Disputation XXIV: De Legibus Primitivis

On Primitive Laws

Quaeritur

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.

Nota

The present disputation turns from the visible order of nature to the hidden foundations of order itself. Having established that the laws of nature manifest divine intelligibility, we now inquire into those deeper determinations of being by which such lawfulness becomes possible. For before the empirical and the measurable, there must be that which gives measure, the primordial laws (legibus primitivis) through which the world receives form, regularity, and stability.

These primitive laws are not secondary generalizations abstracted by reason, but the interior articulations of the Logos within creation. They express the first participation of the finite in divine reason, the silent grammar by which being becomes intelligible. In them the ontological and the logical meet: they are at once the metaphysical structure of the world and the semantic condition of its knowability.

Thus this disputation seeks to recover a pre-modern sense of law, not as an external decree imposed upon matter, but as an intrinsic mode of divine order, an eternal ratio in which creaturely reality is constituted. In doing so, it prepares for the next inquiry, where this participatory vision will be set in contrast to the empirical reduction of law to mere regularity in Disputatione XXV: De Regularitatibus Humeanis.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Law primitivism secures modal governance by fiat; it asserts necessity without explaining it. It halts reason precisely where reason most demands sufficiency.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXV

In the preceding disputation it was proposed that beneath the empirical laws discerned by science lie legibus primitivis, the primordial determinations of intelligibility that make any ordered cosmos possible. These were not conceived as mere abstractions from observed events but as ontological articulations of divine wisdom: the interior syntax of creation itself. Law, in this view, is not imposed upon matter from without but proceeds from the very being of the world as participated in the eternal Logos.

Yet such an account stands in marked contrast to a dominant modern alternative. Since the Enlightenment, many have denied any intrinsic ground of law, holding instead that what we call “laws of nature” are only descriptions of habitual regularities, patterns of succession abstracted by the mind from experience. In this Humean interpretation, necessity is dissolved into custom, and causality becomes a projection of expectation rather than a feature of reality.

Therefore we advance to Disputationem XXV: De Regularitatibus Humeanis, in which it shall be examined whether law can be reduced to mere regularity, whether necessity has any place within a purely empirical framework, and how the theological conception of Logos-grounded order confronts the skeptical naturalism of modern thought.

Disputatio XXIII: De Fundamento Legum Naturae

On the Ground of the Laws of Nature

Quaeritur

Quaeritur utrum mundus finitus per se possit rationem reddere regularitatum quae in ipso obtinent, an vero requirat veritatis factorem infinitum qui earum necessitatem et convenientiam inter proprietates constituat.

It is asked whether the finite world can of itself give an account of the regularities that obtain within it, or whether it requires an infinite truthmaker that constitutes both their necessity and their coordination among properties.

Thesis

No finite reason can adequately explain the necessity of natural law without recourse to an unconditioned truthmaker. Every attempt to ground lawfulness within the finite order ends either in brute fact, in mere description, or in regress. The necessity and coordination of the finite therefore presuppose an infinite ground.

Locus Classicus

“He himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things… for in him we live and move and have our being.”
— Acts 17:25, 28

Patristic commentators from Athanasius (Contra Gentes 41) to Augustine (De Trinitate I.6) read Paul’s words as denying that creatures possess in themselves either being or order. Aquinas echoed this interpretation (ST I.105.5): “Since the being of a creature depends upon the Creator’s influx, so too does its operation and order.” Thus the tradition rejects any claim that the finite law of things is self-grounding.

Explicatio

Since the rise of modern science, the regularities of nature have been taken as the paradigm of intelligibility. The deductive–nomological model of explanation sought to show how particular happenings follow from general laws, much as the medieval astronomer derived eclipses from celestial mechanics. Yet this model silently presupposes the existence and stability of those laws; it uses them without explaining why they obtain.

Microphysical explanation was meant to improve upon this by tracing macro-level regularities to the behavior of elementary particles. But it soon became clear that the very behavior of these particles -- obeying field equations, conservation laws, and symmetry constraints -- rests again upon ultimate regularities that are themselves unexplained.

Accordingly, the philosophical task is to ask what truthmaker accounts for the existence and necessity of these basic laws. Must we accept them as primitive features of the finite, or do they point beyond the finite to an infinite ground making possible their order and coordination?

The following trilemma arises:

1. Primitivism holds that laws are ultimate facts of the finite world, self-standing and unexplained.

2. Descriptivism claims that laws are linguistic or mathematical summaries of what happens, containing no real necessity.

3. Those allowing an Infinite Ground argue that laws possess genuine necessity only if their order is constituted by an unconditioned truthmaker that grounds their coordination.

The first halts inquiry; the second dissolves necessity; only the third preserves both intelligibility and modality.

Objectiones

Objectio I: The empiricist claims that science does not seek metaphysical grounds but predictive success. To demand a truthmaker beyond empirical law is to mistake the limits of scientific explanation for a deficiency in reality itself.

Objectio II.  Primitivists like Maudlin declare that laws are fundamental ontological features. To ask “why these laws?” is a category mistake. Explanation ends rightly where necessity begins.

Objectio III.  Humeans like David Lewis say that there are no governing laws over and above the mosaic of events. Laws merely describe the best systematization of what occurs. Necessity is a manner of speaking, not a metaphysical tie.

Objectio IV.  Immanent realists like David Armstrong argue that immanent universals and their relations of necessitation suffice. The finite already contains within itself the structures that make lawfulness intelligible. No appeal to an infinite ground is required.

Objectio V. Kant and transcendental philosophy generally hole that necessity belongs to the conditions of human cognition, not to things in themselves. To seek a truthmaker beyond the phenomenal order is to step outside the bounds of reason.

Responsiones

Ad 1. Predictive adequacy is not metaphysical sufficiency. Scientific method may stop at empirical laws, but reason does not. To confuse epistemic limits with ontological closure is to mistake what we cannot measure for what cannot be.

Ad 2. To call a law “primitive” is to give it the status of a brute fact, and this is an admission that it is unexplained. Primitivism therefore secures necessity only by halting explanation, treating the finite as self-grounding without warrant.

Ad 3. The best-system analysis reduces necessity to description. But description, however elegant, cannot make a law necessary. It says how the world behaves, not why it must. Humeanism thus exchanges being for grammar.

Ad 4. Relations among finite universals can explain why certain properties co-occur, but not why these universals and these relations exist. The “necessitation” relation itself either regresses or becomes primitive. The coordination of all such relations across the cosmos still calls for a higher unity.

Ad 5. Transcendental necessity explains how we must think the world, not how the world is. If the phenomenal order is intelligible only through the assumption of stable laws, then reason itself points beyond phenomena to that which makes stability possible.

Determinatio

The search for the ground of natural law thus faces a decisive choice.

If we remain within the finite, explanation ends either in brute fact (primitivism) or in empty description (Humeanism). If we turn inward to the structures of the finite (immanent realism), we face regress or unexplained selection. The explanatory trilemma of bruteness, vacuity, or transcendence is therefore unavoidable.

From this it follows that the finite cannot be complete unto itself. The very intelligibility of law points toward an unconditioned truthmaker—an Infinite ground that confers necessity and coordinates the manifold of the finite. The appeal to such an Infinite is not a theological excess but the only philosophically adequate completion of explanation.

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Every finite explanation of natural law fails by terminating in one of three defects:
     (a) brute necessity (primitivism),
     (b) vacuous description (Humean regularity), or
     (c) infinite regress (immanent relationalism).

2. The finite as finite is composite, coordinated, and contingent; it cannot be the source of its own necessity.

3. The unity of laws and their coherence across domains demand a ground that is simple, self-explanatory, and unconditioned — an Infinite truthmaker.

4. This conclusion is not a theological intrusion but a philosophical necessity. Reason itself, in seeking sufficient cause, transcends the finite and implicitly participates in the Infinite.

Therefore the order of nature is not self-grounding but participatory: its necessity and coordination are signs of dependence upon an Infinite act in which the finite both is and is held together.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXIV

In the preceding disputation it was argued that the laws of nature cannot be understood merely as empirical generalizations or statistical regularities. Their very intelligibility presupposes a Logos that orders being from within, a divine rationality that grounds the harmony between mind and world. The cosmos, thus conceived, is not a closed system of mechanism but a structured participation in the intelligible act of God.

Yet if the visible laws of nature manifest such divine order, they must themselves rest upon something more primordial. What is the origin of lawfulness as such? Do the regularities of the cosmos emerge from deeper ontological principles—legibus primitivis—that articulate the very possibility of order? And if so, are these primitive laws expressions of divine wisdom antecedent to physical manifestation, the traces of the eternal Logos within the ground of being itself?

Therefore we proceed to Disputationem XXIV: De Legibus Primitivis, in which we shall inquire into the foundational strata of law beneath empirical nature: the primordial conditions through which order, form, and causality first become possible, and by which the world stands as a coherent revelation of the Creator’s rational act.