Laws of Nature and the Divine Order of Things

Abstract

This chapter examines the different ways in which Descartes and Newton balance their claim that laws of nature are true of the natural world with their commitment to our human inability to fully comprehend God’s creation of nature. For both Descartes and Newton, there is a qualified notion of truth at play. Descartes’s laws of nature are true insofar as they capture God’s maintenance of nature only so far as we can understand. Nonetheless, they are afforded the highest degree of certainty and necessity that we can attain. Newton’s laws of motion are true insofar as they accurately describe the motions we witness in the sensible world. However, this truth is not based on mere inductive certainty; this chapter argues it is a truth that is characterized by rational certainty and thus closer to Descartes’s notion than we might expect from Newton’s ‘empirical’ method.

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