It would also be necessary to explain where the laws exist, and what they do. A law, in itself, is a mathematical abstraction, and maths doesn’t cause anything. Why do these abstractions reflect reality, and not some others?
Brute facts are not explanations - but laws are not even brute facts, but descriptions.
I don’t need one.
What action could God take that you would not consider good?
And that can be done on a case by case basis. I don’t think it is worth both of our time for me to list every natural law in this thread. For example, water doesn’t flow in a random direction, but in a downhill direction. This is due to the natural law of gravity. Therefore, chance doesn’t have to explain the direction that water flows.
…that you should need to ask that.
You’re not the slightest bit intellectually curious about why they exist?
The problem of evil/suffering is genuine challenge to the nature of God. My understanding/explanation for it is as below -
The only greater evil would be to no grant free will to Sentient beings and make them slaves to Gods whims without any ability to choose what they want.
2a. Suffering as consequence of the fall - This is a subsection of point 2. Adams actions effected all humanity and caused us to become corrupt, preferring sinful and evil choices over good ones. This leads to a separation from God for the entire human race and we miss out on Gods grace.
The fullness of this grace is seen in the actions of Jesus during his incarnation in how he healed diseases and provided for those in need.
Suffering/ Challenges as a means of Growth and personal development -
Some amount of challenges in life is required for us to grow in our capabilities/ maturity as human beings. Without the challenge of providing food for ourselves and dependents, of overcoming difficult weather/environments, diseases, etc; we would not be where we are as species. Its these challenges that cause us to bond in communities and live together and collaborate with each other.
Suffering/difficulties play an important role in our overall development as individuals living in communities.
The existence of a an ultimate destiny/destination for human beings -
I along with most Christians view life as a journey towards better things beyond this life. For example, if there is an afterlife which is eternal, then sufferings in this world are passing and have great value if they cause us to know God and come close to him.
For example, if a child dies suffering from a painful disease and enters an eternity in heaven; its not such a bad outcome.
what makes suffering so terrible to athiests is the overall purposelessness of life.
As for christians, our hope is not restricted to this life on earth alone… if it were, there would be no greater fools than us.
You haven’t demonstrated the existence of a law, but merely a repeated pattern of what material things do. You deduce intellectually, or else imbibe socially, that somewhere, somehow, some objective law exists behind the water to explain that behaviour, but nobody has ever seen or bottled such a law. Maybe that’s why the postmodernists are taking over the world with their idea that all reality is socially cosntructed - laws of nature, as such, certainly are, because other explanations would fit the phenomena.
As Eddie says, your lack of curiosity about why such laws came to exist is rather … curious. But my question was about what these apparently foundational entities called “laws” actually are, and how it is they get to govern the movement of water on hills. You don’t know how they came to exist, you can’t (as far as I can see) say exactly what they are, nor how they control material entities.
In Aristotelian terms, one could describe them as intrinsic properties of material entities, which at least makes them something less mystical. But then you still have no explanation for why all material entities across the universe act in the same ways.
Let me join the dots for you: there is no causal, rational material explanation for why “the laws” are as they are. Therefore there must be an a-causal explanation: which is only another word for Epicurean chance.
Once again, chance must have surprising organizing or creative powers - or else there is a rational God who explains both the lawlike and apparently random aspects of reality. The old dichotomy remains, and remains as ever a choice between faith in randomness, or faith in personhood.
Just a quick reminder that if your reality consists of laws of nature and randomness, this question is meaningless. How can chance and necessity constitute moral qualities?
On the other hand, the existence of God is necessary for the question to make sense: it then becomes the very different question of “Can God explain his actions?” But there’s nothing about personhood that mandates such an explanation being given to us.
Sure, but it isn’t necessary to show how they came about.
We give it meaning and morality as human beings.
So anything that God does is good by definition, no matter what it is?
Whether or not it is necessary depends on your aims. If the only thing that interests you about nature is prediction and control, then maybe you don’t need to know how they came about. But if you want a full, well-rounded understanding of nature, you have to address the question.
The aim in this topic was to address why we see order instead of chaos. The answer is that there are natural laws. We don’t need to know where those laws came from in order to understand why we see order instead of chaos.
Would it be nice to be omniscient? Sure, but you don’t need to know everything in order to know something.
Your meaning is meaningless.
This is tautological - laws are the patterns of order we see in nature. So it hardly gets us very far to say “We see order in nature because there is orderliness in nature.”
The point is rather that if there is no moral component to the ontological structure of things (ie, that there is a person behind it) then the concept of “good” is irrelevant to the matter. At best it makes the question purely subjective:
“There seems to me to be immorality in the way the universe runs.”
“So what? There seems to me not to be, as I attribute a different meaning and morality to it.”
It’s a species of pareidolia: the fact that you attribute a particular moral meaning to the Universe is as irrelevant as your seeing a face in the clouds - unless someone did actually put a face in the clouds.
It’s not meaningless to me.
Seems like giving a name to regular phenomenon/order in the universe and acting like you have explained them.
This is not an explanation for the order in the universe by a long shot… unless you care to explain what exactly a natural law is.
The implication made earlier in the thread is if there is chance, then everything has to be chance and must be explained by chance. This is obviously false as shown by the existence of natural laws.
Morality isn’t irrelevant to humans, even if morality is based on subjective human wants and needs. You seem to have confused subjective with meaningless and irrelevant. Those aren’t the same thing.
You’re meaningless, just a puff of smoke.
It’s unfortunate that you feel that way.
It’s not a feeling. It is the logically consistent conclusion of your thinking.