Why God created the laws of physics

[Flopfoot]

Why did God create the laws of physics?

Hawking argued that if God created the world, there’s no reason that God couldn’t run the world. He could change the laws of physics each day or even personally decide what should happen each time two things interacted. This made Hawking suspect that there might not be a God and that the initial state (“creation”) of the world also depended on simple rules.

If God ran the world like this, it’d be like a TV show. What you see on the screen is whatever the director decided you should see at that moment, rather than depending on pre-existing rules.

However, God wanted humans to have free will. What would be the point of having free will if the rest of the world was choreographed? You wouldn’t be able to interact with it.

Would you even be able to control your own body? Your brain could tell your legs to walk, but once the nerve signal left your brain, God would get to decide what happened next.

Creating a consistent set of rules means that humans can predict what outcomes their choices will have. If the laws of physics are the same every day, you can’t throw a spear at someone and then say that you didn’t know it would kill him.

There are also other reasons why God might have wanted to create laws of physics, like he knew we would enjoy trying to figure them out, or because a world that runs on simple rules is more beautiful than an arbitrary one.

 

[TheOldColonel]

God is the God of truth. Therefore, it makes sense that his creation does not contradict itself. It is not a system of chaos. God’s truth is reflected in the order and regularity apparent of his handiworks. These observations lend themselves to the concept of laws arising from observable predictability.

 

[Crocus]

God put order to the chaos, and made gravity so I wouldn’t fall off the earth, and some other physics rule (bang explosion?) so the stars wouldn’t fall back on me. And His plan was good.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Far be it from a simple lad like me to question Hawking, but it seems to me he is oversimplifying the issue; perhaps to lead him to a desired result. He allows there to be only two possibilities; First, that God set immutable laws of physics in motion at the beginning. Second, that the laws are not immutable and he can change them (and perhaps does) to suit Him.

But perhaps it’s more complicated than that. Possibly God, for His own reasons, chooses to act as regards this particular universe, according to a certain set rules of physics, some of which we know and understand and some of which we either don’t even know or do know but don’t understand.

So, for example, it’s entirely possible that God, acting solely through the laws he set up, to have all actions of the physical earth coincide in such a way that, e.g., the Red Sea parts at a particular moment in time.

In other words, perhaps God, for His own reasons, decrees all things from all eternity in the most minute detail, and all to accomplish certain things at certain times. Possibly those confluences only SEEM to us to be interventions that are a “change of plan”.

Maybe nothing is a “change of plan” even when it most seems so.

To me, that God is far greater than either of Hawking’s gods.

 

[MPat]

If God ran the world like this, it’d be like a TV show. What you see on the screen is whatever the director decided you should see at that moment, rather than depending on pre-existing rules.

Actually, as writer Michael Flynn noted in a comment on Edward Feser’s blog (Edward Feser: Divine causality and human freedom), that would be a description of a bad TV show, bad story.

When something in a story happens only because the author chose to write so, when there is no “in-universe” reason for something, we call that a “plot hole” and say that’s bad writing.

Another commenter recommended Dorothy Sayers’s “Mind of the Maker” as discussing analogies between creation of stories and creation of this universe in more detail.

 

[Theo520]

Why did God create the laws of physics?

God didn’t create the laws of physics, all such laws are created by man to try describe what we discover, and we know most such laws are useful but ultimately proven incorrect/imprecise as we continue to discover more.

 

[ericc]

Why did God create the laws of physics?

God created the world. Natural laws are man’s attempts to understand how God did it. After man understood a tiny bit, he thought he knew enough to exclude God out of his equations.

because a world that runs on simple rules is more beautiful than an arbitrary one.

An arbitrary world results in insanity. Imagine in one instance stuff behaves in a certain way and the next, a totally different way. Imagine a knife that cuts butter easily and the next instance turns jellolike. A car that drives properly in one sec and in a wink, behaves erratically the next. Imagine fire that behaves like non-fire arbitrarily, or water that does not behave like water all the time. We would all be stuck in the stone age, perhaps there won’t even be an age. If water doesn’t behave like water , there is no life.

 

[AIPM1615]

Why did God create the laws of physics?

Let’s start out by recognizing what a “law of nature” is. Take gravity, for instance. The law of gravity is not a “thing” that’s “out there” that cannot be contradicted, akin to some platonic form. It’s not like a rule in mathematics or logic. Rather, it is a phrase that we give to describe a regularity observed in nature–in this case, for more massive objects to draw in those with less. The word “law” itself is analogous. Laws of nature are not akin to, say, the laws of the United States.

Hawking argued that if God created the world, there’s no reason that God couldn’t run the world.

In other words, “If I was running the show like God, I would do things differently.” Makes me think of when Richard Dawkins said the world appears “just as we would expect from something that is uncaused, random, without any purpose or meaning or value.” Ummm, no. That’s just your imagination at work…

He could change the laws of physics each day or even personally decide what should happen each time two things interacted.

That’s what we might call a miracle. God doesn’t change the regularities of the universe when he makes exceptions to the rules, though. There’s no need to.

For example, when Lazarus was brought back from the dead, Jesus was under no obligation to redefine the laws of the universe such that every dead creature would simultaneously rise as well. See what I’m getting at?

–

So why are there regularities in the universe? To realize God’s will in creation. If there was no gravity, and matter was simply floating around in space to no end, there would be no giving rise to life. Of course, we wouldn’t have matter ‘just floating around’ in this possible world… since without laws there would be nothing holding together the universe at the quantum level, much less the macro level. It would be unrestrained chaos.

MPat spoke well to bring Dr. Feser into the discussion. He recently posted a great argument for divine causality and free will. In other words, the question which he address is, “How can we be free if God is running the show?” Obviously, Flopfoot, none of the points regarding free will are even relevant in a disorderly universe that lacks laws of nature.

Your topic goes well with Aquinas’ teleological argument for God’s existence. It’s often misrepresented as being a primitive version of Paley’s “watchmaker” argument and the modern “intelligent design” movement, but that totally misses the point he’s making. It’s not a question of “What are the chances a mitochondria/human eye/some other complex feature of the world would form by itself without a designer?” But rather, “Why are there laws/regularities that allow things to act towards a final goal at all?” It’s a totally different type of question. This is addressed at great length in the Summa Theologiae, and I think you may benefit from reading it!

–

It’s early in the morning and I hope I made a bit of sense there. Time for some more coffee.

Pax Christi!

 

[Curious11]

Hawking could have been wrong. Creating something does not mean you can control it later. He argued that the fact that God didn’t seem to interact with the world is proof he doesn’t exist, but that is also compatible with a weak or evil God.

We just don’t know, so be open-minded