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Chapter 3 of 511 min read
القوانين الطبيعية تفسيرًا: ما تستطيعه وما لا تستطيعه
Among educated secular thinkers, the most common answer to the question of what governs the universe is neither pure chance nor God but natural laws. This answer has considerable intellectual prestige because it seems to align with the success of modern science: physics, chemistry, and biology have made extraordinary progress precisely by discovering and applying the mathematical laws that govern natural processes. The universe, it seems, is a law-governed place, and those laws are the governing principles we have been looking for. Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris takes this answer seriously as the most sophisticated secular position available, and his critique of it is correspondingly more careful and more philosophically deep than his critique of the bare appeal to chance.
To evaluate whether natural laws can serve as the ultimate governing principle of the universe, we must first be clear about what natural laws actually are. This is a question that philosophers of science have debated extensively, and the answer is less obvious than it might appear.
In the most deflationary, scientifically cautious account, natural laws are regularities: observed patterns in the behavior of physical systems that have been generalized and expressed mathematically. The law of universal gravitation, on this account, is the observed regularity that massive bodies attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The regularity is real; the mathematical formulation is our representation of it; but the “law” is not an entity that exists in addition to the physical things whose behavior it describes.
On a more robust account — often called the nomic necessitarian view — natural laws are genuine features of reality that govern the behavior of physical things. The gravitational law does not merely describe a regularity; it determines that massive bodies must attract each other with that force. On this view, laws have a kind of necessity built into them: they cannot be violated, not merely because they happen not to be violated but because physical reality is constituted in such a way that violation is impossible.
Both accounts face philosophical difficulties. The deflationary account struggles to explain why regularities are regular — why the same patterns persist across different times, places, and circumstances. The necessitarian account faces the problem of explaining what kind of thing a law is that can “goverr” or “force” physical systems to behave in particular ways: abstract mathematical structures do not obviously have the kind of causal efficacy that would allow them to necessitate physical events.
Whatever their ultimate metaphysical status, natural laws provide genuine explanatory power within a defined domain. Given that the laws of physics are as they are, and given specific initial conditions, those laws allow us to predict and retrodict a vast range of physical phenomena with extraordinary accuracy. Newtonian mechanics predicts the trajectories of projectiles, the motions of planets, and the behavior of fluids. Quantum mechanics predicts the spectral lines of atoms, the behavior of semiconductors, and the stability of chemical bonds. General relativity predicts the bending of light around massive bodies, the precession of Mercury’s orbit, and the properties of black holes. This is genuine, impressive, scientifically earned explanatory success.
The success of scientific explanation via natural laws has led to a kind of extrapolation: if natural laws explain so much within the universe, perhaps they can explain everything, including the universe itself. This is the thought that underlies the claim that natural laws govern the universe in the ultimate sense. Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris’s response is to examine this extrapolation carefully and to identify precisely where it breaks down.
Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris identifies three distinct explanatory gaps that natural laws, by their nature, cannot close. Each gap corresponds to a different level of the question of what governs the universe.
First: Why are there any laws at all? The existence of natural laws is itself a feature of the universe that requires explanation. A universe with no governing laws at all — a universe of pure chaos with no regularities of any kind — is at least conceivable, even if it is hard to imagine in detail. The fact that our universe is governed by precise mathematical laws rather than being completely chaotic is a feature of our universe that demands explanation. But this feature cannot be explained by those same laws, since the laws are what needs to be explained. Any appeal to natural laws as an ultimate explanation of the universe assumes rather than explains the existence of the laws themselves.
Second: Why these laws rather than others? Even if we grant that there must be some laws, the question of why the particular laws that govern our universe exist rather than some other possible set of laws is not answered by those laws. The laws of physics in our universe could, in principle, have been different — they could have involved different force strengths, different symmetries, different dimensionality of space. The fact that they are precisely what they are, with the values of the physical constants discussed in the previous chapter, is a contingent feature of our universe that points beyond itself for explanation. The laws cannot explain their own particularity.
Third: How do laws cause anything? This is perhaps the deepest of the three gaps, and the one that is most frequently overlooked. Laws, as mathematical structures, are abstract objects — they describe relationships and regularities, but they do not obviously do anything. The equation F = Gm₁m₂/r² is a mathematical expression. How does a mathematical expression cause anything to happen? How does it make massive bodies attract each other? The usual scientific answer is that the law is a description of how massive bodies behave, not a cause of their behavior; but then the question is why they behave this way, and the law cannot answer that question because the law just is the description of how they behave. There is a troubling circularity here: the law explains behavior by describing it, but describing behavior is not the same as causing it or explaining why it is as it is rather than otherwise.
The most dramatic and widely discussed version of the claim that natural laws can explain the universe’s existence is Stephen Hawking’s proposal in The Grand Design (2010), co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow. Hawking and Mlodinow argue that the laws of gravity and quantum mechanics are sufficient to explain the spontaneous creation of the universe from nothing, without invoking any cause beyond physics. Their formulation: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”
Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris’s framework directly anticipates this kind of claim and provides a clear philosophical response. Hawking’s argument makes at least two serious conceptual errors. The first is the misuse of the word “nothing.” Quantum vacuum fluctuations — the physical process Hawking invokes as the mechanism of spontaneous creation — do not occur in literal nothing. They occur in a quantum vacuum, which is a specific physical state with definite properties: it obeys the laws of quantum field theory, it has energy, it has a specific metric structure, and it is embedded in spacetime. This is not nothing in any philosophically meaningful sense; it is a very specific something. The philosopher David Albert, reviewing The Grand Design in the New York Times, made this point precisely: Hawking’s “nothing” is a “relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum state,” which is “some particular arrangement of elementary physical stuff.” Explaining why this arrangement exists and how it generates universes does not explain why there is something rather than nothing.
The second error is that Hawking’s formulation implies that laws can act — that the law of gravity can “cause” the universe to come into existence. But laws are descriptions of how things that already exist behave; they are not agents that act upon things. The law of gravity cannot create a universe because there is nothing for it to act upon in the absence of a universe. To say that gravity creates the universe is to invoke a cause — gravity — that presupposes the existence of what it is supposed to explain.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz posed the fundamental question of metaphysics in its starkest form: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” This question is not answered by any amount of scientific progress, because science always begins with the existence of something — physical matter, mathematical laws, quantum fields, spacetime — and explains how that something gives rise to other somethings. Science is extraordinarily good at explaining phenomena in terms of more fundamental phenomena, but the chain of explanation always starts somewhere. It cannot explain its own starting point, because the tools of scientific explanation — laws, mechanisms, causal relations — all presuppose the existence of something that they operate upon.
This is not a failure of science; it is a recognition of the domain within which scientific explanation operates. Science studies the universe — the totality of physical things and processes. It cannot explain why there is a universe, because this question asks about something outside the domain of science. As the philosopher of science Mary-Jane Rubenstein puts it, science is very good at answering “how” questions but structurally unable to answer “why” questions at the most fundamental level. Why is there a universe at all? Why do the laws of physics have the character they do? Why do mathematical structures govern physical reality? These are questions that Leibniz’s formulation makes vivid, and they are questions that natural laws, taken as ultimate governing principles, cannot answer in principle.
There is a further problem that Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris finds particularly significant: the mysterious intelligibility of the universe. Physics has been remarkably successful, and this success depends on the fact that the universe is governed by mathematical laws of extraordinary elegance and precision. Physicists have repeatedly discovered that the mathematical structures best suited to describing physical reality are precisely those that mathematicians had developed, in some cases centuries earlier, on purely aesthetic and logical grounds, without any physical motivation. Non-Euclidean geometry was developed as a mathematical curiosity in the nineteenth century and turned out to be exactly what Einstein needed for general relativity. The abstract mathematical theory of Lie groups, developed for purely mathematical reasons, turned out to be the exact framework for understanding particle physics symmetries.
The physicist Eugene Wigner called this “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” — the mysterious fact that abstract mathematical structures, developed by human minds with no practical motivation, turn out to correspond exactly to the deep structure of physical reality. On the hypothesis that the universe is governed by impersonal natural laws with no connection to any mind, this correspondence is deeply puzzling. Why should abstract mathematical structures that human minds find beautiful and elegant correspond to the actual structure of physical reality? There is no obvious reason within the impersonal-laws framework why this should be true.
On the Islamic account, the explanation is clear: the universe was created by a rational Being — Allah — who is the source of both mathematical truth and physical reality. Human minds can discover the mathematical structure of the universe because human minds were created by the same Being who created the universe, and He endowed us with the rational capacities needed to understand His creation. The correspondence between mathematics and physics is not a mystery but a consequence of the unity of the Creator.
Scientific explanation works by explaining phenomena in terms of more fundamental laws and mechanisms. Newtonian mechanics explained Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. General relativity explained Newtonian gravity as a limiting case of spacetime curvature. Quantum field theory unified quantum mechanics with special relativity. The ongoing project of theoretical physics — string theory, loop quantum gravity, and other approaches — aims to unify general relativity with quantum mechanics at an even more fundamental level.
This process of finding more fundamental explanations is genuinely progressive. But it faces a structural problem: the chain of more-fundamental-laws terminates somewhere. Either it terminates in a set of fundamental laws that are simply brute facts — they are as they are, and there is no deeper explanation — or it terminates in something outside the domain of physics entirely. The first option accepts that the ultimate governing principles of the universe are unexplained and inexplicable; they simply are. The second option is the direction in which Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris argues the evidence points: a cause outside the physical universe, whose existence and character explain why the universe has the laws it does.
The appeal to natural laws as the governing principle of the universe is, in the end, philosophically incomplete. It explains phenomena within the universe admirably well. But it cannot explain why there are laws, why these laws, or how abstract mathematical structures govern physical events. These questions are the ones that theistic explanations are designed to answer, and they are questions that an honest philosophical inquiry cannot avoid.