The Argument From Nomological Harmony is Ridiculously Convincing

Laws apply to stuff. Isn't that strange?

There's a tiresome young man in Bay Shore.
When his fiancée cried, ‘I adore
The beautiful sea’,
He replied, ‘I agree,
It's pretty, but what is it for?’

—Morris Bishop

(A brief note: this article will mostly just be paraphrasing the arguments made by Saad and Cutter).

The best argument for God is probably the argument from psychophysical harmony. I’ve discussed that argument before, so I won’t go into detail again, but suffice it to say, unless one adopts a ghoulishly reductive view in philosophy of mind that denies the uniquely mental features of our inner life, they should be quite convinced by it. Well, there’s a new kid on the block, challenging the argument’s title of being the best theistic argument. Not only might the argument from psychophysical harmony no longer be the best argument for God, it might not even be the best argument for God with harmony in the name.

This new argument is called the argument from nomological harmony, (not to be confused, of course, with the nomological argument). All the best arguments for theism have harmony in the name apparently—maybe I should call my anthropic argument the argument from anthropic harmony. The argument from nomological harmony begins with a striking observation—laws apply to stuff. Not just stuff that could exist—stuff that actually exists! That’s sort of strange, isn’t it? There are lots of possible laws that would have applied to other stuff that doesn’t exist. For instance, if the laws only applied to bosons, but there weren’t any bosons, the universe would sit around doing nothing. Nearly all possible laws wouldn’t apply to the stuff that exists. So it’s quite strange that laws apply to the stuff that exists.

Cutter and Saad—originators of the argument—give the following analogy: imagine that you come across a random set of pieces and a random rulebook. You find that the rulebook applies to the pieces. If some designer put them together, that explains their pairing. But if there was no deeper explanation of why they were paired, that would be, to use the technical term, super duper weird. Or to give another analogy, it would be like finding a map of a building, discovering that it’s a map of the building that you’re in, and thinking that no one made the map for the building—that it was just random ink residue from a pen-making factory.

If the laws are fundamental, then the fact that they are paired with the stuff that exists is quite surprising. Thus, we should think instead, that there’s something deeper with the power to devise various laws, like a God. What else could it be that doesn’t have an absurdly low prior? I don’t know. Positing that there’s some force that just makes laws and constants matched, for instance, is not a good theory, because there are an infinite number of equally arbitrary forces. It’s like positing that there’s just an arbitrary force that finely tunes the universe.

Now, my first thought when I heard this argument was that it seems to assume a particular view of laws. There are some views of laws according to which laws are what make things behave in a particular way. On this view, the law of gravity makes things with mass exert force on each other. But there are other views according to which laws just describe the causal powers of things. So, on this view, gravity isn’t why things attract—gravity is just a shorthand description for describing that things have the tendency to attract.

If you have the powers view of laws, then it seems at first that this argument doesn’t work. If laws are just powers things have, then the reason the law of gravity applies to the stuff that exists is that it is describing the powers of the stuff that exists. But this generates a slightly distinct similar problem.

The laws are about the interactions between things. For instance, the law of gravity makes things with mass pull on each other (I’m obviously oversimplifying massively). On the powers view, this means that things with mass have the power to pull on each other. This means that powers depend on the other things that exist. So then the mystery is why the powers that things have interact with other things exist.

Suppose that there is one fundamental thing: shmangles. Shmangles only have the power to attract bangles. Well, then the world would sit around doing nothing because it wouldn’t have the necessary ingredients for things to interact. Our world could have been like this—if things only had the power to interact with other things that didn’t happen to exist, the world would have remained inert. Because the powers that one has will depend on the other stuff that exist, the overwhelming majority of possible powers that fundamental stuff could have would result in the world doing nothing, for they won’t have the other stuff to interact with. Powers on this view, would be like cooking ingredients—it would be weird if a bunch of randomly selected coking ingredients made a delicious vegan burger? Or, to go back to the game analogy, imagine if the way that game pieces worked was that they had certain causal powers. The reason rooks move in rows is that they have the inherent causal powers to move in rows. Discovering our nomological harmony would be like going through a game shop, mixing up all the pieces, and then picking out 80 at random, only to find that they form a complete game and interact with each other, rather than, for example, having a bishop from chess with the game board from risk with a magic the gathering card.

One could, in response, say that this is just a brute fact—it doesn’t have an explanation. But this is a really bad view. If two things miraculously correlate, positing that they just happen to with no further explanation—when 0% of the ways they could be involves a harmonious pairing—is a terrible view. It would be like finding out that all humans at night have the same dream and guessing that that’s just a coincidence.

You might worry that this applies to God. Why isn’t God in a stillborn state, unable to do anything. Why does the law of omnipotence apply to God. But God is just a single thing with certain causal powers—there aren’t external laws that apply to him. He doesn’t need to interact with other things. The powers view only has problems if there are multiple things that interact, but theism can deny that. Furthermore, theism can derive nomological harmony from a simpler property: absolute perfection.

You might try to get out of this by appealing to the anthropic principle. I’ve already explained why that doesn’t work (see part 3 of this article). Appealing to the anthropic principle is like saying that you don’t get evidence that your parents weren’t almost entirely infertile from the fact that you exist, because otherwise you wouldn’t have been around to wonder about it, or that the fact that you survived a firing squad of 100 people doesn’t require explanation because otherwise you wouldn’t have been around to wonder about it.

You might finally try to get out of it by appealing to a multiverse. But this has deep problems. There are two ways a multiverse could work: first by positing some fundamental laws that result in many universes, and second by positing that there are just a bunch of universes without a further explanation.

The first solution just pushes the puzzle back a step. Whichever laws generate a multiverse must be nomologically harmonious. So for this to work, one would need a different solution to nomological harmony. The second solution is ridiculously unparsimonious—it posits a huge number of random, unconnected universes, for no reason. Only the first solution has a simple multiverse model, because it derives the multiverse from something simpler.

There are some philosophical views that explain why there would be a multiverse. For example, modal realism, which says that every possible world is real. Maybe a view like this is the best way out of the puzzle. The problem is that views like this tend to be really implausible—e.g. modal realism undermines induction. If there’s a way to make such a view plausible, it’s probably the best atheistic solution. But I don’t think there is.

In addition to this basic version of the problem, there’s the problem of psychophysical nomological harmony. Why is it that the psychophysical laws—the laws that give rise to consciousness—apply to stuff that exists? Assume that consciousness arises when there’s integrated information. It’s sort of weird that integrated information exists—that the stuff that happens to generate consciousness exists. Theism nicely explains this fact, atheism doesn’t.

I find this argument to be quite compelling. It’s one of a long list of compelling theist arguments. The question is just whether they are enough to overcome the problem of evil and potentially low prior of theism. That, I’m not sure about.