Disputatio XXVII De Essentiis Dispositionalibus

On Dispositional Essences

Quaeritur

Quaeritur utrum necessitas legum naturae possit sufficienter explicari per essentias dispositionales ipsarum rerum, an vero talis explicatio tandem recidat in naturalem essentialismum sine fundamento ontologico, qui rursus ad participationem infiniti redigitur.

It is asked whether the necessity of natural laws can be adequately explained by the dispositional essences of things themselves, or whether such an explanation ultimately collapses into an unfounded natural essentialism that once again requires participation in the Infinite.

Thesis

Dispositional essentialism seeks to ground the laws of nature in the intrinsic powers of entities. Accordingly, each thing, by virtue of what it is, behaves as it does. Laws are thus expressions of essence, not external constraints. Yet finite essence itself requires grounding for its actuality and coordination. Therefore, the appeal to dispositional essences displaces but does not resolve the need for an infinite ground of law.

Locus Classicus

“In him we live and move and have our being.” — Acts 17:28

The early Fathers, having read Paul in light of Hellenic metaphysics, interpreted this as a declaration that all powers and movements within creation presuppose divine causality. For example, Basil of Caesarea (Hexaemeron I.5) taught that “every natural power is the gift of divine energy,” and Aquinas affirmed that “omnis operatio naturae est actus Dei in natura” (ST I.105.5). Thus, even when power is intrinsic to a creature, its being and operation participate in the act of the Creator.

Explicatio

Dispositional essentialism emerged in late twentieth-century metaphysics as a reaction against both Humean regularity and Armstrong’s relational realism. Philosophers such as Brian Ellis, C. B. Martin, and Stephen Mumford argued that laws do not govern things from without but that the flow from within from the very essences or natures of entities. Accordingly, an electron repels another not because a law commands it, but because repulsion belongs to its nature. The behavior is thus essential and not contingent.

In this view, every natural property is dispositional; it is defined by its powers and tendencies. To possess a charge, mass, or spin just is to manifest appropriate dispositions under suitable conditions. Laws of nature are thus derivative descriptions of the necessary behaviors of these dispositional essences. Therefore, there are no separate laws or external principles, but only powers whose exercise constitutes the order of nature.

This approach elegantly restores necessity to the finite without invoking extrinsic governance. But the question remains: Whence the unity of this system of powers? If every essence carries its own necessity, what guarantees the coherence of those necessities across the totality of the world? Why do distinct powers not conflict or dissolve into chaos? While the finite essence, to be actual, must exist and operate within a coherent totality of being, that totality cannot itself be one of the powers. Rather, it must be the condition of their coexistence and harmony.

Hence, while dispositional essentialism succeeds in moving the locus of necessity inward—from external law to internal essence—it fails to remove the need for ontological participation. While essence, in so far as it is essence, is an intelligible structure of being, powers, however intrinsic, can only be participatory modes of a deeper enabling act.

Obiectiones

Objiectio I. According to Ellis in 2001, the essence of each natural kind explains its behavior. Thus, no further metaphysical foundation is required, and to demand more is to mistake explanation for regression.

Objiectio II. Martin argued in 2008 that disputations constitute causal grounds for their manifestations. Since power is primitive and self-explanatory, the world’s order is the network of powers acting according to their natures.

Objiectio III. Mumford in 2004 argued that laws are supervenient on dispositional essences, and hence add nothing ontologically to them. Thus, the finite order is self-sufficient so long as it consists of stable powers and their mutual tendencies.

Objiectio IV. Naturalistic Metaphysics claims that to appeal to an Infinite act is unnecessary duplication. If dispositions suffice for explanation, positing divine participation is a metaphysical surplus.

Objiectio V. Sometimes the theological tradition assumed that grounding the powers of things directly in the infinite may risk erasing natural causality. But the integrity of secondary causes requires that creatures possess genuine powers of their own.

Responsiones

Ad I. While essence may explain behavior, it does not explain existence. To say “the electron repels because it is its nature to repel” still leaves unasked why such a nature exists at all. Essence is formal cause and being is act. The latter cannot be derived from the former without reference to a self-sufficient act of existence.

Ad II. Power cannot be self-explanatory, for power is always power to act.The actuality of its exercise depends on a larger order within which it operates. Without a unifying act of being, powers remain mere potentialities without coherence.

Ad III. Supervenience explains correspondence but not causation. That laws supervene on essences tells us that essence and law covary, not why such correlation obtains. The dependence relation itself requires grounding.

Ad IV. Appealing to the infinite is not an additional move but a natural completion in the order of explanation.The Infinite is not another entity among the powers but the act in which all finite essences receive their actuality and unity. Without such an act, the multiplicity of powers lacks ontological coherence.

Ad V. Participation does not abolish finite agency but founds it. Creatures possess true powers because the infinite communicates actuality to them. Their independence as secondary causes is secured by the divine act that continuously sustains them in being.

Nota

Dispositional essentialism rightly perceives that the necessity of nature arises from within things themselves. It holds that each being acts according to what it is, and thus, its tendencies are not imposed from without but flow from its essence. The very intelligibility of this insight, however, betrays its limit, for the intrinsic power of a thing explains its manner of acting, not its capacity to act at all. Accordingly, the essence that disposes toward activity still requires an act that gives it existence and coherence.

Hence, the metaphysical question beneath dispositional essentialism is not why things act as they do, but why there are things capable of acting at all. To say that the stone falls because it has mass, or that the charge repels because it is charged, presupposes the ontological act by which stone and charge subsist. Clearly, while the essence disposes, only the act sustains.

The theological transformation of this view is participation. On this view, every finite power is a communicated potency; it receives from the Infinite Act not only its existence but its coordination with all others. The unity of law in the world, that is, the harmony among dispositions, is thus the reflection of the divine unity that gathers all powers into a single order of being. Nature’s lawfulness is the shadow of grace: finite essences cooperate because they share in one act of creation.

Dispositional essentialism, therefore, contains a veiled confession:
to affirm inner necessity is already to acknowledge the immanence of the divine act within creation. The Spirit is the bond that makes powers conspire toward intelligibility, and the Logos is the act through which each essence becomes dispositional at all. Necessity, properly understood, is participation in the divine constancy by which all things are held in being.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Dispositional essentialism internalizes necessity but does not abolish dependence. Thus, finite essences are intelligible structures whose actuality presupposes a unifying act of being.

2. The unity of natural order cannot arise from a plurality of isolated powers. Coordination among dispositions requires an ontological ground transcending them.

3. Essence without act is impotent. The existence and operation of every power presuppose an act that is not itself one power among others. They thus presuppose an infinite act of being.

4. The participation of finite essences in the Infinite corresponds to the metaphysical structure of creation. As Augustine said, “Omne bonum quod habet creatura, habet participando” (De Diversis Quaestionibus 83.46). Powers are real and finite, and their actuality is participatory.

5. Hence, dispositional essentialism, though the most promising finite account, nonetheless points beyond itself. Its truth lies not in rejecting participation but in clarifying the mode of it: each finite power is a share in the creative act that sustains and orders all powers.

Therefore, the necessity of natural law is neither imposed from without nor self-generated from within. It arises from the participation of dispositional essences in the infinite act of being, in the Word through whom all powers subsist and in the Spirit who continuously actualizes their operation.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXVIII

The unity of nature cannot be secured from within the multiplicity of powers. The next disputation therefore asks whether finite systems, even when internally coherent, can ever be complete in themselves. 

We proceed to Disputatio XXVIII: De Systemate Incompleto et Veritatis Factore Infinito, in which the Gödelian structure of dependence reveals that every finite necessity presupposes an infinite act of truth.

Disputatio XXVI: De Universalibus Immanentibus et Necessitatione

On Immanent Universals and Necessitation

Quaeritur

Quaeritur utrum necessitas legum naturae sufficienter explicari possit per relationes reales inter universalia immanentia, an vero talis explicatio aut in regressum, aut in factum brutum, aut in participationem infiniti deveniat.

It is asked whether the necessity of natural law can be adequately explained by real relations among immanent universals, or whether such an explanation must ultimately collapse into regress, brute fact, or participation in the Infinite.

Thesis

Immanent realism explains regularity by positing universals instantiated within things and connected by real relations of necessitation. Yet the nexus that binds one universal to another either becomes an infinite regress, a brute primitive, or an implicit participation in an infinite unity. Thus, while immanent universals preserve realism, they cannot close the circle of explanation within the finite.

Locus Classicus

“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
— Colossians 1:17

Patristic and scholastic theology interpreted this not as poetic hyperbole but as a metaphysical statement. Athanasius (Contra Gentes 41) held that creatures “stand fast by participation in the Word.” Aquinas, commenting on the same verse, wrote: “In ipso omnia constant, quia ipse est ratio essendi et ordinis in rebus.”(Super Colossenses I.17.) The order and interrelation of created forms thus depend upon the Logos as their unifying act.The attempt to ground such order solely in finite relations among universals severs form from source and leaves unity unexplained.

Explicatio

D. M. Armstrong, seeking a realist alternative to both Humean descriptivism and Platonic transcendence, developed a theory of immanent universals in What Is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge University Press, 1983) and A World of States of Affairs (1997). For Armstrong, universals are not abstract entities existing apart from things but real features instantiated in rebus. A natural law is then a relation of necessitation between such universals:

N(F, G) means that every instance of F is necessarily also an instance of G.

For example, the law “All electrons repel each other” corresponds to a relation N (being an electron, repelling other electrons). This N-relation is itself a real universal connecting others, not a mere linguistic rule.

Armstrong’s system preserves a realist ontology, for lawfulness exists in the world, not in our descriptions. It also avoids Platonism by keeping universals immanent.Yet the decisive problem lies in the status of the necessitation relation itself.

If N is simply another universal, it must stand in further relations explaining how it binds F and G—relations such as N′(N, F, G)—and so on ad infinitum. If N is primitive, we are left with unexplained necessity. If N is grounded in the overall structure of being, that structure functions as a transcendent unity, in effect, a metaphysical participation in the Infinite.

Thus Armstrong’s account, while internally rigorous, cannot ultimately provide a self-sufficient finite explanation. It gives us the mechanics of law but not its metaphysical coherence. The problem is not empirical but ontological: what makes the system of immanent relations one and necessary rather than a contingent web of co-instantiated properties?

Obiectiones

Objiectio I. In 1983 David Armstrong argued that immanent universals provide the ontological structure science presupposes. The relation of necessitation N is real and sufficient. No further grounding is needed.

Objiectio II. Moderate realism claims that by positing universals in rebus rather than ante res, we respect the finitude of creation and avoid both Humean nominalism and Platonic abstraction.

Objiectio III. Scientific pragmatism holds that the theory of immanent universals aligns well with scientific practice, which operates by discovering relations among properties, not by appealing to transcendent causes.

Objiectio IV. Empiricists argue that an infinite ground multiplies entities beyond necessity. The unity of laws is a consequence of the shared structure of matter and fields, not of any higher participation.

Objiectio V. The theologicus cautus ("cautious theologian") opines that to require an infinite explanation of finite order threatens to erase the integrity of secondary causes and the natural autonomy of creation.

Responsiones

Ad I. To say that N(F, G) is real explains that the relation exists, not why it obtains. Unless N itself is grounded, the account halts in primitive necessity. A brute tie between universals is no advance over the brute law it replaces.

Ad II. Immanent universals are indeed within things, yet their coordination across all things remains unexplained.The in rebus does not by itself yield the per se unity of the real. Participation in a higher act of being is required for coherence among universals.

Ad III. Scientific adequacy differs from metaphysical sufficiency.
Empirical inquiry describes how properties are correlated; metaphysics asks why such correlation is necessary. Armstrong’s ontology presupposes the unity it should explain.

Ad IV. The claim that matter and fields explain law simply restates the problem at a lower level. For the structure of matter and fields is itself law-like and requires grounding. Invoking the material order as ultimate converts contingent structure into absolute necessity without reason.

Ad V. Participation in the Infinite does not annul finite autonomy but establishes it. Only what is grounded in the Infinite can act coherently according to its own nature. The Spirit’s causal presence secures the creature’s integrity by making its lawfulness possible.

Nota 

The idea of universal immanence captures a profound half-truth.
On the one hand, it rightly discerns that the divine is not absent from the world but intimately present within it, sustaining the being of all that is. On the other hand, when detached from the transcendence that grounds it, immanence collapses into necessity without freedom, into an all-encompassing process in which God and world dissolve into one another.

Theology must therefore distinguish immanentia participationis from immenentia identitatis. In the first, the divine act is interior to all things as their sustaining cause; in the second, the divine and the creature are confused as modes of one process. But true immanence is participatory, not monistic. God is within all things precisely because all things are within God.

Necessity, when viewed in this light, is not mechanical but the mark of divine fidelity. The stability of natural law expresses the constancy of the creative Word, whose will does not waver. The same act by which God gives being gives order, and thus the regularity of the world is grace made habitual. Accordingly, immanence and necessity are not rival to transcendence and freedom; they are its temporal manifestation.

The absolute dependence of creatures upon the divine act entails that while God is more interior to them than they are to themselves, yet God remains infinitely beyond them. The world’s necessity is therefore double. It is necessary in itself because the divine act holds it in being, and yet contingent before God, who freely gives it.

Universal immanence, properly understood, is the metaphysical form of providence:the Creator’s continuous presence as the reason for the world’s coherence. This providence is the “necessity of grace,” the steady rhythm of divine constancy through which all that is remains possible.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Armstrong’s immanent realism preserves ontology but not ultimacy. The N-relation that ties universals together is either another universal (regress), an unexplained primitive (brute fact), or a reflection of a deeper unity (participation).

2. Finite relations cannot ground universal coherence. The multiplicity of universals demands a unifying act that is not itself one among them. Without such an act, law remains accidental coordination.

3. The appeal to the Infinite is not extrinsic but intrinsic. The very notion of “necessitation” implies participation in an unconditioned ground of necessity. The Infinite is the metaphysical horizon within which immanent universals receive their order.

4. The participation of universals in the Infinite corresponds to the theological doctrine of the Logos. As the eternal form of all forms, the Logos is the ratio essendi and ratio ordinis of finite properties. Law, in this light, is the reflection of divine intelligibility within creation.

5. Hence, immanent realism, while the most sophisticated of finite explanations, points beyond itself. Its internal coherence is the sign of participation, not self-sufficiency. In the Infinite Word, the many relations of the finite find their unity; in the Spirit, they find their continuous actuality.

Therefore, the necessity of natural law cannot rest in the N-relations of universals alone but requires the participation of all finite forms in the Infinite act of being — in ipso omnia constant.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXVII

If universal immanence reveals that the divine act is interior to all things as the ground of their necessity,then theology must next inquire how that immanent act manifests within the distinct natures of creatures themselves. After all, divine constancy, to be real, must articulate itself in finite structures of power and tendency. The same Word who upholds all being also orders its operations; the regularity of nature is the expression of this inner form.

Hence we turn to Disputatio XXVII: De Essentiis Dispositionalibus,
in which we ask whether the necessity of natural law arises from the intrinsic powers of things, or whether even these dispositions, in all their apparent autonomy, depend upon participation in the infinite act that both constitutes and coordinates them.

Disputatio XXV: De Regularitatibus Humeanis

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

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.