The Divine Lawmaker (original) (raw)

In this fascinating book, John Foster develops a novel argument for the existence of God on the basis of considerations about inductive inference and laws of nature. The key claim that Foster defends is this: that regularities in the behaviour of physical objects in different times and places are only satisfactorily explained on the assumption that the Judaeo-Christian God's causal imposition of regularities qua regularities on the physical universe brings it about that the operation of the physical universe is partly governed by natural laws. On Foster's account, for there to be a law of nature is for there to be a certain type of natural regularity of which it is true that it is nomically necessary that things are regular in that way; and for there to be a certain type of natural regularity of which it is true that it is nomically necessary that things are regular in that way, there must be something that causally imposes this regularity on the universe qua regularity, i.e. in a way that leaves open all of the details of how things conform to that regularity.