James Orr is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge. Though right-wing & anti-immigration, I can't warm to him because, it seems to me, his metaphysics entails certain Christological errors which, however, can no more impugn than it can establish, his Faith.
Consider this draft, available on Academia, of his paper titled-
No God, No Powers: On Cartwright’s Escape Nancy Cartwright has recently claimed that analysing physical regularities as laws
which physicsts don't do
– that is, as quasi-causal necessitation relations between universals
universals are intensions without fixed extensions. Even if there is a possible world where necessitation relations exist, there will always appear to be a possible world where it doesn't in our own world.
–presupposes theistic commitment.
Anyone can presuppose any sort of commitment on the part of anybody else. My own fundamental ontic presupposition is that all beings are commited to an intense aesthetic appreciation of my farts even if they deny it and run away from me coz they iz jelly.
To borrow her slogan: no God, no laws.
For the 'Enlightenment' it seemed likely that unicity or naturality or categoricity obtained in every discipline and thus a unique set of 'natural laws' regulated everything including the God who necessarily exists so as to promulgate them.
Sadly, category theory itself suggests that naturality is far to seek. There are fundamental mathematical problems of complexity, concurrency, computability and so forth.
She argues that the more plausible alternative for nomic realists who reject theism is to ground regularities in powers.
Why not in gods or archangels or prosopoi?
I argue that this alternative is in fact inconsistent with a core commitment of metaphysical naturalism.
Statistical regularities are natural. Laws aren't. They are things people talk about but which don't inhere in anything.
I then examine and reject a platonic version of the powers account before concluding with a more promising theistic alternative. In slogan form: no God, no powers.
Since nothing can come from nothing either we are nothing or we come from God. The problem here is the Christological doctrine of kenosis arising from Phillipians 2.7 ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών, ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος· καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος (but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men).
Here becoming nothing becomes the making of μορφὴν (morphēn) – form / shape.
No God, No Laws Nancy Cartwright has recently claimed that the most coherent way to analyse physical regularities as laws of nature requires theistic commitment.
The most coherent way to analyze cats as dogs requires a God who turns cats into dogs for the purpose of analysis.
Her specific target are those theories that ground regularities in quasi-causal necessitation relations between categorical properties.
No theory in physics does so. Regularities are grounded in time-series. A Structural Causal Model may posit categories and specify functors upon them. But positing is not grounding.
The claim articulates a widespread suspicion not only among neo-Humeans who hold that every regularity is a contingent regularity,
every cat is a contingent cat
but also among neo-Aristotelians who analyse regularities in terms of the causal powers of objects, where causal powers are construed as ‘pure’ or ‘ungrounded’ – that is, as dispositional properties that are not reducible to an underlying base of categorical properties.
This is a tempting route to escape from reductionism (what's more it has Heisenberg's imprimatur!) but it hasn't yielded anything useful yet. Still, we are seduced by things like the 'law of increasing functional information'.
For reasons of space, I shall simply assume in what follows that Cartwright’s suspicions regarding the theistic implications of the relations-between-universals analysis are well-founded.
There are no such implications. Faith is founded on a mysterey.
I shall focus instead on the dispositionalist analysis as the one option that Cartwright leaves open for those who share her realist intuitions about regularities and her rejection of theism. Let us call this proposal Cartwright’s Escape.
God is God because he is God.
My aim in this paper is to show that although it is well-motivated, Cartwright’s Escape fails: the prospects of grounding a realist analysis of physical regularities within a non-theistic explanatory framework are dimmer than Cartwright supposes, while the prospects of grounding one in a theistic one are more promising than she realises.
If God exists he can ensure stupid shit you think corresponds to reality. If he doesn't, then nothing can redeed your thinking from incompossibility.
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