| The Positivists of the Vienna Circle objected to the very idea of laws of nature. 'Laws without a law giver. That is like a son without a father', argued Otto Neurath . So, no God, no laws. Even if it made sense to talk about laws, now could laws govern nature? People obey laws either out of conscience, duty, respect, habit etc. or because they are made to. Physical objects do not have conscience, habits or feeling of duties. They can 'obey' a law only if forced to behave in the way the law describes. Hence, once more, the need for a God if laws are to govern Nature. In the seventy years since, the Positivist ideas have not been popular. Scientists and philosophers alike talk about laws of nature without blush; and philosophers have worked very hard indeed to explain how the dictums of science can be laws after all, though writ nowhere by no-one. I shall point out that none of these efforts have proved successful. There are a few alternatives on offer to make sense of the 'laws' of science without taking them to report literally on the 'laws of nature'. One is descriptivism: following David Hume , the 'laws' of science merely describe what happens, not what must happen. There is no such thing as what must happen since there is nothing anywhere to make anything happen. A second is instrumentalism: the 'laws' of science need not even describe correctly what does happen; they are, rather, instruments that we use to predict what will happen in special cases. A third, following Aristotle and maybe Kant or Spinoza , maintains that material substances themselves have active powers of certain specific sorts. These are responsible for generating the regular behaviour described by the 'laws' of science. I shall briefly defend the third. On all these options, God may still be thought necessary to create the world or to start its processes off-or not. But they can make sense of what the sciences correctly describe without the need for a God to serve as Parliament and police. |
