Studies in Philosophical Theology
1 primary work
Volume 65
Historians of science have long considered the very idea of a
law-governed universe to be the relic of a bygone intellectual culture
that took it largely for granted that a divine lawmaker existed.
Similarly, many philosophers of science today insist that the notion of
a law of nature is fraught with implausibly theological assumptions,
preferring instead to treat them as theoretical axioms in an optimal
description of nature’s regularities, or else as patterns of causal
connections or powers that are compatible with a naturalistic conception
of reality. Yet the metaphor of lawhood has proven more difficult to
dislodge than the theistic commitments it once presupposed, not least
because it preserves the widespread intuition that the task of
scientific inquiry is not to stipulate the difference between a lawful
and an accidental regularity in nature, but to discover it. Taking its
cue from the repeated failure to find naturalistic alternatives to
divine lawmaking, this book undertakes a retrieval and reappraisal of a
high-scholastic philosophy of nature that grounds lawlike regularities
in the conceptual and causal powers of God and, having done so,
concludes that the metaphysical framework of classical theism yields a
more powerful and parsimonious explanation of the rhythms and patterns
of the natural world than its secular rivals.
law-governed universe to be the relic of a bygone intellectual culture
that took it largely for granted that a divine lawmaker existed.
Similarly, many philosophers of science today insist that the notion of
a law of nature is fraught with implausibly theological assumptions,
preferring instead to treat them as theoretical axioms in an optimal
description of nature’s regularities, or else as patterns of causal
connections or powers that are compatible with a naturalistic conception
of reality. Yet the metaphor of lawhood has proven more difficult to
dislodge than the theistic commitments it once presupposed, not least
because it preserves the widespread intuition that the task of
scientific inquiry is not to stipulate the difference between a lawful
and an accidental regularity in nature, but to discover it. Taking its
cue from the repeated failure to find naturalistic alternatives to
divine lawmaking, this book undertakes a retrieval and reappraisal of a
high-scholastic philosophy of nature that grounds lawlike regularities
in the conceptual and causal powers of God and, having done so,
concludes that the metaphysical framework of classical theism yields a
more powerful and parsimonious explanation of the rhythms and patterns
of the natural world than its secular rivals.