like "law-speak" again.
What I'm aiming to say is that the description works because there are some conditions by which we judge the description as true -- namely pragmatic ones that deal with technology -- but that does not then warrant an inference from these regularities to an ontological justification of regularities.
Rather than treating the regularities like a cause or a law or logical connection between events they're just as plain as asking "How is it that we describe things?" -- though, perhaps, that's not exactly "plain" after all, I'm hesitant to give ontological justification to scientific work. There's something that it tracks, but there's no checking the thing-in-itself to really make sure that we are tracking this time.
I'm not saying there are no patterns, it's about how we tend to perceive things and that our predictive model change over time and may not map onto something we call reality. We tend to fall back on predictions to cope with our world. So if it rains after we pray or do a special dance, we'll keep doing it to try to bring rain again.
Quoting wonderer1
Ah... there's your problem... what is the expression? If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Bad paraphrase of Maslow. (And I'm just joking BTW)
Quoting wonderer1
I am not saying we can't make predictions and find them useful, we can see predictive success as a contingent outcome of practices of inquiry, experimentation, and consensus, but not as proof of any intrinsic order in nature.
A model can be useful even if it isn't true. For instance, the miasma theory of disease turned out to be false, but it worked to some extent, it helped people notice a connection between sewage and illness. Promoted the use of fresh air and isolation to manage disease, which proved effective, even if the underlying model was incorrect. Who knows where understanding will be in 200 years? Who knows which laws of physics will still be standing?
Quoting wonderer1
Our knowledge and preconceptions can also hold us back. Being baffled may be the start of a breakthrough...
Im not saying to ignore science or stop using tools based on predictions, that would be a misunderstanding of the point. Im simply suggesting (and theres no way to establish this conclusively) that humans use predictions and metaphysical models to anticipate outcomes. Because we can make accurate predictions, we assume the model maps onto reality in some way. But we dont actually know this. My intuition is that we dont need to know if the model truly corresponds to reality; what matters is that it works well enough for our purposes. Instead of searching for some ultimate, final truth, we should focus on the usefulness of our concepts and tools and how they help us cope in the world.
So coming back to the OP, are there laws of nature, or apparent regularities which are produced by how we perceive the world, but not a product of reality itself? We cant really demonstrate either, although it is instructive to see over time how models of reality seem to change.
Quoting Tom StormCertainly, our perceptions, and guesses regarding the meaning, of the universe's regularities and patterns change over time. Hopefully becoming more accurate, though Donald Hoffman might say not. But I take 's OP as asking why there are regularities and patterns at all.
Yes, my language is sloppy and I'm writing in the gaps of other activities. (I should also write "may not" rather than "is") I'm saying there are patterns, we see them and use them, sometimes successfully. But I don't know if these patterns map onto the world and say anything about the nature of reality, or if they are produced contingently by our ways of seeing and describing nature.
The question for me is: are the patterns external, or are they the product of our cognitive apparatus? To call a pattern a law of nature reifies it, or at least risks mistaking a useful human construct for something intrinsic to reality itself.
The one is that there are ordered laws of nature, and they are there becasue god said so.
Now this is not much of an explanation, since whatever way the universe is, this view explains it.
The other is that the universe just is this way, that there is no reason for it being this way rather than some other.
And the same point applies: no mater how the universe is, this view works, so it doesn't serve to explain anything.
Indeed, they amount to much the same view...
Well -- how are we supposed to fight about who is right now?
We could all go learn some physics?
Heh, yeah.
How does it help if these connections are only in our head and have nothing to do with the environment in which we live? How could we even exist in and of a world that lacks any order? For that matter, how do you come to any conclusions about the world, even such skeptical conclusions as you make?
I am suggesting a constructivist view. Even the notion of "order" itself is a contingent human artifact. My instinct is that our knowledge, meaning, and order are contingent products of human interpretation, language, and culture. The world exists independently but is indeterminate or (as Hilary Lawson would argue) "open in itself"; order and meaning dont exist out there waiting to be discovered but arise through our way's of engaging with the world.
So, in this view (which I think has some merit), we never arrive at absolute truth or reality; everything we hold is contingent and constantly changing. We dont really have knowledge that maps onto some kind of eternal, unchanging foundational truth. What we have instead are provisional frameworks, interpretive tools and perspectives, that help us navigate and make sense of our experience, always open to revision and reinterpretation. Now, this either resonates with people or (especially if they are foundationalists and empiricists) will seem vague.
Quoting Tom Storm"Law" is an unfortunate word, but it's the one we've been using for ... well, quite a while. No, I wouldn't think the inverse square law is a thing that demands or forces the gravitational attraction between two objects to be inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Nevertheless, the gravitational attraction between two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Maybe the science world should start using new words.
How about we take out proof of any intrinsic. Throw that baggage away. Nothing proven. Nothing certain. Nothing intrinsic discovered. And just say order in nature. Why is order in nature such a bugaboo? Why mist consensus always be given priority over that which is agreed upon?
Quoting Moliere
That speaks of something noticed, and separately, our notion of orderliness.
Two separate directions to inquire into.
Quoting Moliere
So this now clarifies further that the regularities as we think them to be regular, are only regularized because of our thinking, not because weve noticed something or noticed something that fits or discovered orderliness in the world.
So are we noticing something, or not? When saying orderliness are we ever basing it off of something seen in the world, or only merely constructing it?
Lets start over, again.
Is there order in nature?
We can easily say the orderliness has been rigged by us the order makers.
But is that how communication between two people actually works? We cant point to something in the world and rename it every time we point. Orderliness must have a world component to it to function as ordering. Pointing over and over to the same thing and renaming it would be one way of disorganizing the world.
If I say something and you hear it. And then you respond to what I said and I hear it as logically following the order that I started. And then I say something else in response to your response and you hear it. And you hear it as logically following the orderliness you were following/building - havent we both found orderliness in the world in our eyes that read words and ears that hear sounds? The world is still functioning as the conduit for the orderliness we fabricate. Why does THAT function? What is a communication between order-makers in itself? It seems to me there must be some sort of orderliness IN THE WORLD, apart from we order-makers, in order for our fabrications to function as communications. We cant forget there is an internet connecting us here, for instance. That is order in the world, weve fabricated but then let loose in the world, necessary to sustain order, regardless of how crazy I might go off the rails when I post here. We can fix the world and order it, because the world can contain order in itself.
Quoting Tom Storm
That is a massive, pregnant statement. Maps (amazing figments) that map onto (by impossible epistemological processes) something (like reality for instance, or something else - incredible).
Dont we have to be able to map onto things at all just to determine whether something does or does not map onto something in particular? Why would you think you can question whether our maps are maps of reality or not? The answer is, because mapping has to do with connecting our minds with the world. There wouldnt be a map to wonder if it connects to the world without a mind AND a world. We may be wrong about the world, most of the time, but we cant be wrong all of the time and make any sense to each other, because we are all still (forever only) dealing with the same world.
Quoting Banno
First I would note that whether the view is because god said so or because just is this way, neither is much of an explanation since whatever way the universe is, this view explains it.
So lets throw away the why of it. Who cares how or why order comes to be for now. Lets just focus on is there order at all? And regardless of the motivation or reason for this order, where is this order found?
I dont see how you retain science, physics, even math and language, without some sense of order existing apart from minds, in the world. Perhaps order isnt the best word for what is in the world. And I agree laws in the world apart from minds doesnt make sense. But do we have no use for observation and merely listening and sensation to discern order and educate the mind? And again, if there is no ordered conduit between two minds, communication must fail. But it occasionally succeeds.
Let me cash out what Im trying to say:
X says Ptolemy was wrong, the earth is not the center of the universe.
Y then says: I see that too, because I see the day happens because the sun is fixed and the earth spins on an access.
X then says: yes, and the spring moves to summer and fall and winter because the spinning earth revolves all the way around the sun at varying distances and angles.
Y then says: So the sun is at the center.
So where is the source of order here? Both men could claim it was a new consensus they were ordering. But they are both pointing to the sun and the functions of a solar system. Each separately pointing to separate aspects of the suns relationship to the earth, but each extending and agreeing in an orderly fashion. They are not pointing merely to each other and building a coherent map. They are building a map that is coherent because it mimics the order they are pointing to in the world.
We may one day learn this was all wrong too, that there is no such thing as a sun, but then, the reason this new description might be understood by X and then followed by Y who extends it with whatever follows, would be because of new evidence to point to in the world. We cant avoid the world completely and discount its own order, nor discount our ability to map our minds to it as much as we map it to our minds, and further, call all of our communications between minds about the world world-order-fabrications using the world as conduit to communicate.
Maybe we are order makers because, we, haling from the universe, are like the universe which has order in it.
Well peopel like Hilary Lawson would likely argue that the world is inherently open and indeterminate, so our minds create patterns to impose some order on that complexity. These patterns arent discoveries of fixed external laws but constructs that arise from our engagement with an otherwise uncertain reality. We engage with an open and indeterminate reality by constructing tentative models that help us navigate and make sense of it, knowing these models are provisional and will eventually be replaced as our understanding evolves. In thsi way we had Newton's laws of motion and gravity replaced by Einstein's theory of relativity and now what? QM? And after that? But hey, I'm not a metaphysician or academic and this is just what my intuition leads me into tentatively holding.
Reification fascinates me and mainly because my philosophical journey and intuition has a focus on the idea that we make many assumptions. I find it fascinating to contemplate how much of what we call reality may be co-created, a product of our experience. This, from the smattering I know of it, is a rich theme in phenomenology and postmodernism, and of course, it is hotly resisted by many who prefer foundationalist models. Thats all.
Could be. But maybe conceptual frameworks need renewal too. If by science we hold the belief that the universe is intelligible and that science mirrors reality. Hey - I'm not sayign I'm correct on this (correct is problematic of itself) just that it's a perspective I have sympathy for and want to pursue.
I agree assumptions are what we must be looking for the most when we ask questions. You said co-created. That implies two sources of creation. I think that is accurate. Our minds are full of co-creations. I am just as fascinated by how much we contribute to the creation as some co-creator does.
I am interested in your response to this, because this speaks of both elements in the co-creation:
Quoting Fire Ologist
I might say the Earth is the center of the universe as metaphorical description, indicating the centrality of our planet in all our priorities and values. And this would be true in a sense.
I wonder to what extent all knowledge and language are best understood as metaphor. Ways of managing our experince for a time. Some metaphors work better for certain purposes than others, right? Not sure I have much more on this today.
I suspect I am not, although I don't really understand. It seems to me that you're sometimes saying there are consistencies/regularities/patterns in the universe, and sometimes saying there are not. How can we make sense of the indeterminate, beyond knowing it is indeterminate? What I mean is, what greater understanding of it can exist beyond the fact that it is indeterminate? If, for no rhyme or reason, something changes its shape, size, state (solid, liquid, gas), and everything else we can think of, each at its own random interval, isn't that all we can understand about it?
Exactly one point in time is a low probability event!
Possibly, but not necessarily.
A favorite example of mine is astrology. People who take astrology seriously are able to do all the things you just said: Hear and respond and understand one another in a perceived orderly manner.
But I'd be hesitant to draw the conclusion that the astrologists have found order in the world. I think they've ordered their thoughts in a manner that they are able to communicate, and that their names refer to various objects in the world, and all their explanations are entirely false.
Basically we want to believe if we are coherent that what we believe is true, but that's not enough because sometimes we can build whole ways of talking together in an orderly way -- such as astrology or numerology -- which has nothing to do with the world and everything to do with what satisfies us to hear.
Whether 1) there is the world and its order as it presents itself to me, (which is my position), or 2) there is the world as I present myself to it (as map that I make, which is your position), but either way, 3) there is still always you or me and the ordered world (every position includes ordered descriptions and worlds); So therefore, no matter how you slice it, 4) there is the order of the world.
That itself is order in the world. 1 or 2 through 4 are not true in a sense - they are true in all senses, because of the world.
I am not merely making up there is you and me, and we are in the world. The world itself has dictated this, has ordered this be a coherent statement and valid and true, to us both.
It is all we ever speak of, and can ever speak of, if we are to make sense of what each other says.
Quoting Tom Storm
See, you speak of order in the world . Results (things in the world, that we point to), that are pragmatic (according to some reasoning, some ordering, some practical relationship to them). So you are speaking of a world and speaking of order (pragmatic) in the world (results are in the world, not merely an agreement). Maybe you said it for nothing more than to conjecture, but that small, pregnant quote assumes the existence of a lot that you are trying to say is not there.
Quoting Tom Storm
Senses of truth, and therefore senses with no truth. In these few words. Whole worlds between us, to observe and which serve as judge for what senses can be said are true and what senses are not.
But we are only able to make sense of your metaphorical sense of center because of the way the world is, and the possibilities that we can see in it. For instance, we have to now say that this sense of center is metaphorical only:
Quoting Tom Storm
True, but only in a metaphorical sense of center because, the earth as a ball of mass does not relate to the sun and planets and stars as a center, or there is no physics to speak of. If you want results in a practical sense, place the sun as more central, not the earth. And if there is a math that holds earth as center and completes a description of the earth in the world for practical purposes not just metaphorical ones, we still have to look to order in the world to show how the map of new math maps to it.
There is a reason it makes sense to use the word sense when talking about true in a sense. It is true in a sense of the world you are pointing to by the ordering of your words. In other words, your words will only make sense when you senses of truth because we can both also point to something in the world that is ordered to your words (or that you can order to your words).
I guess my point is more basically, whether we put the order in the world or it is just there, we cant escape finding order in the world. So why bother resisting order in the world? Look for it. Make your words make sense as descriptions I would also make because we are in the same world. (Which you do, but dont seem to see the ordered world in it.)
Another way to ask the question the OP is trying to pose:
Do we impose order on the world only (because we surely do that), or does the world impose its own order on us as well? Does the world educate us as we observe it? Or do we inform the world or simply overlay an invented map that magically functions to be readable by other map makers? (Loaded question but you know where I stand. I say that means you know something about the world, with me in it.)
That actually also demonstrates my point. I agree astrologists are kidding themselves, both or all of them that can create logical chains of astrological reasoning. I believe this because of the world and the evidence I can show you from this world; we can show how astrologers are kidding themselves. Without the order in the world, we cant do this. Without order in the world, why would you be hesitant to accept what they think they are saying provided a reasonable, coherent, functioning, map? Astrologers made some map applicable to the world and that keeps order as you would have it, out of the world and only in the words and descriptions we fabricate? They are a better example of where you think order only resides - in our descriptions (like astrology).
Can we? Have you tried?
What I've noticed is that I'm showing myself why I don't believe them, and they are dismissive of what I say.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Notice how I said "of course there are regularities" -- I'm not trying to maintain an idealist thesis here. I'm a materialist and a realist. My doubt so far has been with respect to the notion of laws of nature.
A regularity can be as simple as "The sun rose yesterday morning and this morning" -- two observations grouped together. The observations are of something, of course -- but I don't think it's so general as to be able to claim something like "All of Nature is Ordered" or "There are Laws of Physics"
Rather, just like the astrologist, we go out to look for evidence for our beliefs while usually avoiding evidence that counts against our beliefs.
And lo and behold, upon seeing a stone drop twice I knew there was an eternal order in nature! :D
I take out the all of and the laws of.
My end result is, order I observe. I am educated to make maps from two teachers: the world AND people who use maps with me. Not just people who use maps (otherwise they couldnt be with me, like I cannot be with astrologers because that stuff makes no sense at all to me and Incould show you why all day.).
"Nature is ordered"
and
"There are Physics"
?
I don't think there are lawless universes though, I think a universe is fundamentally defined by its laws.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Irrespective of the self-and-other distinction (or divide), would you not say that these are all parts of the same world?
Yeah.
I dont just make order up. I learn how to make order up from nature because, there is a physics to things, because nature has an ordering to it. It has other things as well, like disorder, and I dont always see the physics
As long as I emphasize your statement thus: "I don't just make order up"
Sure.
Taking that out though I think "I don't make order up" is false.
We do!
Why else place the fork on the left?
Ok good. We are coming together. We are forming the much celebrated consensus.
I would say, we are forming this consensus both because we each know how to make things up really well, AND because they reflect something true and ordered in the world.
So if we have consensus that we dont just make order up, we have consensus that there is order in the world. We draw on observations that we can point to, each of us separately and both of us together, in the world, and from those, fashion an ordered description.
Maybe because the person is left-handed. Not just because I looks pretty to someone.
You would, but I wouldn't. ;)
Quoting Fire Ologist
We have consensus on the first point, but no the implication.
Just because I see the stone drop 20 times every time I drop it that does not then mean that "there is order in the world" -- most specifically thinking here with respect to "the world".
There's order in the world could mean something small, which I agree with, and something large, which I disagree with.
The "large" thing I disagree with is the notion that nature behaves according to law.
In the most literal sense -- there is no government which passes laws that make our universe. This is to interpret the universe in terms of our governments. While useful sometimes, it's not true.
Maybe.
But in the "usual" table manners:
If all the place settings were different from each other, I think we would all agree the table setting was disordered. But if they were all the same way, we would see some order on the table. But there is no absolute law that says forks on the left.
The middle part here is, order on the table has a component dictated by the world (if each place setting is however/random them the table will show no order), but if we put all of the forks on the right and build repeatable settings, we can show an ordered, pleasing table.
No. I'm speaking of a 'world' to which we ascribe order by virtue of all the factors I've described several times.
My basic (and speculative) thesis is this: we find ourselves somewhere, though we don't really know what somewhere is, even though we give it names (like world or reality) and we go about using our cognitive faculties and languages to give order to it. We invent names and concepts and theories, many of which seem to match what we appear to be involved in. This is something we do to help us predict and act. But this process doesn't necessarily map onto any external reality independent of us; rather, it helps us cope with whatever it is we inhabit. Our theories and models eventually fade and are replaced by new ones and they in turn fade and on it goes...
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes, and this is the question Im attempting to address. My intuition tells me that what we call order is a superimposition upon our situation, not something intrinsic to the world or external to us in any absolute sense. Humans live by abstractions. We generate patterns, names, systems, all of which help us navigate what would otherwise be an overwhelming flux. But that doesnt mean those patterns are in the world in a mind-independent way. Theyre ways we cope, predict, and make meaning. So its not that I deny the experience of order or its usefulness to us Im simply cautious about mistaking our interpretive frameworks for the nature of reality itself. Something doesnt need to be true to be useful.
If there are many universes, some lawless and others not, this answers the question. Structure like ours can only arise in a lawful universe, lawlessness might look like a soup of random micro events.
Quoting Tom Storm
I understand that this is your view, and this is what prompted my questions above (and likewise, @Patterner's questions). Do you have any thoughts on that?
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, this is all lovely and banal even, but one does need to be a constructivist in your sense to hold such views.
Quoting Tom Storm
Did it now? How? I mean, if we apply your outlook consistently, then all our beliefs are almost certainly and irredeemably false, being that the world is independent of them, and they are independent of the world. But how then do we prove or disprove anything? What meaning can such words have?
Quoting Patterner
And how can we even know that it is indeterminate? This, too, would be a construction that has no purchase on anything outside our cultural practices.
I wonder why you picked astrology as an example, rather than astronomy? Would you consider them more-or-less on the same footing, and if not, why not?
I don't think this is all that challenging. I'd prefer to say things are useful, not true or false. This is my thesis. I'm not claiming to be inerrant about this matter, it's simply my tentative model for understanding things, and it relates to the original post.
Some things work well for us in certain circumstances, and some things don't. It's always evolving and changing. I suspect you're right. We never really get to truth, at least not if by truth we mean something external to our contingent factors like language and culture.
The next obvious criticism is: if nothing is true, then neither is what you said, Tom.
To that, I would agree. Saying we never get to truth expresses skepticism about objective or foundational truth claims, but it is not itself a universal truth, rather, I'd see it more as a useful framework for managing ideas and guiding actions. I think Richard Rorty may have settled on this frame too, but I am not a philosopher.
Of course, there are intersubjective communities that share views and models, and many of those are useful. Those communities may even see their frames as 'how the world is'. But they soon are found wanting and they change. Just look at the history of medicine. In 200 years, it's likely we'll look back on many of our current practices as a mix of ignorance and barbarism, just as we how view much of what was done 200 years ago.
Things don't have to be true to be of use.
This one comes from Hilary Lawson. A good example of how something doesn't need to be true to be useful is Aristotles geocentric model of the universe. Although we now know it was completely wrong (the Earth isnt at the center, and there are no crystal spheres) the model was used successfully for over a thousand years, especially in navigation. Sailors relied on tools and star charts based on that system to cross oceans and navigate by the stars. It worked, even though it wasnt true. As Lawson points out, this shows that conceptual frameworks can be effective 'closures' that help us act, even if they dont reflect reality as it actually is.
Back to laws and patterns. Perceived patterns in the external world emerge through our embodied interaction with the environment. I am wondering if they reflect what human cognition projects onto experience and that they can function provisionally to produce what we call useful outcomes.
Quoting SophistiCat
Quoting Patterner
These patterns are neither external to us, nor are they merely internal to us. The order emerges out of our discursive and material interactions with our environment. It is not discovered but produced , enacted as patterns of activity.
Cool. I can get behind that. The how interests me.
Thinking along this line kind of led me to writing - Quoting Tom Storm
But this is more properly your area of expertise, not mine.
Duck-rabbits and frog-horses - is it really a duck, really a frog? No, it's a Duck-rabbits and it's a frog-horse. It makes no sense to ask which came first, which is it really.
Discovering and producing as the very same thing.
I don't think they're on the same footing. I think that's because astrology's purpose isn't to describe, but it's in the language of description. It "works" at a descriptive level because it's complicated and vague enough that any example can be explained. But then that's just why it's a degenerative research program: they're not trying to figure out which part is wrong, but rather it's a constant quest to demonstrate what's right about it.
The reason I use astrology is because it's an example of a coherent language game that people claim has descriptive power, but I interpret it as a language game which people play to talk about themselves and others and their interpersonal lives that only has the appearance of describing people.
Basically it's possible, even if something is useful and coherent, for it to be entirely false even though we see a pattern there and we think it's due to features of the world.
There are lots of interesting answers given in this thread. However I like to approach ideas about nature from a different view point and compare and contrast from two different view points. To perform a kind of calculus.
So whats been presented in this thread are ideas about nature derived from what we find before us when we are born into this world. Including an already fully formed society and culture with all the knowledge of humanity. A world where physical material works in a predictable way following laws of physics etc. and we inhabit bodies which have evolved to inhabit this world over millennia and are very finely tuned to this environment and interacting with each other and other plants and animals. Resulting in a stable complex persistent world, that to a large extent we take for granted as a peaceful normal state of affairs.
Now by contrast I will offer an alternative perspective on this same state of affairs from the spiritual dimension.
Imagine a God, or being with immense powers to create, or generate things. This being has a ground, or substance, a blank canvas of material potentiality to work with. Such that the being can order it into a multitude of forms and complexities at will.
Now imagine that this being creates a world of interacting beings, an angelic world. This angelic world will have a nature and forms dictated by what is required for them to have a form that can be interacting beings that are able to interact. They need to be separate, more than one, they need to be able to act independently of the other beings. They need a common environment, or place in which to be and to interact. So they need a space and some time. Rather like virtual interacting bots that can be created on a computer screen. Now we already have a few basic laws of nature. These laws are requirements, necessities for this little world of angelic beings to exist in this ground and interact.
When it comes to their environment, how they interact, and what they do while interacting. That depends on what they have and can do within the constraints of those few laws of nature that they have. So they may well be able to speed up time, slow it down, reverse it. They may be able to do the same with size, appearance, even change and alter the place they inhabit totally. Merge with each other move through each other. Have bodies made up of other groups of beings etc etc etc.*
Now imagine the creator being decides to increase the complexity of this little world of angels. Inevitably there will be more requirements for laws of nature necessitated. There may be more than one kind of being. Which means they will need to be differentiated into groups, with their differentiated modes of communication. There might be a broader, more complex kind of place or world that they inhabit. Which means there would need to be more stable structures to work with. There would have to be rules for what the individuals in that world can do the change the world, or other beings on a wim. Because it would interfere with the stability of the more complex system they inhabit.
So we have a more complex world with differentiated structures, beings, rules of behaviour etc, which are necessary for that degree of complexity. Constraining the angelic beings in what they can do. Even though, these beings may still have full control at will of their form, the forms around them and how they interact. They inevitably have to conform to the rules of that degree of complexity, to remain there, and sustain it.
Now lets jump forward a long way into a vastly more complex world of angels. There would at some point of complexity be a requirement for more solid objects, physical material. There would have to be more formal constraints on what each individual angel could do in that world. There would be more rigid laws of nature. The angels can still magically change anything at will. But they are strongly required to abide by the laws because it could have far reaching consequences in that world it they are not fully observed. They might be a history of disasters when beings had defied the laws, resulting in the creator being modifying the angels limiting their ability to change things. This might include encoding things so that they cant access certain abilities without knowledge of the codes.
Eventually the physical material they are working with would become so constrained with such strict laws and the angels would be so limited in their abilities that they would have to learn to inhabit physical bodies in that world with no magical abilities left, no knowledge of the creator being, or the more foundational rules of the world works. In a sense they would be imprisoned in physical bodies in an entirely physical world.
We have come full circle in this alternative cosmogony to the world we inhabit from a different world, the world of spirit. However the same laws of nature apply, for seemingly different reasons. But are they really any different, they are equally necessary in each world. Indeed we could be in either and have no idea which one we are really in, or have no way of finding out.
*what I am describing correlates closely with the cosmos as described in Hinduism.
However, that doesn't even matter. Even if there are no patterns in the universe whatsoever other than those humans construct, humans are a part of the universe. Therefore, patterns are a part of the universe.
Yeah, I like it too. Or something pretty close to it.
Quoting Tom Storm
Agreed, insofar as all natural external reality is independent from us with respect to its existence, but whatever of external reality to which the process .whatever it may be .does map, is necessarily not independent from us with respect to its perception by us, hence is the mere occassion for the possibility of any experience for us.
Quoting Tom Storm
Ive had better luck with relations, which seems to be what patterns reduce to. Another story, though, for another time. Or not.
Quoting Mww
Cool. We may check this out down the track...
We do, of course, actively discover order when we look for it, be it in our natural environment or in artificial constructs. But the other kind of pattern emergence has its place too, both in sentient and nonsentient organisms. Our DNA encodes patterns in our environment, for example, and so does our behavior.
I know that, but I note that you keep evading the questions that challenge that thesis.
Quoting Tom Storm
That's not the criticism, at least not from me. The criticism is that you keep saying things about the world and our relationship to it, while maintaining that the world is independent of our concepts and practices. Don't you find this contradictory?
The most reasonable move from this point of view would be to drop this mysterious "world" thing as surplus to requirements. But then, of course, in the process of expanding the world of mentation and sociation to encompass the sensible world that we inhabit, in assimilating our commonsense beliefs and scientific theories, you will end up with a construct that is isomorphic to the world of the realist, with the main difference being a more contrived language (like saying "useful" in place of "true").
Quoting Tom Storm
Sounds like you've been listening to @Joshs :) But how does this square with your earlier stated view that there are no patterns in the external world? What is it that we perceive then?
I appreciate that you use plain language to get to the heart of things and speak your mind.
I think I see what you are saying. At root, this is your speculation: [we use] our cognitive faculties and languages to give order to [experience/the world]. We invent names and concepts and theories. We do this best when we do it pragmatically to help us predict and act.
I think I understand that and I think that all is happening.
But my issue arises and begs further speculation when we turn out abilities to give order and invent concepts back on ourselves, and on the world as a whole (and not the world in some practical contextualized circumstance).
When we reflect on your thesis, and further speculate, we end up needing to use words in this way:
many of which seem to match what we appear to be involved in. This is something we do to help us predict and act. But this process doesn't necessarily map onto any external reality independent of us
Our inventions of complex concepts like external versus conceptualized reality, and matching these and mapping these. Knowing whether our concepts do or do not map onto some independent world is one thing, but how do know there is such a thing as mapping or a separate world, at all?
Are we just making concepts and languages up, or are we also making up the fact that there is an independent world and concepts can attempt to map to? We never seem to admit all of the moving parts in our speculations without saying independent and drawing this clear line. Is the line already drawn? If so, how is this not an order of things that we did not invent?
The fish may feel it is one with the ocean, and as a conscious being, not know itself, and be a part of the ocean. But people make maps, and so we notice the fish without noticing the ocean.
So I dont disagree with the positive assertion you say about what there is for us, except I would add there are more things we can speak about, and some of these, we didnt invent. Like the fact that we live separately (from the world and each other), seeking to invent knowledge, of the world, that can be captured in language. This is a fact about the world and you and me in it. I didnt merely invent you.
Quoting Tom Storm
That is a better restatement of what I am taking to be your central, speculative, thesis.
I see that first, yes, we invent our language.
My intuition tells be I cant leave it at that, because our language works too well to capture predictability and identify things.
It cannot be an accident that language about what I think maps to the world, and language about what someone else thinks maps to the world, and these two languages also match each other. There is too much circumstantial evidence for an order I didnt invent. Everytime I cross the street safely, order in the world, in my eyes, is there for me to testify to in my words, words I can use to keep someone else from getting hit by a car.
Quoting Tom Storm
If the world was ONLY an overwhelming flux, no abstractions would allow us to survive the day or make even less possible, planning for tomorrow. But we survive some days with predicable ease, and plan for next year about things that we sometimes actually make happen. This is not overwhelming flux.
Or I would say, this is not only overwhelming flux.
Quoting Tom Storm
This is your intuition. In one sense, I have to make up a specific noun, predicate that noun from a point of view, place that object in a context of other nouns predicated from other points of view and knit this elaborate web before I can claim my words to reflect an order in the world. I agree, that is the process of ordering things.. My language itself is not mind-independent.
But I think that overlooks what language is and what thinking thinks about. Language is always about. We are always translating and interpreting - this is the invention you speak of - but we are always translating and interpreting something independent, something about which we speak. This is what I am trying to show you is always involved as well.
Quoting Tom Storm
For me to cope, to predict, to make meaning - we cannot simply invent. If there is something, like flux, that demands we cope with it, and somehow we are able to cope with it, to predict it - then there must be something about it our coping mechanism truly relates to just as we have truly felt it was coped with; you dont get to say coping until something has been coped with - and that says something about some thing (the world). Same type of analysis for prediction (pre-duct, say it before it is in the world), and meaning.
Your caution is wise in the moment, when deciding when it is safe to step into the street and cross. We are wrong so often. But that caution is different than saying there is no order in the world that instructs the maps we invent to navigate this world.
Quoting Tom Storm
I disagree. This statement isnt itself useful when judging important, practical usefulness. Something DOES need to be true to teach others language (maps) that will help them survive crossing the street.
Im not an idealist, and Im not claiming that nothing exists. My point is that human knowledge is contingent, constructed through language, culture, and shared practices, so it isnt true in any ultimate or objective sense, but rather useful within a given context. What reality is, in itself, we dont know. The fact that we can build technologies and predict outcomes doesnt prove weve captured some final truth; it simply shows that our current ways of describing the world work well enough for now. 400 years from now our technology may be able to defy current 'laws' of physics.
Quoting Fire Ologist
The fact that our language lines up with the world (and with each others) doesnt require us to believe theres some deep order weve discovered. Its more plausible to say weve developed ways of speaking that help us cope with our environment and coordinate with others. That alignment isnt surprising; its the result of a long, shared process of trial, correction, and adaptation. Intersubjective communities of agreement. What works gets kept. We dont need to assume our words mirror reality; its enough that they help us get things done and reach agreement.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think the example provided makes the argument. But plenty of things which are untrue can be useful , from painting to poetry, fairy tales to myth, even science, which has proved to be wrong, may have provided some utility. No doubt many cancer treatments we have now fail to understand accurately the nature of cancer, but work at some level that prolongs some lives.
This is an equivocation of the word law. In the case of natural law, law is a metaphor rather than an actual law implying a lawgiver, like traffic laws. Natural laws are axioms or regularities.
However, your example illustrates something different, a speed limit can be changed or ignored without any direct repercussion. But can we ignore the logical axioms (identity non-contradiction and excluded middle) without important consequences? Are we're unable to change them? Cue the debate about paraconsistent logic.
"Laws" is used as a metaphor, many people just call them the principles of logic.
Fr. Norris Clark wrote a book arguing for a Thomistic metaphysics. He says we know something exists when we perceive it with our senses. Although I agree with him, a significant problem perplexes me. Dr. William Lane Craig thinks we're justified in believing there's an external world if we don't find a defeater for that belief. But if Berkeley is right, nobody can do that, since objects will still seem to be in an external world when there is none. That suggests that a sound deductive argument would be the only way to prove him wrong.
I'm an atheist, so for me there'd need to be a good reason for assuming gods before giving them a series of characteristics. Or one god. Whatever the model might be.
Quoting BillMcEnaney
Well, most people build their beliefs on foundations/axioms or presuppositions. There's a choice of these and they're hotly debated epistemological claims.
I'm no expert on logic, but I think youre referring here to induction and a law of nature rather than a logical principle. This is an inductive inference about the physical world.
But you don't need to look into nature to illustrate logical principles; you could say they are necessary to hold a meaningful conversation.
The universe possesses a certain orderliness to it which exists independently of our descriptive language used to describe it. This is the crux of the issue I believe and so far in this thread we dont know where this orderliness came from but that things just happen to be orderly. Whether this answer is satisfactory or not I do not know however there are two answers that I can think of either it just is the way it is for no apparent reason or theres an intelligence in the cosmos a god who created these laws.
For the fact that the orderliness exhibits some intelligence then its that intelligence that has imbued this order into the universe rather than it just being happenstance.
Isn't t that a false dilemma fallacy? How did you rule out other possibilities?
Quoting kindred
Im not convinced this is accurate. I think there are philosophers, such as Derrida and Rorty, who would agree. Its not everyones cup of tea, to be sure, but they may be onto something.
Quoting Banno
What other possibilities are there ?
In any case do you believe that the universe contains order in it ?
I'd say we don't know enough to make any firm pronouncements: we have limitations. From an epistemological perspective, what if idealism is accurate? Are regularities then in the universe, or part of consciousness, convenient mechanisms that help us make sense of experience, but not inherent in the universe itself? Perhaps more along the lines of how Kant seems to view space and time.
If by "no apparent reason" you mean there may be reasoning that simply isnt apparent to us yet, then fair enough. But it's worth noting that the very idea of a "reason" (defaulting to causation) reflects a deeply human need to explain, grounded in the assumption that the universe is intelligible. Maybe it isnt.
The significant difference between deductive and inductive arguments is that deductive ones can be conclusive, and inductive ones are always inconclusive when they confirm their conclusions. There's only one way to make an inductive argument conclusive: You must find a counterexample to its conclusion. So, scientists may know much less than they think they do.
I mentioned Berkeley's theory because most natural scientists are physicalists. Physicalists believe there's no God and nothing like God. For them, there's only the natural world and its costs. But physicalism may still be false, even if atheism is true. Physicalism is false if there's even one nonphysical object, a number, for example. If Berekeky's theory is true, everyone may still believe in physicalism, even if it's false. Scientific absolute certainty is too rare for me to believe that natural science is the best source of knowledge. No, scientism is self-refuting. It says science is our only source of knowledge. But since that's a belief about the nature of knowledge, it's not a scientific statement.
You said "gods" instead of "God." What's wrong with that? You might make a category midtake. You might lump God together with Zeus, Thor, Hera, Kali, and others when those pagan deities aren't deities in the biblical sense. If they exist, they're created, which means God makes them exist. God explains why there's anything at all. Zeus doesn't do that.
If you want scientific evidence for classical theism, read about combinatorics. It'll show you that natural selection would need to try too many possibilities to produce an animal body plan. Darwin's theory is false. But doesn't mean that I'm a young-earth creationist. You may know that many biologists believe it's time to replace Darwin's theory with one with more explanatory power. If there is one, that's fine with me. Suppose classical theism is true. Then, if atheism were true, there would be nothing at all. If the classical theist's God exists and if Darwin is right, evolution presupposes theism because God must sustain each object and every natural event.
Sounds like an argument straight from David Bentley Hart, right down to the wording. I quite like his work and mention it here sometimes. I say Gods, even when referring to Christianity, since accounts vary dramatically even within the one religion. Everyone thinks their understanding, their god, is the right one.
Im not up for a debate about science versus religion. But even if Darwin were wrong, that still wouldnt get us to gods.
You write well, Bill. Most naturalists are not scientistic in outlook, and many are quite open to religious perspectives. Physicalists who embrace metaphysical naturalism take a stronger stance, but it's not clear that anyone can definitively argue that physicalism is the only true view. A more cautious and widely accepted position is methodological naturalism. The challenge, of course, is that we cant directly test for supernatural claims, we can only infer them through particular language practices or philosophical arguments.
Maybe I sound like Hart, but I've never read his books. I'm a Thomist and an Aristotelian, and Hart's isn't either.
I hope you know much more philosophy than Dawkins does. Sadly, it would embarrass me if I thought up his atheistic argument from complexity. He devoted about five pages to Aquinas's Five Ways in The God Delusion when he should have known that St. Thomas thought God had no parts. Thomas believed that anything with parts needed a cause to combine them. He believed God would prevent a vicious infinite regress of causes. For him, God explains why there's natural causality.
When I attended graduate school at the State University of New York at Albany, my philosophy professors were physicalists. They probably still are. But physicalism is probably self-defeating, like something Freud believed. For him, subconscious brain events caused each belief.. Sadly, that falsifies his opinion because it implies that those subconscious processes also caused it. If thoughts consist of deterministic brain events, how can I know I'm not like Hilary Putnam's imaginary brain in a vat while a mad scientist uses electrodes to make me hallucinate? Am I trapped in Star Trek's holo-deck, where I've lived from birth? The computer could simulate a door to convince me I could leave that machine. If physicalism and determinism are true, rational thought seems impossible.
My undergraduate advisor was an atheist who taught me Medieval Philosophy, so he was open to religious thought. But some other scholars were hostile to it. That was all right because I needed them to challenge my beliefs. I couldn't argue for them in an echo chamber.
Sounds like you have a healthy and useful approach. I have respect for the Catholic tradition and a couple of friends who are members of the Catholic clergy. One of them introduced me to Father Richard Rohr, who has some powerful insights on binary thinking and finding better ways to approach complex issues. That said, some Catholics view him as bordering on heretical.
I think physicalism (now naturalism) like religion, has become more sophisticated since my university days. Our philosophy department was strictly atheist and often patronising towards religion. I found that very unhelpful, even as an atheist, and ended up leaving.
Quoting BillMcEnaney
Thats a common enough argument, but I dont find it convincing. That may depend on what one thinks reasoning actually is. I dont see reason as some special branch of objective truth reflecting the nature of reality, I generally undertand it as a contingent product of language and culture. I think truth is of a similar nature: not something absolute out there, but something shaped and revised within shared human practices. In other words, reason and truth are contingent tools we use to navigate and manage our environment, none of which strike me as requiring a transcendent foundation.
So, what happens if nature violates its laws? Does it get a ticket?
This obvious parallel with human-instituted laws is unfortunate (and it's probably why some people like @Moliere are allergic to the phrase). Human laws are only prescriptions. They require complex social mechanisms to work, and even then they work imperfectly at best. Laws of nature were always thought of as inviolable (with the possible exception of an occasional miraculous intervention).
The remedy is to not get too hung up on words and their folk etymologies, and remember that words can have multiple meanings. Laws of conduct, laws of science, and laws of nature all mean different things.
All law consists of the relation of conceptions in accordance with principles. That subsumed under law is determined by the source of the principles to which it accords, and that legislated by law is determined by the source of the causality of its objects.
The possibility of law in general on the one hand, and the apodeitic certainty of law on the other, is given from the principles of universality and necessity.
In the case of natural law, then, in which all causality of objects is Nature itself, the source of conceptions is empirical understanding, which is itself always predicated on observation of those objects, the relation being an effect to its cause.
An expression of a law is linguistic in one form or another; the construction of it, is always metaphysical, the purview of speculative pure reason for natural law, and practical reason for moral law in the case made by deontological philosophy.
A metaphysical answer to a metaphysical question.
For whatever thats worth.
I reject moral relativism and relativism about truth. But my emotional pain makes me long to think like a cultural anthropologist who must learn how to study a society from the native's perspective and empathize with him.
You know what Christian fundamentalists usually do. They study the Bible from a 21st-century perspective and read contemporary ideas into it. They misinterpret Sacred Scripture because they ignore ancient historical and cultural context. Many atheists do that, too, when they caricature theism. They may not know they're doing that. But perceptive theists notice the distortion and oversimplification. I don't see things your way when I'm biased against it.
Some unsophisticated people believe relativists are kind and tolerant. They forget that truth is hard to find. Relativism about truth makes people like arrogant narcissists who are too proud to learn from others. They might say, "I'm a scientist. You're a gullible moron because you believe in the invisible sky daddy. Learn science and reject religious superstition."
Hear Dawkin's dismissive "What if you're wrong?" speech and hear his fans cheer mindlessly when he humiliates a since questioner by committing an obvious example of the genetic fallacy. How can he expect theists to listen carefully to him when he dimisses what they believe and ignores how his arrogance might make them feel. He's an excellent scientist and a gifted writer. Unfortunately, I loathe how he treated his questioner in this video.
What if you're wrong?
I could reply with another example of the same fallacy by saying something like this. Prof. Dawkins, you believe in contemporary Western science because you grew up in the West. In Ancient Greece, you would have believed in Ancient Greek science and atomism. You would have believed in Ancient Chinese science during the Ming Dynasty. What if you're you're wrong about Ancient Greek science? What if your wrong about contempory Western science?"
Dawkins's audience was like a screaming crowd a a Justin Bieber concert because they didn't reflect on what they heard. Dawkin's is no elderly substitute for a teen heartthrob.
Quoting BillMcEnaney
I'm not really able to follow the thread of this, it seems like grab-bag of assumptions and prejudices, perhaps?
Take this line, as a for instance:
Relativism about truth makes people like arrogant narcissists who are too proud to learn from others.
Now thats just an assertion. What demonstration can you provide that this is necessarily the case? I could just as easily say that Christianity makes people into arrogant narcissists who are too proud to learn from others, and it would be equally true. By that, I mean you can find arrogant narcissists anywhere and, to be honest, Im particularly wary of anyone who thinks they have The Truth, surely a recipe for arrogance greater than a propensity for subjectivity?
But even if relativism turns people into narcissists, you still haven't addressed whether it is a reasonable view of itself. Whether relativism is true or not is independent of how people behave if they hold this view.
But perhaps all this, and your ideas about God, belong in a different or a new thread rather than this one about "laws" of nature...
Quoting BillMcEnaney
I started a thread on this very matter called More Sophisticated Philosophical Accounts of God.
Thats not an example of breaking the law of gravity at all. Gravity still applies because the ball is still pressing down against your hand with the same force as when it was falling. Its just that your hand formed an obstacle which that force was not strong enough to overcome. For example, if the ball was a 10kg shot put, your hand wouldnt have stopped it, it would have pushed your hand out of the way.
As for your question,
I have concluded that the laws of nature are innate. That whenever there is more than one, a pattern emerges which on a greater scales results in these laws. As to where this comes from, who knows.
No, that's a common error. Saying relativism is self-defeating only works if you ignore how relativists actually define truth. Relativism doesnt claim universal truth; it asserts that truth is always relative to a framework, so the statement truth is relative is itself a framework-bound claim, not a universal one. That said I'm not especially concerned by so-called performative contradictions, I think contradictions are just part of how life and language actually work.
A relativist will often argue that truth depends on context, like culture, language, or conceptual schemes. I think that's pretty much the case. So when they say something is true, they mean it's true relative to a particular framework, not that it's universally true for everyone at all times. In Western countries, we often have intersubjective agreements about values, but even some of these are open to challenge. Some people condemn homosexuality, while others proudly fly the rainbow flag of inclusion. There are different frameworks even within a single culture.
Each paradigm lands in what you might call a metaphorical vault that no one can open. Nobody can understand its jargon anymore. Its theories don't work. . . However, Kuhn still uses outdated jargon to describe supposedly unintelligible models. His postmodern antirealist theory sounds like a kind of relativism you described.
Scientist X may say that atoms exist. Scientist Y might assure you that they don't exist. X believes that atoms exist, logically consistent with Y believing atoms don't exist. But ignore the parts about X and Y to get contradictories. When you tell me that some statement is true in some context, it may mean it's only a supposition. However, that supposition may be false and inconsistent with other context statements. When you suppose the first premise in a reductio ad absurdum argument, you do that to derive a contradiction from it.
Going back to more than one, could there, logically, be more than one without the innate pattern? Or could there be other patterns?
For dialectical consistency, we must say that metaphysically, conceptual relations as such, represent human understanding of natural events. Words describe; understanding uses no words hence doesnt describe.
In whichever form conceptual relations are eventually understood, the words used to express such relation represents a description post hoc ergo propter hoc, of the understanding alone, which is twice removed from the event itself.
And still as yet has no sufficient justification for reference as law, but merely the initial condition established for its possibility, for as yet there is no account of the principles to which the relations must accord.
Metaphysics: that fun shit in which every single rational human ever necessarily indulges but, all-too-humanly, seldom bothers to acknowledge, while nonetheless thrilled to hear himself talk and then think theres something important about that.