Benjamin Cain
Dec 18, 2023

--

Your theism would make the laws of nature just like human social laws. The laws would be the designs of functions for artifacts, and there would be no objective difference between nature and artificiality. That mix-up affected early modern scientists, given their lingering deism.

David Hume pointed out, skeptically, that there's little empirical support for thinking that laws necessarily hold. Social laws are necessary because they're normative: violating those laws is supposed to be bad because we want society to sustain itself. Without God, there's no such normative basis of the laws of nature--unless the normativity comes from us, as the lawgivers who mean to use our understanding of how nature works to terraform the wilderness. Scientific objectification, too, would be a social project.

--

--

Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

No responses yet