THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF LAWS OF NATURE

PETER HARRISON

in Fraser Watts (ed.), Creation: Law and Probability (Ashgate, 2008)

One of the remarkable features of the physical universe is the fact that it seems
to conform to mathematical laws. On most accounts, moreover, these laws are not
simply descriptions of regularities although some important thinkers have held this
view but rather they dictate how things must be. Laws of nature, in other words,
seem to capture some kind of natural necessity. Science, it is usually thought, has as
one of its aims the discovery of laws of nature, and the refinement of various
expressions of those laws. That there are laws of nature, however, seems to be a
presupposition of science, rather than the outcome of its investigations. In light of this
we can ask three important questions about such laws of nature: Why are there laws
at all? Why are these laws mathematical? Why are they necessary or, to put it
another way, what gives these laws their exceptionless character? In the seventeenth
century, when the modern notion of laws of nature was first articulated, the answer to
each of these questions entailed reference to God. The very idea of a law of nature,
from the moment of its birth, was thus underpinned by theological considerations.
One of the chief aims of this chapter is to investigate the historical processes that gave
rise to the idea of laws of nature and to provide an account of its theological
foundations.

It must be stated at the outset that the three questions posed above are ones that
ultimately cannot be answered by the historian. Nonetheless, the logic of those who
pioneered the concept is of importance for its ongoing viability. After all, if the
theological assumptions that provided the underpinning of the idea of laws of nature
in its infancy no longer prevail, it may be that the concept itself is no longer
sustainable. In other words, we can profitably ask whether subscription to a particular
conception of natural laws entails some tacit theological commitment. This is partly
why a historical inquiry such as this is worth pursuing. It is also important to
acknowledge that what now constitutes a law of nature amounts to quite different
things in different sciences. Thus, what was a more or less unitary notion in early
modern physics has now become somewhat equivocal. The main focus of this paper
will be mathematical laws of nature as they first appear in the realm of physics,
although brief mention will be made of the later development of laws in the biological
sciences.

ORDER IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSE

Historians are generally agreed that the modern concept of physical laws of
nature, understood as mathematical descriptions of exceptionless regularities, first
emerged in the West during the early modern period the era of Galileo, Kepler,
Descartes and Newton.i It does not follow from this, of course, that those in previous
historical periods entertained no conceptions of the orderliness of the natural world,
nor even that use of the expressions natural laws or laws of nature was completely
unknown before the modern period. Yet there is something quite distinctive about the
early modern formulation and these distinctive features played an important part in
the development of modern science. In order to understand the novelty of the
seventeenth-century understanding of laws of nature it is necessary to consider briefly
the idea of natural order that prevailed during the Middle Ages.
From about the eleventh century onwards, with the reintroduction of Aristotles
writings to the Latin West, ideas about the natural world were dominated by
Aristotelian thought. For the Greek philosopher and his medieval followers the
orderliness of the cosmos derived from the immanent properties of natural objects.

3
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74), who successfully integrated many Aristotelian
conceptions into medieval theology, was to speak of the order that God has
implanted in nature.ii This order did not manifest itself in absolutely invariant rules,
however, because these implanted natural powers would on occasion miscarry, giving
rise to exceptions to the usual course of events. Aquinas pointed to the example of
individuals born with six fingers.iii Nature was thus understood as that which is wont
to occur in things for the most part, but it is not everywhere in keeping with what
always occurs.iv Genuine science had no interest in attempting to comprehend the
exceptional or accidental within its explanatory framework, however. This was
because on the Aristotelian understanding, scientific knowledge was concerned with
unchanging essences.v Ideally, moreover, scientific knowledge was knowledge that
was capable of logical demonstration.vi

Given this view of the nature of science, it might seem as if mathematical

reasoning would play a primary role. Yet the division of labour within the Aristotelian
sciences conspired against the use of mathematics in explanations of natural
phenomena. Aristotle had carefully distinguished between natural philosophy, the
science concerned with causal explanations in the real world as it were, and
mathematics, which in his view dealt with human constructions.vii In this respect
Aristotle differed from Plato who was a mathematical realist. The study of the
motions of the celestial bodies, to take the most pertinent example, could thus be
treated under two distinct rubrics. In the sphere of natural philosophy, the causes of
the motion of the stars and planets were considered. In mathematical astronomy,
however, mathematical descriptions provided the basis for calculations of the
positions of heavenly bodies. Oversimplifying the matter somewhat, in the former
discipline a realist stance was adopted, in the latter an instrumentalist stance.viii Thus
a mathematical description might be regarded as saving the phenomena that is,
providing an account that yielded good predictions without being taken as a true
causal explanation of the relevant motions.ix This was precisely the point that
Osiander attempted to make in his controversial preface to the Copernicuss De
revolutionibus (1543). The hypothesis of a sun-centred system, Osiander explained,
was to be located within the disciplinary framework of mathematical astronomy, not
natural philosophy. The heliocentric system, he implied, though physically impossible

4
in natural philosophical terms, had merit by virtue of its capacity to deliver slightly
better mathematical predictions of the positions of various heavenly bodies.x

It is also important to bear in mind that Aristotle had proscribed transfer of the
methods of one science to another. This meant that mathematics was not to be used in
the sphere of natural philosophy.xi However, in what Aristotle had referred to as
subalternate sciences astronomy, optics, and mechanics some mathematical
treatment of particular subjects was permitted. Aquinas was to call these scientiae
mediae (middle sciences). These were also known as subordinate sciences and, from
the sixteenth century onwards, were referred to as mixed mathematical sciences.xii
The exact terminology is less important than the fact that they were regarded as
something less than complete sciences. What is important about these subordinate
disciplines is the development within them of rules (regulae), such as rules of
refraction and reflection. At this time, however, these were thought of more as rules
of calculation than laws of nature in the modern sense.

Another aspect of medieval science that is directly relevant to this discussion is

Aristotles distinction between the natural and the artificial. In the Aristotelian scheme
of things study of the operations of machines artificial man-made objects was
relegated to arts rather than the speculative sciences (which included the more
elevated disciplines of natural philosophy and mathematics).xiii As we have seen,
insofar as the workings of machines called for mathematical analysis, such analysis
fell within the mixed mathematical sciences. Study of mechanical processes was
considered to be about the manipulation of nature, not nature itself. This was
consistent with the Aristotelian tendency to regard the operations of nature as
analogous to that of an organism rather than a machine, and was also in keeping with
Aristotles assumption that the cosmos was eternal that is to say, not a created
artefact. As we shall see, the early modern conception of nature as a machine and a
divine artefact would make possible a novel union of physics as the study of nature
with mechanics as the study of artificially induced motions.xiv
Finally, it should be conceded that a vocabulary of natural laws did exist
during the middle ages. However, its primarily reference was to the sphere of
morality.xv In Aquinass typology of laws, for example, eternal law the

5
government of things in God the Ruler of the universe occupies the highest place.xvi
Next comes natural law, which for Aquinas referred to the participation of rational
creatures in the eternal law. For the rational creature this entailed a natural inclination
to its proper act and end.xvii This teleological notion, according to which the moral
behaviour of rational creatures is to be understood as an inner impulse to a proper end,
thus parallels the Aristotelian view of motion in the universe which has all natural
objects moving by inner compulsion, as it were, to their proper place. For Aquinas,
moreover, the precepts of the natural law are universal and exceptionless, and are
capable of being intuited by any rational agent.

Developments in the later middle ages and during the eras of the Renaissance
and Reformation saw challenges issued to each of these elements of the medieval
Aristotelian worldview. A renewed emphasis on the omnipotence of God, and on the
divine will in particular, led to a questioning of the autonomy of Aristotelian nature
and of its relative independence from the Deity. The Renaissance witnessed the reemergence of a Christian Platonism that stressed the reality of mathematical relations,
opening up the possibility of the application of mathematics to natural philosophical
problems. Other sects of Greek philosophy were also to challenge the monopoly of
Aristotelianism, among them scepticism and the atomism of Democritus and
Epicurus. Atomistic conceptions of matter implied the inertness of nature and hence,
again, challenged the Aristotelian assumption that a purposeful, causal efficacy
resided within natural objects. Later in the sixteenth century, the Protestant
Reformation reinforced these developments by prompting renewed questions about
the appropriateness of the pagan, and putatively unchristianized philosophy of
Aristotle. If God had created the world, it was suggested, and if he ruled it directly,
why should he not issue physical laws analogous to the moral edicts set out in
scripture? If mathematics were a product of the divine mind, rather than just a
construct of human minds, why should geometrical and mathematical relations not be
genuine features of the created order? Finally, if the world were a divine artefact,
would not the distinction between natural and artificial be irrelevant to the study of
nature, and would it not be possible to transfer knowledge gained from the study of
machines to nature itself? The posing of these questions was an important
prerequisite to the emergence of the modern idea of laws of nature.

6
MATHEMATICAL LAWS, DISCIPLINARY DIVISIONS, AND THE SCIENTIFIC
REVOLUTION

In recent times historians have become somewhat wary of speaking about the
scientific revolution. Some of this reluctance has to do with the protracted nature of
the so-called revolution. Some is also to do with the fact that the study of nature in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was carried out in disciplinary contexts natural
philosophy, natural history, mathematical astronomy, and so on that took a quite
different approach to their respective subject matters than do the disciplines of
modern science. No one doubts, however, that within these various disciplines a
number of revolutionary changes took place over the course of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Some of the most dramatic and closely studied developments
occurred in the sphere of astronomy, and consideration of these changes provides
what is perhaps the clearest illustration of how the notion of laws of nature took on
some of its characteristic features. Most important for our purposes was the
unprecedented union of mathematics and natural philosophy, and the insistence that
an amalgamation of these two disciplines might provide for a realist, rather than an
instrumentalist account of the movements of both celestial and terrestrial bodies.

Many of the canonical figures of the scientific revolution have laws associated
with their names Galileos laws of fall and inertia, Descartes laws of motion,
Keplers planetary laws, Newtons laws of motion, Boyles Law, Hookes Law,
Huygens Law, and Pascals Principle. Some of the better known of these laws
provide a mathematical account of the motions of heavenly bodies. Keplers third law
of planetary motion, for example, states that the square of the orbital period of planet
(the time it takes to orbit the sun) is proportional to the cube of its semi-major axis (its
mean distance from the sun). The articulation of laws such as this was not simply a
consequence of better observational data, but entailed a radical reconception of the
nature of astronomy and natural philosophy. Kepler was conscious of the fact that in
providing a mathematical account of the motions of the heavenly bodies he was
transgressing traditional disciplinary boundaries, and he was aware of the reaction that
this would provoke:
I shall have the physicists [i.e. the natural philosophers] against me in these
chapters, because I have deduced the natural properties of the planets from
immaterial things and mathematical figures. I wish to respond briefly as

7
follows: that God the Creator, since he is a mind, and does what he wants, is
not prohibited, in attributing powers and appointing circles, from having
regard to things which are either immaterial or based on imagination. And
since he wills nothing except with absolute reason, and nothing exists except
by his will, then let my adversaries say what other reasons God had for
attributing powers, etc. since there was nothing except for qualities.xviii

What is interesting about this passage is the manner in which Kepler invokes
the divine will and his belief in a creator as the justification for, and indeed
the foundation of, his realist mathematical astronomy. The reality of
mathematical relations in the universe is asserted on the basis that God has
instantiated these relations in the created order. In fact Kepler attributed
Aristotles inability to conceptualise a world founded on mathematical
principles to the fact that the Greek philosopher had not believed that the
world had been created. A mathematical natural philosophy that was
unacceptable to Aristotle, Kepler wrote, is acceptable to me and to all
Christians, since our faith holds that the World, which had no previous
existence, was created by God in weight, measure, and number, that is in
accordance with ideas coeternal with Him.xix All of this makes possible the
conviction that mathematical laws are not just human constructions and
devices for calculation, but rather describe the real relations that obtain
between physical objects in the universe.
Galileo (1564-1642) was also to invoke the notion of God as a creative
mathematician. The world, he wrote in the Dialogue concerning the Two
Chief World Systems (1632), is the creation of the omnipotent Craftsman,
and is accordingly excellently proportioned. This mature claim he had
already foreshadowed in The Assayer, in which he famously wrote that the
book of nature had been written by God in mathematical language.xx
Mathematics, in short, was appropriate in discussions of nature because God
had imbued the universe with a mathematical order. Human beings can intuit
this order insofar as they participate in the mathematical truths that inhabit
the mind of God. It is this participation that invests human knowledge of
nature with the requisite certainty.xxi If the application of mathematical
reasoning to the order of nature involved a deliberate breech of Aristotelian
disciplinary boundaries, Galileo nonetheless adhered to the Aristotelian ideal
of science as yielding certain and demonstrative knowledge. His aim was

8
absolute certainty and necessary and eternal scientific conclusions.xxii
Galileo was to argue (as he presented it, on the authority of Augustine) that
particular interpretations of scripture such as those, for example, that seem
to support a geocentric cosmos must yield to necessary truths established
in the sphere of science.xxiii This tactic proved less successful than Galileo
had hoped. But the more important point is that Galileo sought to achieve
the Aristotelian ideal of demonstrative certainty by adopting the distinctly
un-Aristotelian procedure of introducing mathematics into physics.

Related to the introduction of mathematics into the sphere of natural philosophy

was the idea that the cosmos was a divinely created machine. Kepler wrote that the
celestial machine should be thought of not on the model of a divine, animate being,
but on the model of a clock. In [that machine] almost all the variety of motions
[stems] from one most simple, physical magnetic force. And I mean to call this
form of reasoning physics [done] with numbers and geometry.xxiv The mechanistic
model of the universe meant that the kinds of mathematical applications used in
mechanics, previously one of the mixed mathematical sciences, could now be applied
to nature itself. Such a view called for a rejection of the Aristotelian distinction
between the natural and artificial. Ren Descartes, one of the pioneers of the new
mechanical approach declared: I do not recognise any difference between artefacts
and natural bodies except that the operations of artefacts are for the most part
performed by mechanisms which are large enough to be perceived. Natures
operations, on Descartes account, were analogous to those of machines, but took
place at a microscopic level beyond the sensory threshold. His conclusion, however,
was clear: mechanics is a division or special case of physics.xxv Descartes made a
similar claim in the Discourse on Method to the effect that the laws of mechanics
are identical with the laws of nature.xxvi Similar assertions recur in Le Monde in
which Descartes identifies the rules of collision with laws of nature, and in the
Principles of Philosophy in which rules from the sphere of mechanics (laws of inertia
and collision) are also equated laws of nature.xxvii These are not idle assertions of
some trivial equivalence. Rather they amount to the claim that the rules of mechanics
or optics are to be regarded as eternal and immutable features of the natural world.
For Renaissance Aristotelians, by way of contrast, the laws of optics and mechanics
were rules (regulae) pertaining to the methods of these mixed mathematical

9
disciplines. Such principles, in other words, were human constructs, rules of
calculation rather than laws indelibly etched into nature itself. The promotion of these
rules from the realm of human convention to that of nature was thus a major
development, justified by the assertion that these regularities were not the products of
human art, but rather represented discoveries of genuine features of the natural world.
These laws originate in the divine will rather than in the human imagination. The
constancy and immutability of these laws, for Descartes, was underwritten by the
immutability of God.xxviii

While the introduction of mathematics into the sphere of natural philosophy,

along with the idea of the world as divinely ordered machine, were important
prerequisites for the emergence of the modern notion of laws of nature, developments
in two further areas also warrant attention. These concern the related questions of
causation and the nature of matter.

MECHANISM, MATTER, AND CAUSATION

A key characteristic of the notion of laws of nature was the idea of an external
imposition of order onto the world. Such a perspective contrasted with the
Aristotelian view that attributed order to the intrinsic properties of natural things. So
not only was this new conception at odds with Aristotles idea that mathematics be
kept separate from natural philosophy and his insistence on maintaining a distinction
between artificial and natural motions, it was also inconsistent with the Aristotelian
view of matter and causation. The idea of divinely imposed laws was more consistent
with the recently revived matter theory of the ancient atomists and with its modern
modification, the corpuscular hypothesis.xxix Unlike the ontologically rich
Aristotelian world, the sparse world of atoms of corpuscles was unpopulated by the
qualities, virtues, active principles, and substantial forms that had once invested
nature with significant causal agency. This was a causally vacant cosmos that would
be receptive to the direct volitions of the Deity. It was also a world that required
constant creative attention. For this reason, corpuscular theory, in spite of its
traditional associations with atheism, gained increasing acceptance during the early
modern period.xxx

10
Part of the attraction of atomism and corpuscularianism was that Gods control
over nature was no longer mediated by the secondary causes which, on the
Thomist/Aristotelian account, he was said to have implanted within nature. These
developments have been traditionally associated with the rise of theological
voluntarism a view that stresses the pre-eminence of the divine will in Gods
dealings with the world.xxxi While there are difficulties with a number of aspects of
the voluntarism and science thesis, it can certainly be said that during this period
natural laws were typically understood as expressions of the divine will.xxxii More
important than voluntarism (although sometimes confused with it) was the growing
popularity of an understanding of causation which held God to be the only genuine
cause in the universe. This was the doctrine of occasionalism. While occasionalism is
most closely associated with Cartesianism and with the philosopher Nicholas
Malebranche in particular, many natural philosophers of the period exhibited strong
occasionalist tendencies.xxxiii This was because if one removed causal efficacy from
natural objects, as opponents of Aristotle tended to do, it followed that one either had
to remain agnostic about causation or to concentrate causal power in God. Certainly
occasionalism was not an idiosyncratic view, and neither was it an ad hoc attempt on
the part of metaphysical dualists to solve the problem of mental causation. Part of the
reason for the rise of occasionalist understandings of causation at this time is that they
meshed neatly with atomic or corpuscular matter theory.

Interestingly, this was not the first time in the West that atomism and
occasionalism had appeared together as part of an account of divine action in nature.
In the ninth century, Islamic theologians had adopted an atomic metaphysics and had
subscribed to occasionalism. The concern of kalam thinkers such as al-Ashari (d.
935) who espoused these views had been to affirm the ultimate authority of God,
which it was believed would have been compromised had causal power been
attributed to natural agents. Discussion continued amongst Islamic scholars
throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Ibn Rushd (Averros, d.1198) mounted
strong Aristotelian arguments against occasionalism but his views were received more
favourably in the Christian West.xxxiv Ironically, commitment to occasionalism has
sometimes been identified as a factor that inhibited the growth of Islamic science.
This interpretation is possibly the consequence of identifying Aristotelianism as the
more genuinely scientific position. In the seventeenth century it could be said that

11
the reverse was the case, with occasionalism offering a way of explaining motion and
change without requiring recourse to the rich causal resources provided by
Aristotelianism.

Descartes and Malebranche represent the clearest examples of how this doctrine
of causation related to the idea of laws of nature. The differences between their
approach and that of the Aristotelians is nicely set out by historian Dennis Des Chene:
The Aristotelian philosophy takes natural change to be the work of active
powers in nature itself, in which God concurs. The Cartesian interprets it as
the work of God alone, subject to natural laws, appeal to which will help
demonstrate the observed regularities which by the Aristotelian are referred
to the intrinsic powers of material things, and to the ends toward which they
act.xxxv

The Cartesians, however, like many of their contemporaries, retained an attachment to

the Aristotelian ideal of science as certain and demonstrable knowledge. Descartes
thus described his goal as that of establishing a certain science or as achieving
perfect scientific knowledge.xxxvi This certain science was to be premised on an
assumption that the motions of objects in the physical world are best understood in
terms of mathematical descriptions rather than causal powers. Natural philosophers,
Descartes urged, should concern themselves only with objects which admit of as
much certainty as the demonstrations of arithmetic and geometry.xxxvii Tiny particles
of matter, evacuated of causal efficacy and other properties, were perfect candidates
for such treatment. As to their motions and what made them necessary and law-like,
this was ascribed to the divine will.
In his Principles of Philosophy (1644), Descartes first set out his three laws of
nature. He begins by asserting that God imparted various motions to the parts of
matter when he first created them, and he now preserves all this matter in the same
way, and by the same process by which he originally created it. It follows from this,
Descartes concludes, that God likewise always preserves the same quantity of motion
in matter. The principle of conservation of motion is thus underwritten by divine
immutability.xxxviii The first law is essentially that simple objects remain in the same
state and change only as a consequence of external causes; the second, that objects
tend to move in straight lines; the third concerns rules of collision.xxxix What gives
these laws their necessity is the fact that they are derived from the divine nature.
Indeed for Descartes all necessary relations including not only the laws of nature,

12
but also the laws of mathematics and logic are ultimately dependent on the divine
will. As he explained to his friend Mersenne, the mathematical truths, which you call
eternal, were established by God and totally depend on him just like all the other
creatures.xl Descartes thus suggested that there were necessary relations in nature that
derived their necessity from the fact that an omnipotent and immutable Deity had
promulgated unchanging laws and was acting constantly and directly to produce
motion and change in the universe.xli
Malebranches occasionalism is simply the logical conclusion of the Cartesian
project, for natural causality is, in a sense, the last of the Aristotelian occult qualities
to be banished from the world. It was Malebranches great insight, as Nicholas Jolley
has expressed it, to have realized that the traditional idea of causal powers needs to
be replaced by the more modern notion of natural law.xlii For Malebranche, and
indeed all early modern occasionalists, God directly imposed his will on brute matter
in systematic ways that could be described, on analogy with divinely instituted moral
imperatives, as laws. Necessary connections between two states of affairs,
Malebranche pointed, can only be established by God. Physical necessity, in other
words, was grounded in God, and the exceptionless character of laws of nature was
attributed to divine immutability.

NECESSITY, CONTINGENCY AND CREATION

The culmination of the application of mathematics to the problems of natural

philosophy came with Isaac Newtons magnum opus Philosophiae naturalis principia
mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687). This
work contains Newtons three laws of motion along with an articulation of the
universal law of gravity.xliii The title of the work and the method prescribed within
have become so familiar to modern readers that its novelty is often overlooked. To its
contemporaries, however, the startling combination of approaches recommended in
the title bears witness to the bold new direction of early modern physics. Henceforth,
natural philosophy or physics will be a discipline with mathematical principles.xliv
Newton was also conscious of the fact that explanations couched in terms of laws of
nature represented a distinctively new way of pursuing science. In the Preface to the
first edition of the Principia he pointed out that while the ancients had pursued the
investigation of nature by attempting to identify inherent forms and qualities in things,

13
the moderns have undertaken to reduce the phenomena of nature to mathematical
laws.xlv In his other masterwork, the Opticks (1704), Newton also stressed the fact
that phenomena such as gravity are not qualities inhering in the specifick forms of
Things but rather result from general Laws of Nature.xlvi

As with Descartes and Kepler, these laws were directly imposed by God. Roger
Cotes, who penned the Preface to the second edition of the Principia, summarized it
this way: all the laws that are called laws of nature come from the perfectly free
will of God. Yet the most likely cause of motion in the universe was, as it had been
for Descartes, God himself. Newton wrote in a letter to Richard Bentley that gravity
must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether
this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.xlvii
Newton most probably believed the latter.xlviii In another unpublished remark, he
spoke of an infinite and omnipresent spirit in which matter is moved according to
mathematical laws.xlix His correspondent, Richard Bentley, was less circumspect,
declaring in his 1691-2 Boyle Lectures that all the powers of mechanism are
dependent on the Deity, for gravity, the great basis of all mechanism, is not itself
mechanical, but the immediate fiat and finger of God, and the execution of divine
law.l Others within Newtons circle adopted the view that all that happens in nature
does so as the direct consequence of Gods willing it. Isaac Barrow, the first Lucasian
Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and Newtons immediate predecessor in that
famous chair, stated simply that the efficient Cause of all Things is God.li God
governs the world directly, for he uses no other means, instruments or applications in
these productions, than his bare word or command.lii The Anglican Divine Samuel
Clarke, who was Newtons spokesman in the controversy with Leibniz and the most
philosophically able theologian of his generation, also contended that laws of nature
were nothing other than Gods volitions: the Course of Nature, cannot possibly be
any thing else, but the Arbitrary Will and pleasure of God exerting itself and acting
upon Matter continually.liii

There was a significant difference between the position of Newton and the
Cartesians, however. In fact, much of Cotess Preface is given over to highlighting
exactly where that difference lay. According to Cotes, Descartes laws had a logical
necessity that could be intuited by the rational mind. This method, he wrote, proceeds

14
on the basis of untrustworthy conjectures, assumes that nature is characterised by
necessity, and that insignificant human beings can arrive at a clear understanding of
those necessary connections through the exercise of reason alone. By way of contrast,
the Newtonian approach was presented as relying less on the internal light of reason
and more on observing and experimenting.liv One difficulty with the method of
observing and experimenting is whether it could yield the kind of certainties that the
Cartesian approach seemed to offer. How, on the basis of numerous observations,
could one arrive at the notion of an exceptionless mathematical law? This is the issue
that modern philosophers recognise as the problem of induction. Newton seemed to
believe that an appropriate combination of experiment, observation and mathematical
reasoning would provide a heightened level of certainty. Where previous
experimentalists had tended to settle for probabilistic and tentative conclusions,
Newton aimed for mathematical demonstrability, proceeding, in his own words, in
imitation of the method by wch Mathematitians are wont to prove their doctrines.lv
This, he thought, would promote a natural science that rejected probabilities and was
supported by the greatest evidence. lvi Among Newtons peers, other solutions were
offered. Isaac Barrow thought that the philosopher ought to accept any proposition
confirmed with frequent Experiments as universally true, and not suspect that Nature
is inconstant, and the great Author of the universe unlike himself.lvii That is to say
that we can assume a uniformity in natures operations because God is consistent in
all his actions. This seems very much like the Cartesian idea that the constancy of
nature is grounded in the qualities of God. The difference, however, lies in the manner
in which the laws discovered. For Descartes they are intuited from the divine nature,
for the Newtonians they must be discovered by experimentation.

CONCLUSION

If we return to the three questions posed at the outset of this chapter why there
are laws of nature at all, why they are mathematical, and why they are exceptionless
we are now in a better position to see how, for those who first articulated the idea of
laws of nature, the answer to each question involved some significant theological
commitment. The idea of a world governed by laws of nature was the result of a new
view of the relation of God to the world in which God is more directly involved in the
operations of nature. Its early modern proponents argued this to be a more Christian

15
view of nature than the Aristotelian worldview that it replaced. These laws are
mathematical because God was conceptualized as the divine mathematician. The
necessary character of these laws was seen to arise out of the fact that Gods will is
immutable, and hence the laws that he wills into effect are unchangeable.

The subsequent history of the notion of laws of nature, it must be said, has
conspired to conceal the theological origins of the idea. Two distinct developments
are worth brief consideration. First, it must be recognised that the notion of laws of
nature, however much it may have rested on theological convictions, inevitably led to
a desacralization of the natural world. Not only were intrinsic powers and qualities
banished from the world, but the rigid necessity of the new laws of nature meant that
with the passage of time lawfulness came to be regarded simply as an unremarkable
feature of the world itself, and one needing no further explanation. Ironically, the very
constancy of divine action served to make God increasingly irrelevant as an
explanatory mechanism. In the nineteenth century, laws of nature came to be regarded
not as laws imposed on nature by God, but literally as laws of nature itself.
Alternative expressions now include laws of science or scientific laws, reflecting
the elevation of the status of science and scientists, and the corresponding decline in
the emphasis on Gods role in the instantiation of natural laws.lviii A significant phase
in this development came with the nineteenth-century transformation of natural
history into the science of biology. This transition involved, amongst other things, a
growing rejection of the pace of natural theology in the life sciences, and the assertion
that biology, like physics, had its own laws. Thomas Huxley, who did so much to
promote this process, thus announced that a rational order pervades the universe,
it being the task of science to uncover it.lix God was thus supplanted by the notion of
a rational order, the existence of which was simply assumed. Huxley also drew an
analogy between the laws of Newtonian physics and the laws that were presumed to
characterise the new biological science. Robert Chambers, in his notorious Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation (1844), had already established the beachhead: The
inorganic [world] has one final and comprehensible law Gravitation. The organic,
the other great department of mundane things, rests in like manner on one law, and
that is Development.lx Subsequently, Charles Darwin, in the final sentence of the
first edition of the Origin, also equated the law of evolution with the law of
gravitation: whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of

16
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.lxi The persuasiveness of this analogy rested upon
a subtle equivocation, for the laws of evolutionary biology are historical or
phylogenetic, and the subjects to which the laws apply are unique organisms.lxii
Nonetheless this was part of the process by which the new biological science was
presented rhetorically as a suitable replacement for an obsolete and theologically
oriented natural history. Robert Young has plausibly suggested that there is a
continuity in this transition, in which one belief system based on natural theology and
divine law replaced a comparable system, one now devoid of supernatural elements
and based instead on notions of natural law and natural selection.lxiii Common to both
systems was the notion of a nature governed by laws; the transition entailed only a
shift in the understanding of the origin of those laws. Now separated from its original
theistic justifications, the idea of laws of nature was given wider application in the
twentieth century, losing both its deterministic and theistic connotations witness the
appearance of such statistical laws as the Hardy Weinberg Law in population genetics,
and the more mathematically exact, but no less probabilistic laws of quantum
mechanics. Einsteins oft-quoted epigram in response to the latter, that God does not
play dice, reflects the largely forgotten origins of the older view.

Developments in the philosophical realm were also significant for the later
history of laws of nature. In the eighteenth century, David Hume was to agree with
Malebranche and others that causation was not located in nature itself. But neither, for
Hume, was it to be found in the divine will. Rather, causation existed only in the
human mind, in our habit of attributing necessary connections to events that we
observe to be constantly conjoined. Kant formalized this view, asserting that causes
were not a feature of the world in itself, but a feature of the manner in which we
necessarily perceive events in the world. For this reason Kant denied the efficacy of
traditional arguments for the existence of God and, in particular, the cosmological
argument that assumes the reality of causal relations in order to establish the existence
of a first cause.

Contemporary philosophers are divided on even the most fundamental questions

relating to laws of nature. Some still wish to assert that laws of nature capture some
necessary state of affairs. Others support something like a Humean view, according to

17
which laws of nature are significantly mind-dependent. A minority find the problems
associated with each of these views insurmountable, and consequently assert that
there are simply no such things as laws of nature.lxiv This contemporary confusion
results in part from the fact that the idea of laws of nature has been torn loose from its
original theological moorings. Failure to grasp this point also leads to a degree of
conceptual untidiness in some contemporary discussions of the cosmological
argument in relation to laws of nature. One encounters the idea that science discovers
mathematical laws, and that this provides the premise of a cosmological argument on
the basis of which we can infer the existence of first source of causal intelligibility.
However, if we take into consideration the relevant history, it seems that certain
theistic assumptions are already disguised in the premises of these arguments. A small
consolation, perhaps, is the possibility of an alternative argument that science,
insofar as it assumes the reality of mathematical laws, operates with a tacitly theistic
assumption about the nature of the universe. Tracing the history of the notion of laws
of nature helps us to see that such lawfulness is not a self-evident feature of the
universe but, as it was originally conceived at least, an implication of certain
theological convictions.

18

NOTES
i

The best recent account of the historical origin of laws of nature is John Henry,

Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science: Descartes and the Importance of
Laws of Nature, Early Science and Medicine, 9 (2004): 73-114. See also Edgar
Zilsel, The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Law, The Philosophical Review, 51
(1942): 245-67; Joseph Needham, Human Laws and the Laws of Nature in China and
the West, Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951): 3-32, 194-231; Jane Ruby, The
Origins of Scientific Law, Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986): 341-59; J.R.
Milton, Laws of Nature, in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (2 vols., Cambridge, 1998), vol. 1, pp.
680-701; Friedrich Steinle, The Amalgamation of a Concept Laws of Nature in the
New Sciences, in Friedel Weinert (ed.), Laws of Nature: Essays on the
Philosophical, Scientific and Historical Dimensions (Berlin, 1995), pp. 316-368.
Specifically on theological influences see Francis Oakley, Christian theology and the
Newtonian science: the rise of the concept of laws of nature, Church History, 30
(1961): 433-57; M.B. Foster, The Christian doctrine of creation and the rise of
modern natural science, Mind, 18 (1934): 446-68; Peter Harrison, Newtonian
Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56
(1995): 531-53; Alan Padgett, The Roots of the Western Concept of the Laws of
Nature: From the Greeks to Newton, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith,
55 (2003): 212-21.
ii

Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles 3b, 100, tr. English Dominican Fathers (5 vols.,

London, 1934), vol. 4, p. 58; Quaestiones disputatae de potentia dei, Bk. 1, q. 3, a. 8,

rp. 2, English translation, On the Power of God, tr. English Dominican Fathers
(London, 1932), p. 143.
iii

Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 3b, 99 (vol. 4, p. 57). Such events were known as

praeternatural. See Lorraine Daston, Miraculous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in

Early Modern Europe, Critical Inquiry, 18 (1991): 93-124
iv

Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles 3b, 99 (vol. 4, p. 57).

Aristotle, Metaphysics 1026b- 1027a, 1064b-1065a. For Medieval and Renaissance

versions of this view see Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle

11.8.2276, tr. John P. Rowan (2 vols., Chicago, 1961), Vol. 2, p. 814; Matteo

19

Palmieri, Civil Life II, in Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. Jill Kraye, (2 vols.,
Cambridge, 1997) vol. 2, pp. 149-72 (esp. p. 153).
vi

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 71b-72b. For the reception of this doctrine during the

Renaissance see Peter Dear, Method and the Study of Nature, in Garber and Ayers
(eds.), Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 147-177;
Heikki Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism: Jacopo
Zabarella on the Nature of Arts and Sciences (Helsinki, 1992).
vii

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 75b.

viii

This kind of instrumentalism is not quite the same as that espoused within some

contemporary philosophy of science circles, however. See P. Barker and B.R.

Goldstein, Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy: A
Reappraisal, Perspectives on Science, 6 (1998): 232-258.
ix

Thus Aquinas, e.g.: Yet it is not necessary that the various [mathematical]

suppositions which they [Eudoxus and later astronomers] hit upon be truefor
although these suppositions save the appearances, we are nevertheless not obliged to
say that these suppositions are true, because perhaps there is some other way men
have not yet grasped by which the things which appear as to the stars are saved.
Exposition of Aristotle's Treatise on the Heavens II.17.451, tr. R. Larcher and P.
Conway, (2 vols., Columbus, 1963-4), vol. 2, p. 74.
x

For it is not necessary that these hypotheses should be true, or even probable; but it

is enough if they provide a calculus which fits the observations. Nicolaus

Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, tr. Charles Glenn Wallis
(Amherst, 1995), p. 3.
xi

Aristotle, Metaphysics 989b-990a, 1025b-1026a; On the Heavens 299a-299b. See

also Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton, 1986),
pp. 35-7, 303-7.
xii

See Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism, pp. 40-44; J.A.

Weisheipl, Classification of the Sciences in Medieval Thought, Mediaeval Studies,

27 (1965): 54-90; R.D. McKirahan, Jr., Aristotles Subordinate Sciences, British
Journal for the History of Science, 11 (1978): 197-220; J.G. Lennox, Aristotle,
Galileo, and Mixed Science, in W.A. Wallace (ed.), Reinterpreting Galileo
(Washington, D.C., 1986), pp. 29-51; Peter Harrison, Physico-Theology and the
Mixed Sciences: The Role of Theology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, in Peter

20

Anstey and John Schuster (eds.), The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century
(Dordrecht, 2005), pp. 165-183.
xiii

Pseudo-Aristotle, Mechanics, 847. For a discussion of Aristotles distinction

between arts and sciences and its reception during the Renaissance see Mikkeli,
Zabarella on the Nature of Arts and Sciences, pp. 21-34; P.L. Rose and S. Drake,
The Pseudo-Aristotelian Questions of Mechanics in Renaissance Culture, Studies in
the Renaissance, 18 (1971): 65-105.
xiv

Alan Gabbey, Between ars and philosophia naturalis: Reflections on the

historiography of Early Modern Mechanics, in J. Field and F. James (eds.),

Renaissance and Revolution (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 649-679; Peter Anstey, The
Philosophy of Robert Boyle (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1-4. Admittedly,
medieval comparisons of the cosmos to a vast machine may be found in Hugh of St
Victor, De arca Noe morali IV.7; Henry of Langenstein Lecturae super Genesim,
I.35va.
xv

Jane Ruby and A.C. Crombie have pointed out that Roger Bacon (c. 1210

c.1292) spoke of laws [lex, leges] of reflection and refraction, and of these
collectively as laws of nature. See A.C. Crombie, The Significance of Medieval
Discussions of Scientific Method for the Scientific Revolution, Critical Problems in
the History of Science (Madison, 1959), p. 89; Medieval and Modern Science
(Garden City, 1959), 24; Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society
in East and West (Toronto, 1969), 310; Ruby, The Origins of Scientific Law, pp.
343f. Crombie points to the possible influence of the Platonising philosopher Robert
Grosseteste (1175-1253). This is suggestive of an alternative Platonic source of the
modern notion of natural law. However, it is consistent with neither the Aristotelian
understanding of the mathematical sciences, nor the voluntarist tendencies of most of
those who were subsequently to speak of laws of nature in this sense in the early
modern period.
xvi

Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1a2ae. 91, 1.

xvii

Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1a2ae. 91, 2.

xviii

Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum tr. A.M. Duncan (Norwalk, CT,

Abarus, 1999), p. 123.

xix

Kepler, The Harmony of the World, tr. and intro. by E.J. Aiton, A.M. Duncan, J.V.

Field (Philadelphia, 1997), pp. 115, 146. The reference to weight, measure, and

21

number comes from the Book of Wisdom 11:12, a favourite passage of Augustine.
See The Trinity, XI.iv; The Literal Meaning of Genesis IV, 3, 7-12; Confessions
V.iv.7; Answer to an Enemy of the Law and the Prophets I, 6, 8; Free Will, III, 12, 35.
See also W. Bierwaltes, Augustins Interpretation von Sapientia 11,21, Revue des
tudes augustiniennes, 15 (1969): 51-61. On the reasons for Keplers realist stance see
Kenneth J. Howell, Gods Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical
Interpretation in Early Modern Science (Notre Dame, 2002), pp. 126f.
xx

Galileo, Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, tr. Stillman Drake

(New York, 2001), p. 3; The Assayer, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, tr.
Stillman Drake (New York, 1957), pp. 237f. On the novelty of this understanding of
the book of nature see Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of
Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 1-5.
xxi

Galileo, Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, pp. 11, 118f. For

Galileos Platonism see James Hankins, Galileo, Ficino, and Renaissance

Platonism, in Jill Kraye and M.W.F. Stone (eds.), Humanism and Early Modern
Philosophy (London, 2000), pp. 209-237.
xxii

Ibid., pp. 119, 471. On Galileos understanding of science see Ernan McMullin,

The Conception of Science in Galileos Work, in Robert Butts and Joseph Pitt
(eds.), New Perspectives on Galileo (Dordrecht, 1978), pp. 209-57; Arkady Plotinsky
and David Reed, Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration, and Science in Galileo's
Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences, Configurations, 9 (2001): 37-64.
xxiii

Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in Discoveries and Opinions, pp.

186f., 194. Cf. Augustine, On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis 1.21.

xxiv

Kepler to Herward von Hohenberg, 10 February 1605, qu. in Michael Mahony,

The Mathematical Realm of Nature, in Garber and Ayers (eds.), Cambridge History
of Seventeenth Century Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 702-55 (p. 706).
xxv

Ren Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical writings of

Descartes [CSM] tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and
Anthony Kenny (3 vols., Cambridge, 1984-91) vol. 1, p. 288. Bacon also denied the
significance of the distinction between the artificial and the natural. See Paolo Rossi,
Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era (New York, 1970), pp.
138f.
xxvi

Descartes, Discourse, CSM vol. 1, p. 137.

22

xxvii

Descartes, The World, CSM vol. I, p. 97; Principles, CSM vol. 1, p. 240.

xxviii

Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, CSM vol. 1, p. 286.

xxix

Atomism posits indivisible particles and the existence of a void for them to move

in. The corpuscular hypothesis holds that matter is made of invisible, but not
necessarily indivisible, particles. Corpuscularians might also deny the existence of the
void (as Descartes did).
xxx

Mersenne thus specifically developed a mechanistic account of nature in response

to the perceived dangers of too close an association of God and nature. See Stephen
Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 146-52. The
relative merits of Epicurean atomism and Aristotelianism in terms of their
compatibility with Christian notions of creation also featured in cosmological debates.
See Harrison, The Influence of Cartesian Cosmology in England, in S. Gaukroger, J.
Schuster, and J. Sutton (eds.), Descartes Natural Philosophy (London, 2000), pp.
168-92. See also Margaret Osler (ed.), Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean
and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cambridge, 1991).
xxxi

From the large body of literature on this topic see, e.g., Foster, The Christian

doctrine of creation and the rise of modern natural science; Oakley, Christian
theology and the Newtonian science: the rise of the concept of laws of nature;
Eugene Klaaren, Religious origins of modern science (Grand Rapids, 1977); Peter
Heimann, Voluntarism and immanence: conceptions of nature in eighteenth-century
thought, Journal of the history of ideas, 39 (1978): 271-83; Margaret Osler, Divine
will and the mechanical philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on contingency and
necessity in the created world (Cambridge, 1994).
xxxii

For a critique of some aspects of this thesis see Peter Harrison, Voluntarism and

Early Modern Science, History of Science, 40 (2002): 63-89; Harrison, Was Newton
a Voluntarist?, in J.E. Force and S. Hutton (eds.), Newton and Newtonianism: New
Studies (Dordrecht, 2004), pp. 39-63.
xxxiii

Seventeenth-century occasionalists include Arnold Geulincx, Louis de La Forge,

Grauld de Cordemoy, and probably Antoine Arnauld, Johann Clauberg and

Descartes himself. See Desmond Clarke, Casual Powers and Occasionalism from
Descartes to Malebranche, in Gaukroger, Schuster, and Sutton (eds.) Descartes
Natural Philosophy, pp. 131-48; Daniel Garber, Descartes and occasionalism, in
Steven Nadler (ed.), Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, (University Park, 1993),

23

pp. 9-26; Steven Nadler, Occasionalism and the Question of Arnaulds

Cartesianism, in Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (eds.), Descartes and his
contemporaries (Chicago, 1996), pp. 129-44; Doctrines of explanation in late
scholasticism and in the mechanical philosophy, in Garber and Ayers (eds.),
Cambridge history of seventeenth-century philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 513-52; Daniel
Garber, How God causes motion: Descartes, divine substance, and occasionalism,
Journal of philosophy, 84 (1987): 567-80.
xxxiv

D. Gimaret, La doctrine d'al-Ash'ari, (Paris, 1990); M. Fakhry, Islamic

Occasionalism and its Critique by Averros and Aquinas (London, 1958); Barry S.
Kogan, Averros and the Metaphysics of Causation (Albany, 1985); H. Brown,
Avicenna and the Christian Philosophers in Baghdad, in S. Stern, A. Hourani, and
Vivian Brown (eds.), Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition (Columbia, SC,
1972), pp. 35-48; L. Goodman, Did al-Ghazali deny Causality? Studia Islamica, 47
(1978): 83-120.
xxxv

Dennis Des Chene, On Laws and Ends: A Response to Hattab and Menn,

Perspectives on Science, 8 (2000): 144-63.

xxxvi

All knowledge [scientia] is certain and evident cognition. Rules for the

Direction of the Mind, CSM vol. 1, p. 10. See also CSM vol. 2, p. 408; CSM vol. 1,
pp. 197, 179, 201; CSM vol. 3, p. 38.
xxxvii

Descartes, Rule for the Direction of the Mind, CSM vol. 1, p. 12.

xxxviii

Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 61, CSM vol. 1, p. 240.

xxxix

Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 61, 63, 65, CSM vol. 1, pp. 240-2.

xl

Descartes to Mersenne, 15 April 1630, CSM vol. 3, p. 23.

xli

Descartes, The World, CSM vol. 1, pp. 93, 96; Principles of Philosophy, CSM vol.

1, p. 240. Whether Descartes believed in the existence of secondary causes remains a

contested issue. See Helen Hattab, Descartes on Secondary Causes: A Response to
Des Chene, Perspectives on Science, 8 (2000): 93-116; Garber, How God causes
motion, and Descartes and occasionalism.
xlii

Nicholas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, ed. Nicholas

Jolley and David Scott (Cambridge, 1997), intro. by Nicholas Jolley, p. xxii. cf. p.
xxvii.
xliii

Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, tr.

I. Bernad Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley, 1999), pp. 416f.

24

xliv

See esp. Andrew Cunningham, How the Principia got its Name: Or, Taking

Natural Philosophy Seriously, History of Science, 28 (1991): 377-92.

xlv

Newton, Principia, p. 381.

xlvi

Newton, Opticks (New York, 1979), p. 401.

xlvii

Newton to Bentley, 25 February 1692, in The Correspondence of Sir Isaac

Newton, ed. H.W. Turnbull (7 vols., Cambridge, 1959-77) vol. 4, p. 438.

xlviii

See, e.g. Alexander Koyr, Gravity an Essential Property of Matter, Newtonian

Studies (Chicago, 1968), pp. 149-63; I.B. Cohen, Newtons Third Law and Universal
Gravitation, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987): 571-93. For a summary of
these interpretations see John Henry, Pray do not Ascribe that Notion to Me: God
and Newtons Gravity, in James Force and Richard Popkin (eds.), The Books of
Nature and Scripture (Dordrecht, 1994), pp. 123-147. Ernan McMullin frankly
concludes that Newton seemed to have no clear and consistent position on this issue.
Newton on Matter and Activity (Notre Dame, 1978), p. 104.
xlix

Draft corollary to Proposition 6 of the Principia, qu. in John Brooke, The God of

Isaac Newton, in John Fauvel, et al. (eds.), Let Newton Be, ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 172.
l

Richard Bentley, Boyle Lectures, Sermon IV, in The Works of Richard Bentley,

D.D., 6th edn., ed. Alexander Dyce (3 vols., London, 1836), vol. 3, pp. 74-5.
li

Barrow, The Usefulness of mathematical learning explained and demonstrated, tr.

John Kirby (London, 1734), Lecture VII, p. 109.

lii

Barrow, Maker of heaven and earth, (Sermon XII), in Theological works, (3 vols.

London, 1885), vol. 2, p. 303. Cf. Isaac Newton, Unpublished scientific papers of
Isaac Newton, ed. and tr. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge, 1962), p.
139; William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth (London, 1696), pp. 6, 211.
liii

Samuel Clarke, The Evidences of natural and revealed religion, The Works of

Samuel Clarke, D.D., (2 vols., London, 1738), vol. 2, p. 698.

liv

Newton, Principia, pp. 397f.

lv

Newton to Oldenburg, 21 September 1672, Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 237.

lvi

Newton, The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, Vol. 1. The optical lectures 1670

1672, ed. Alan Shapiro (Cambridge, 1984), vol. 1, p. 89. Newtons methodology
remains problematic, however, even to modern interpreters. See Rob Iliffe, Abstract
considerations: disciplines and the incoherence of Newtons natural philosophy,

25

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 35A (2004): 427-54; Peter Dear,
Method and the Study of Nature.
lvii

Barrow, Usefulness, pp. 73-74. For Newtons response to this problem see G.A.J.

Rogers, Newton and the Guaranteeing God in James Force and Richard Popkin
(eds.), Newton and religion: context, nature, and influence (Dordrecht, 1999), pp.
221-36.
lviii

Some philosophers maintain a formal distinction between laws of nature and laws

of science. The latter are said to admit exceptions. See Michael Scriven, The Key
Property of a Physical LawInaccuracy, in H. Feigl and H. Maxwell (eds.), Current
Issues in the Philosophy of Science, (New York, 1961), pp. 91-104; Nancy
Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie, (Oxford, 1983); M. Lange, Natural Laws
and the Problem of Provisos, Erkenntnis 38 (1993): 233-248.
lix

T.H. Huxley, The Progress of Science, [1887], in Methods and Results (New

York, 1894), pp. 60-1.

lx

Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London, 1844), p.

36. Chambers nonetheless suggests that both laws are subsets of one still more
comprehensive law that originates from God.
lxi

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Chicago, 1952), p. 243.

lxii

On this equivocation regarding natural laws see George Levine, Scientific

Discourse as an Alternative to Faith in Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman

(eds.), Victorian Faith in Crisis (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 225-61 (esp. pp. 236f.);
David L. Hull, Darwin and his Critics: The Reception of Darwins Theory by the
Scientific Community (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 64-74; Ernst Mayr, The Growth
of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 36-67.
lxiii

Robert M. Young, Darwins Metaphor: Natures Place in Victorian Culture

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

lxiv

Representatives of the first view include David Armstrong, What Is a Law of

Nature? (Cambridge, 1983); Fred Dretske, Laws of Nature, Philosophy of Science,

44 (1977): 248-268; Michael Tooley, Causation (Oxford, 1987). Armstrong holds that
laws of nature describe a relation between two universals. David Lewis was the
foremost proponent of a neo-Humean view. See his Counterfactuals (Cambridge,
Mass., 1973), and Humean Supervenience Debugged, Mind 103 (1994): 473-390.
See also John Earman, The Universality of Laws, Philosophy of Science, 45 (1978):

26

173-181; Barry Loewer, Humean Supervenience, Philosophical Topics, 24 (1996):

101-126. Doubting the existence of laws of nature are Bas von Fraassen, Laws and
Symmetry, (Oxford, 1989), and Ronald Giere, Science Without Laws, (Chicago,
1999).