Natural Laws

When you look at the world and space around it, you are not seeing the result of natural laws.  The natural laws, such as the law of gravity, do not explain the origin of the universe.  When one football player flies out of bounds after a collision with another, a natural law did not cause that.  The second player caused the first one to move out of bounds.  You could say that a defender forced him out.  Natural laws didn’t bring about the event.

Force, as one player forcing another out of bounds, expresses Newton’s second law of motion, which says:

The acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied.

Something applies force and it isn’t a law itself that does it.  Newton’s law, a natural law, explains the force, but it isn’t what sent the offensive out of bounds.  Someone pushed him.  The law explaining the momentum that carried a football out of bounds didn’t make him quickly and explosively leave the playing field.

Category Error

Before nature existed, the laws of nature did not exist.  Laws explain how nature operates, not what caused it to get here.  In his 2010 book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking wrote that the universe can and will create itself from nothing because of the existence of laws like gravity.  He said:

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.

In an accurate way, people call this mistake, a “category error.”  It is my normal practice to attempt to give someone the benefit of the doubt.  According to 1 Corinthians 13:7, this is ‘hoping all things.’  However, it is very hard to believe that these men really do think that the universe arose from laws that depend on an already existent universe.  Space and matter precede natural laws.  No one should believe or advocate for this deluded concept declared by Stephen Hawking.  It is so bad, this idea that laws actually do things, that it really should be a laughing-stock.

God the Cause for Everything

Every year, people fall from high elevation and die from hitting the ground below.  The news does not report that the law of gravity caused their death.  Again, there is a law of gravity, but the law itself doesn’t cause anything.

God both caused and sustains space, matter, and energy.  The laws that explain their function themselves proceed from His intelligence and design.  Assigning their cause to laws is just a futile attempt to eliminate God and man’s accountability and obligation to Him.