On Humean Regularities
Quaeritur
Quaeritur utrum leges naturae sint tantum descriptiones constantium eventuum in mundo, an vere exprimant necessarias rationes essendi quae exigunt causam extra ipsam seriem eventuum.
It is asked whether the laws of nature are merely descriptions of the constant conjunctions of events in the world, or whether they express necessary relations of being that require a cause beyond the series of events themselves.
Thesis
The Humean account of natural law as mere regularity confuses description with necessity and drains law from having real ontological force. If laws are nothing but patterns within phenomena, then the world lacks any genuine principle of order. Accordingly, to recover necessity, the finite must once again refer beyond itself to an infinite ground in which the possibility of law is constituted.
Locus Classicus
“He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
— Matthew 5:45
The constancy of divine action in nature, understood here as fidelitas Dei, was read by Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos 147.18) and Aquinas (ST I.103.8) as evidence that natural regularities are not self-existent but proceed from a sustaining cause. Luther, in his lectures on Genesis, described the continuance of natural order as the “mask of God” (Larva Dei), behind which divine agency preserves creation. Thus, constancy itself is a sign of dependence, not autonomy.
Explicatio
The Humean conception of law arose in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), where David Hume denied that we ever perceive necessary connection between events. From this epistemic premise, he concluded that laws of nature are nothing more than uniform patterns of experience: a "constant conjunction" of similar events leading the mind to expect one after the other. On this view, necessity is not in things but in thought; it is a “habit of imagination.”
In the twentieth century, David Lewis sought to preserve Hume’s metaphysics while providing a systematic account of laws. In A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance (1980) and Philosophical Papers, vol. II (1986), Lewis articulated the Best-System Analysis (BSA) in which laws are the generalizations that occur given the axioms of the simplest and strongest deductive system that best summarizes all particular facts: the “Humean mosaic” of local matters of fact. A law, then, is whatever appears in the optimal balance between simplicity and strength in describing the total history of the world.
The appeal of this position is its ontological economy: no mysterious necessities, only patterns; no governing principles, only description.
Yet its cost is high: it leaves the world without internal order or modal depth. The regularity of events may be observed, but the reason for that regularity is left unspoken. On Humeanism, the universe is a sequence without syntax, a film of contiguous frames in which connection is projected by the mind. In such a world, the word law is metaphor; nothing obliges events to recur, and the distinction between possible and impossible collapses into mere fact and non-fact.
Theologically, this view is untenable. It denies both creation’s intelligibility and divine fidelity. To call law a mental convenience is to deny that the world speaks truthfully of its Maker. Reason, however, testifies otherwise, for the constancy of nature presupposes an underlying act of being that makes regularity possible.
Obiectiones
Objiectio I. Already in 1748 David Hume had argued that all necessity arises from habit. We never perceive any power or connection in nature. Therefore, what we call a law is only an observed uniformity in experience.
Objiectio II. In 1980 David Lewis claimed that to treat laws as abstract necessities adds ontological baggage. The world is a mosaic of local facts. The “Best System” captures their pattern without positing mysterious connections.
Objiectio III. Empiricists say that science requires only prediction, not metaphysical grounding. Whether laws “exist” beyond description is irrelevant to the success of physics.
Objiectio IV. According to nominalism, the notion of an infinite truthmaker is incoherent. Necessity is linguistic convenience; to speak of grounding is to confuse semantics with ontology.
Objiectio V. Liberal theology avers that reading divine causality into natural regularity is to return to pre-critical metaphysics. Lawfulness may express God’s reliability metaphorically, but it requires no metaphysical participation.
Responsiones
Ad I. Observation alone yields correlation, not connection. If necessity were merely mental habit, then any sequence could become law through repetition, which contradicts both experience and reason. Our recognition of constant conjunction presupposes that reality itself is structured for recurrence.
Ad II. The Best-System Analysis transforms the ontological into the epistemic. It tells us what generalizations we find simplest, not why the world is ordered so as to be summarized. The balance of simplicity and strength explains convenience, not causation.
Ad III. Science as practice may ignore metaphysical foundations, but the intelligibility of science presupposes them. If the universe were pure contingency, induction itself would be unjustified. The success of empirical prediction depends upon a real order antecedent to observation.
Ad IV. To reduce necessity to language is self-refuting, for the reduction itself claims necessity. Semantic regularity cannot explain ontological stability. Laws must be more than linguistic; they must participate in a structure of being.
Ad V. The metaphysical reading of divine causality is not regression but completion. Scripture’s description of the world’s constancy as divine faithfulness grounds natural order in personal being. To deny participation is to make the creation silent about its Creator.
Nota
This disputation confronts the decisive modern rupture in the understanding of law and causality. Whereas the preceding disputations discerned in natural order the reflection of divine reason and the imprint of legibus primitivis, modern empiricism, epitomized by Hume, denies that any necessity or intrinsic connection binds events together. According to this view, so-called “laws of nature” are but habits of observation—regular successions that the mind projects as necessity out of custom. The world thus loses its inner ratio; causality becomes expectation, and order a fiction of the perceiving subject.
In this disputation we examine the implications of this Humean reduction. Can theology accept a cosmos governed only by constant conjunction without undermining the very possibility of providence, creation, and divine intelligibility? If natural law is but descriptive regularity, how can the world be a medium of revelation or a site of divine action? The question touches not only metaphysics but also epistemology, for in the collapse of necessity the mind itself loses participation in the rational structure of being.
Therefore Disputatio XXV tests the theological coherence of the modern naturalist paradigm. It contrasts the participatory order of lex aeterna and legibus primitivis with the secularized uniformity of Humean regularity, seeking to determine whether a purely empirical account of law can sustain the intelligibility of creation or whether it inevitably dissolves the Logos into the contingencies of perception. In this way, it prepares the path toward the retrieval of a richer metaphysical realism in Disputatione XXVI: De Immanentia Universali et Necessitate.
Determinatio
From the foregoing it is determined that:
The Humean and Lewisian accounts evacuate natural law of real necessity. By reducing law to description, they destroy the very distinction between order and coincidence.
Regularity theory fails the coordination test. It cannot explain why distinct patterns harmonize across domains,why electromagnetism and gravitation, time and entropy, compose one coherent cosmos.
Reason’s demand for sufficient cause (PSR) re-emerges. If law is mere pattern, PSR is violated, and intelligibility perishes.The mind’s refusal to accept brute regularity is itself evidence of participation in an Infinite intelligibility.
The finite order requires a ground that is both necessary and self-explanatory. Such a ground cannot lie within the Humean mosaic; it must transcend it while remaining immanent as its condition.
Hence, the constancy of nature is participatory: the world’s regularities exist not ex se but per participationem in the Infinite act of being. What the theologian calls divine providence, the philosopher names the unconditioned truthmaker of order.
Therefore, the Humean view of law as regularity fails both scientifically and metaphysically. While it can describe, it cannot explain; while it can record, it cannot ground. Thus, the world is not a mosaic of inert facts but a living participation in the Logos, in whom all order holds together.
Transitus ad Disputationem XXVI
In the preceding disputation it was shown that the Humean conception of law as mere regularity severs the bond between mind and world, dissolving necessity into habit and rendering the cosmos unintelligible from within. The world thus appears as a theater of sequences without reasons—an ordered surface lacking interior logos. Against this view, theology must ask whether there remains a deeper mode of necessity, one not imposed from without nor abstracted by thought, but immanent in things themselves as their participation in divine reason.
This question turns our attention from the empirical pattern to the metaphysical structure that makes such pattern possible. If order is real, it must inhere in being as such; universals must be operative within the concrete, not floating above it. How, then, are these universalia immanentia to be conceived? Are they divine ideas within things, the ontological forms of their participation in the Logos, or the very conditions of their acting and being acted upon?
Therefore we advance to Disputationem XXVI: De Universalibus Immanentibus et Necessitatione, in which we shall inquire how necessity arises from within the order of being itself, how universals dwell in the particular as formative presence, and how through this immanent structure the world remains transparent to the intelligibility of God.
