On the Ground of the Laws of Nature
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.
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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:
Primitivism holds that laws are ultimate facts of the finite world, self-standing and unexplained.
Descriptivism claims that laws are linguistic or mathematical summaries of what happens, containing no real necessity.
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:
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).The finite as finite is composite, coordinated, and contingent; it cannot be the source of its own necessity.
The unity of laws and their coherence across domains demand a ground that is simple, self-explanatory, and unconditioned — an Infinite truthmaker.
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.
