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The Stubborn Confusion that Natural Events are Lawful
Why “laws of nature” persists as a figure of speech in science
Probably the greatest, most persistent confusion in the sciences is about the so-called laws of nature.
Scientists tend to presume that they discover these laws, that the laws are the real patterns themselves that scientists observe in their experiments. In the early modern period, scientists presumed that the laws existed before the universe as God’s blueprint.
This confusion originates from the early modern scientists’ theism or deism, but it carried on for centuries, right up to the assumptions of much later scientists who are avowed atheists.
A litany of scientific confusions
Here, for instance, is Johannes Kepler: “Those laws [of nature] are within the grasp of the human mind; God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”
So, the laws of nature are roughly God’s thoughts that we can “grasp,” presumably because we’re made in God’s image, according to Christian theology.
Isaac Newton likewise thought of the laws of nature as divine commandments that force nature to conform to a certain order:
