We now find that a great many things we thought were Natural Laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depth of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is.no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. (1)On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find that they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are sta tistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design;on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design.
The laws of nature are of that sort a s regards to a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance;and that makes the whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. (2) Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a law-giver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws.
Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which way you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; (3) but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and, being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were you are then faced with the question, Why did God issue just those natural laws and not others？
If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others—the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think to look at it—if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary.
(4) You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate law-giver. In short, this whole argument from natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of these arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. (5) They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modem times they become less respectable intellectually and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.
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