The Mind of God and the Works of Nature: Laws and Powers in Naturalism, Platonism, and Classical Theism

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.