The Miraculous Brute Fact of the Natural Order

And the unavoidable path from atheism to pantheism

There’s an illuminating exchange between the physicist Paul Davies and a bevy of other scientists at Edge, from 2007. Davies had argued in the NY Times that the mainstream scientific conception of natural laws is faith-based and has even derived from early modern deism.

The status of natural laws

Scientists presume, says Davies, “that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin.” The scientific problem, then, is to explain why those laws are as they are, without positing anything supernatural. Otherwise, the laws themselves would be inexplicable exceptions to science’s method of reductively explaining phenomena.

Davies concludes that “religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.”

As he says in his reply to his critics, “My article pointed out that the widespread belief in immutable perfect transcendent prior laws underpinning the physical universe, while not necessarily wrong, is nevertheless held as an act of faith, similar in character to belief in an all-perfect divine lawgiver.”

The physicist Sean Carroll begs to differ. He thinks the question of why the natural laws are as they are is a pseudo-question. The universe, he says, isn’t ‘embedded in a bigger structure; it’s all there is. We are lulled into asking “why” questions about the universe by sloppily extending the way we think about local phenomena to the whole shebang. What kind of answers could we possibly be expecting?’

Instead of getting caught up with pseudo-questions, we should accept that “that’s just how things are. There is a chain of explanations concerning things that happen in the universe, which ultimately reaches to the fundamental laws of nature and stops. This is a simple hypothesis that fits all the data.”

Carroll concedes that “there is a deep-seated human urge to think otherwise. We want to believe that the universe has a purpose, just as we want to believe that our next lottery ticket will hit…Part of the job of being a good scientist is to overcome that temptation…The laws exist however they exist, and it’s our job to figure that out, not to insist ahead of time that nature’s innermost workings conform to our predilections, or provide us with succor in the face of an unfeeling cosmos.”

An onslaught of scientistic prejudice

What’s going on in that spat, though, is largely a turf war. As is often the case when scientists run up against philosophical questions, scientists fall back on their lingering scientistic or positivistic prejudices.

Davies views his inquiry into the nature of natural laws as a scientific one. As he says, “My concern is admittedly with a restricted physics/cosmology agenda, as that is the only area in which I can claim some modest authority.” Assuming scientific explanations are necessarily reductive — meaning they explain Y by positing something else, namely an X which is simpler or more fundamental than Y — Davies’ project of scientifically explaining natural laws isn’t likely to succeed. At least, physicists like Carroll are skeptical, which is why they regard natural laws as brute facts.

Although Davies, too, is confused, then, about the nature of the question he’s asking, the scientism is more overt in his critics’ reaction to his challenge to their complacency.

Several, for example, speak disdainfully of metaphysics. The physicist Lee Smolin calls for “a better notion of law, applicable on a cosmological scale, not for a surrender to religion or metaphysics.” And even when Smolin says “there is wisdom to be gained from studying philosophers who anticipated that science would reach the point of asking this question,” namely “Why these laws?” he’s quick to add, “There is a healthy skepticism about the role of philosophy in science.”

The biologist PZ Myers says, “Davies also brings up the anthropic principle, that tiresome exercise in metaphysical masturbation that always flounders somewhere in the repellent ditch between narcissism and solipsism.” And fellow-traveller and former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, says, “Cosmology asks questions like what is the fundamental nature of space and time? Where did the universe come from? These questions carry with them an unfortunate baggage that distract people with navel gazing and worrying about philosophical issues.”

What, then, is the scientism at work in this collective dismissal of Davies’ question about the status of natural laws? It’s just mainstream scientists’ condescending prejudice against what are alleged to be unscientific forms of knowledge, as in philosophy or religion. Scientism isn’t an explicit argument or even often a consciously affirmed proposition; instead, scientism is mainly an attitude, the downside of pride in scientific rigour and accomplishments. The prouder you are about science, the more likely you’ll just disdainfully dismiss the notion that anyone other than a scientist can usefully contribute to the best picture of the world.

In this context, Carroll’s contention that natural laws should be accepted as inexplicable brute facts is like the child’s intention to terminate the game by taking his ball home with him. What Carroll’s saying is that because the scientific work ends by discovering the natural laws, and there’s no valid input on the subject outside of science, we must accept the laws as we find them, which means Davies’ inquiry is illegitimate or bound to be fruitless. Carroll’s implicit premise, that there’s no valid nonreductive or nonscientific input is based on pure scientistic prejudice.

The pantheistic upshot of science

But more interesting are the philosophical implications of Carroll’s claim about the brute status of cosmological laws. In his book, What’s Eating the Universe? Paul Davies says that ‘a universe that “just exists” for no reason, with specific properties that just are, is correctly described in informal logic as absurd.’

I think it’s worse than that, though, since such a universe would be monstrous. A universe that just gets up and goes on its accord, with no apparent cause, purpose, or intelligent direction would be effectively a zombie. To the extent that the natural order simulates intelligent guidance, the flow of natural events would be a condition of living-death. Nature would be like a virus, neither alive nor fully dead, neither meaningfully directed nor inert or chaotic.

Moreover, scientists would be positing a miracle. Like the Platonic Forms, the laws of nature would replace a personal Creator, as Davies says. And in so far as those laws pop into being from nothing or are eternal and unmade, and they dictate the universal structure, all of nature would be infected with their uncanniness.

In short, reductive cosmology would entail pantheism: ironically, nature would replace God on scientific, atheistic grounds.

Calling attention to the scientism or positivism here doesn’t mean there’s a clear rational explanation of the laws. As I explain elsewhere, there are sociological reasons why we should expect that scientific explanations will be endless, since scientists are inclined to search for more and more causes to be able to exploit the weak points of any given phenomenon. Scientific explanations are strategically, not just methodically reductive. This is one reason for positing eternal inflation or a megaverse with infinite sets of universal laws.

Philosophers or theologians might present comforting myths that round out our worldviews, satisfying certain psychological needs rather than science’s pragmatic and hubristic one of empowering our species at nature’s expense. But accepting those myths would be largely a question of taste or personal character.

We can clarify the problem by doing what Davies and his company don’t, which is to distinguish between laws and nomic relations. Laws are generalizations codified by people, using language’s symbols. So, there need be no question that human formulations of nature’s basic operations or structures are miraculously self-generating, eternal, infinitely precise, and so on. The natural laws that we formulate are only ours, not the universe’s because our formulations are bound to simplify.

What would be the miracle of the elemental brute facts would be some such seed of natural order, a fundamental level of regularity or a metaphysical structure which would support the edifice of causality, complexification, emergence, and evolution we call “the universe.” Our natural laws would only model certain cosmological constants and structural relationships that would supply the universe’s order or character.

But the conundrum remains. Leaving out philosophy and theology, for the sake of argument, scientific explanations are either

• (a) endless, in which case the order corresponding to the natural laws isn’t a brute fact after all
• (b) not endless, in which case that order is a miraculous, brute fact.

The second case, (b), zombifies nature from its point of origin onward. And nature would usurp God’s creative power, as it were, turning the universe’s unfolding into a divinely creative act, albeit an impersonal one.

But (a) likewise implies pantheism. The true culprit here is atheism or science’s methodological naturalism. If we’re dealing with strictly scientific explanations, nature will be pictured as self-generating and thus as implicitly divine. The difference between (a) and (b) is that (a) posits an infinite series of atheistic explanations of natural phenomena, as required by the humanistic (or metaphorically “Satanic”) ambition to conquer everything that’s nonhuman, whereas (b) posits a miraculous but still atheistic moment of Creation or some timeless, impersonal bedrock of order.

Both options violate mainstream science’s strait-laced, positivistic self-image, and both open lines of philosophical and theological criticism. An interesting question, for example, is whether there’s any atheistic worldview that doesn’t entail pantheism. If God is dead, must something else take God’s place? Is some pseudo-divinity, then, as in all-conquering, vain Humanity or divinely self-creative Nature metaphysically necessary?