On Primitive Laws
Quaeritur utrum leges naturae possint esse facta prima et inexplicata intra ordinem finitum, an vero talis primitivismus sit contradictorius intentioni rationis, quae exigit ut ipsa necessitas habeat causam suam.
It is asked whether the laws of nature can be primitive and unexplained facts within the finite order, or whether such primitivism contradicts reason’s own demand that necessity itself must have a cause.
__________
Thesis
Law primitivism fails as an account of the laws of nature because it secures its necessity only by denying its own explanation. To treat the deepest, most intelligible features of reality as the least explicable is to invert the order of reason. If the finite claims to ground its own lawfulness, it asserts a self-sufficiency it cannot justify. Accordingly, the necessity of the finite’s own laws implies dependence upon an infinite truthmaker.
Locus Classicus
“By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… and in him all things hold together.”
— Colossians 1:16–17
Aquinas comments on this passage: “Ordo naturae participatio est legis aeternae” (ST I.91.2 ad 3). Augustine had earlier taught that “lex temporalis a lege aeterna derivatur” (De Libero Arbitrio I.6). The tradition thus affirms that the order and necessity observed within creation participate in the eternal act of divine reason. Against this background, primitivism, which asserts that the finite holds together of itself, appears as a metaphysical contradiction within Christian and classical realism alike.
EXPLICATIO
Law primitivism, as developed by Tim Maudlin in The Metaphysics Within Physics (Oxford University Press, 2007) and later refined in Philosophy of Physics: Laws, Explanation, and Symmetry (Princeton University Press, 2019), holds that the fundamental laws of nature are ontologically primitive; they are basic facts of the world that govern what is physically possible. As such, they are neither reducible to regularities among events nor analyzable in terms of universals or dispositions.
Central to Maudlin’s view is the notion of modal governance. According to this doctrine, laws are not descriptive generalizations but governing realities that determine the modal structure of the universe, that is, they determine the domain of what can and cannot occur. The laws of nature are “facts of governance,” possessing intrinsic modal authority; they make things behave lawfully, rather than merely record how they behave.
The philosophical motive behind this position is clear. Humean accounts reduce necessity to description; Maudlin restores it as an objective feature of reality. Unfortunately, by making the laws themselves fundamental, primitivism converts what should be explained into the ultimate explainer. The very intelligibility of the cosmos—its coherence, uniformity, and mathematical precision—becomes that about which reason is forbidden further to inquire. The result is a paradoxical ontology in which the finite behaves as if it were self-sufficient and necessary
Maudlin’s “governing facts” thus occupy an ambiguous status: they are finite in existence but infinite in function. They are everywhere present, universally binding, and unconditioned by what they govern. Primitivism thereby yields what may be called functional theism without God: the cosmos as self-grounded lawgiver.
Philosophically, this position is unstable. If laws are grounded, they are not primitive; if ungrounded, their modal authority is arbitrary. To recognize necessity but deny its cause is to paralyze reason at the point of its deepest activity.
Obiectiones
Objiectio I. According to Maudlin, every chain of explanation must terminate somewhere. Laws are where it properly ends, for they make explanation possible. To ask for a ground of law is to misunderstand law’s ontological role as modal governor.
Objiectio II. Empirical realism holds that seeking a metaphysical ground for laws exceeds the limits of science and contributes nothing to explanation or prediction.
Objiectio III. Neccessitarian naturalism opines that necessity is simply a feature of the finite. If the world exhibits regularity, that regularity is ultimate. Therefore, to postulate an Infinite truthmaker is gratuitous metaphysics.
Objiectio IV. Antifoundationalists argue that every worldview ends in some ungrounded posit: the theist in God, the naturalist in law. To stop with God rather than law merely renames the brute.
Objiectio V. Theological minimalism asserts that Scripture itself portrays the world as ordered by fixed ordinances: “He set them in their courses.” Hence, the lawful structure of nature may rightly be regarded as primitive, though originally created.
Responsiones
Ad I. Explanation must terminate, but not in the arbitrary. A proper terminus is self-explanatory, not self-assertive. To stop at finite laws is to call contingent necessity ultimate. Modal governance, if real, cannot itself be without a governor; an ungrounded modal authority is a sovereignty without legitimacy.
Ad II. Science is methodologically modest but metaphysically neutral. Its refusal to ask “why these laws?” does not license the claim that no answer exists. Philosophy begins where empirical explanation ends.
Ad III. The finite cannot generate its own necessity. Coordination among laws, constants, and symmetries presupposes a unity transcending each. To make the contingent itself the source of the necessary is to conflate participation with origin.
Ad IV. The Infinite is not a renamed brute fact. A brute fact is contingent yet unexplained, while the infinite is necessary per se. Appeal to theiInfinite transforms unintelligibility into intelligibility, grounding rather than relocating the unexplained.
Ad V. The “courses” of creation imply stability of operation, not independence of being. Biblical lawfulness manifests divine fidelity, not divine withdrawal. Autonomy of process does not entail autonomy of existence.
Determinatio
From the foregoing it is determined that:
Law primitivism secures modal governance by fiat; it asserts necessity without explaining it. It halts reason precisely where reason most demands sufficiency.
The finite cannot serve as its own lawgiver. A world of contingent things and relations cannot contain the source of its universal necessity. “Necessary facts” arising contingently are self-contradictory.
The appeal to an infinite ground is therefore a philosophical, not merely theological, conclusion. The rational structure of the finite world points beyond itself to an unconditioned truthmaker, to an infinite act by which self-explanatory being confers order and modal unity upon the finite.
In this light, participatory ontology emerges as reason’s completion. If the infinite grounds the finite’s necessity, every law, structure, and regularity exists per participationem in that infinite act. Law is the trace of participation, and modal governance is the finite expression of the Infinite’s continuous act of holding-together.
The statement in ipso omnia constant thus names not a pious mystery but a metaphysical necessity. Theology and philosophy converge: what theology calls Word and Spirit, philosophy recognizes as the infinite cause through which all finite law receives its being and coherence.
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