Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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KENOSIS

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rooted in a self-emptying principle of being intent

upon the emergence of what is truly and deeply

“other” than itself. A universe of emergent evolu-

tion is more or less what should be expected when

people begin reflecting on nature with a belief in

the kenotic nature of ultimate reality.

The seemingly aimless meandering of biologi-

cal evolution may be incompatible with a divine

designer, but not with a creative power that takes

the form of defenseless love. If the deity were

powerful only in the vulgar sense of having the ca-

pacity to overwhelm, then evolution might be the-

ologically troubling. But a divine power that man-

ifests itself in infinite self-giving love does not

manipulate that which it enfolds. According to ad-

vocates of a kenotic theology, therefore, the un-

qualified religious claim that God is primarily a

“designer” would be quite problematic. A design-

ing deity could not permit the world any real in-

dependence. A kenotic understanding of divine

creation, on the other hand, would allow that life

and eventually mind may blossom indeterminately,

and over a long period of time, in a universe that

is in some sense self-creative from the outset. A

kenotic deity would be the ultimate source of the

possibilities for novel patterning made available to

an evolving cosmos, but in such a way as to allow

for a great measure of spontaneity in the evolution

of life, mind, and freedom.

See also CHRISTOLOGY; EVOLUTION, THEOLOGY OF;

HITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH

Bibliography

Balthasar, Hans Urs Von. Mysterium Paschale, trans. Aidan

Nichols. Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1990.

Hallmann, Joseph M. The Descent of God: Divine Suffering

in History and Theology. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress

Press, 1991.

Haught, John F. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolu-

tion. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000.

John Paul II. Encyclical Letter Fides Et Ratio (September

14, 1998). Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic

Conference, 1998.

Jüngel, Eberhard. The doctrine of the Trinity: God’s being

is in becoming, trans. Horton Harris. Grand Rapids,

Mich.: Eerdmans, 1976.

Macquarrie, John. The Humility of God. Philadelphia, Pa.:

Westminster Press, 1978.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson

and John Bowden. New York: Harper, 1974.

Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl.

San Francisco: Harper, 1985.

Murphy, Nancey, and Ellis, George F. R. On the Moral Na-

ture of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics.

Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1996.

Polkinghorne, John, ed. The Work of Love. Grand Rapids,

Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001.

Richard, Lucien J. Christ: The Self-Emptying of God. New

York: Paulist Press, 1997.

JOHN HAUGHT

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LAMARCKISM

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck

was born in Picardy, France, on August 1, 1744. He

received a Jesuit education at Amiens and briefly

pursued a military career before turning to science.

Lamarck’s interests ranged widely from natural his-

tory to meteorology, and with the reorganization of

the Jardin du Roi into the Muséum d’Histoire Na-

turelle in 1793, he was appointed to the professor-

ship of invertebrates. Lamarck’s central concern,

reflecting his Enlightenment values, was to present

a thoroughly naturalistic and developmental ac-

count of all aspects of the natural world. His de-

velopmental geology followed uniformitarian prin-

ciples, and his deism rendered irrelevant the

optimism of natural theology and dissolved the dis-

tinction between humans and other animals.

Lamarck believed that “life” is a force imposed on

the universe by the creator, but he rejected any

idea of a plan for the development of species. His

early interest in botanical classification led to his

conversion to a transformationist position after

1800, allowing him to explain a wide range of bio-

logical phenomena in one coherent system.

Lamarck died in relative obscurity on December

18, 1829. His most influential works were his Hy-

drogéologie (1802), Recherches sur l’organisation

des corps vivants (1802), Philosophie zoologique

(1809), and Histoire naturelle des animaux sans

vertèbres (1815–1822).

Although Lamarck himself founded no school

of thought, his ideas became a standard point of

reference and controversy during the century that

followed. His failure to develop a convincing the-

ory of the transmutation of species—in an era in-

creasingly favorable to biological mutability—can

be traced to his inability to articulate a credible

mechanism for such change. He rejected the idea of

species extinction, and evolution through the natu-

ral selective pressures never occurred to him.

Lamarck’s own theory about the transmission of ac-

quired traits from parents to offspring lacked em-

pirical support, and he seems not to have appreci-

ated the significance of biogeography or the fossil

record offered by paleontology for developing a

complete evolutionary account of life. His posthu-

mous reputation suffered substantially from the

campaign of Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) against

the insufficiencies of his theory of the inheritance of

acquired characteristics. Nevertheless, Lamarck

played a seminal role in broaching the basic idea of

species change and in supporting it with a justifica-

tion that rivaled natural selection in plausibility until

the integration of Mendelian genetics with the the-

ory of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) after 1900.

Neo-Lamarckism was a late-nineteenth-century

movement with variants in France, Britain, and

North America. Following the publication Darwin’s

Origin of Species (1859), naturalists who were

skeptical of Darwin’s insistence on natural selec-

tion drew upon Lamarck’s theory to elaborate an

evolutionary science of life driven by an alternate

mechanism. In France his main ideas were pre-

served through the efforts of his colleague Etienne

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), and elaborated

a generation later by biologists such as Alfred

Giard (1846–1908). The neo-Lamarckian school

in the United States was led by paleontologist

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Edward Cope (1840–1897) and other scientists

who combined diligent fieldwork with a distinctive

theistic metaphysic. Their journal The American

Naturalist called for a new natural theology built

upon perceived evidence of divine purpose in the

environmental adaptation of organisms. In con-

trast, the French neo-Lamarckian school was secu-

lar in flavor, rejecting any intent of discovering

divine purpose in nature, illustrating how neo-

Lamarckism as a scientific theory was compatible

with a wide variety of conflicting theological and

metaphysical interpretations.

See also DARWIN, CHARLES; EVOLUTION; NEO-

ARWINISM

Bibliography

Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berke-

ley: University of California Press, 1984.

Bowler, Peter J. “Lamarckism.” In Keywords in Evolutionary

Biology, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Burkhardt, Richard W. The Spirit of System: Lamarck and

Evolutionary Biology (1977). Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

vard University Press, 1995.

Corsi, Pietro. The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories

in France, 1790–1830. Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1988.

Jordanova, L. K. Lamarck. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1984.

Moore, James R. The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A

Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with

Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Persell, Stuart M. Neo-Lamarckism and the Evolution Con-

troversy in France, 1870–1920. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin

Mellen Press, 1999.

PETER M. J. HESS

LANGUAGE

Human mental life includes biologically unprece-

dented ways of experiencing and understanding

the world, from aesthetic experience to spiritual

contemplation. Nevertheless, the origins of many of

the most distinctive human mental attributes are

likely intertwined with the origins of language. Lan-

guage is without doubt the most distinctive human

adaptation. There is almost no realm of human cog-

nition unaffected by it. Yet there is still debate over

even the most basic aspects of its nature, including

the degree to which linguistic competence can be

coaxed from other species (e.g., apes, dolphins,

and parrots); what the neural basis for this distinc-

tive capacity is; and when exactly in human ances-

try this capacity emerged and matured to its mod-

ern level. There is little doubt that some substantial

role is played by distinctive aspects of human biol-

ogy. Both the special adaptations for language and

language itself have played important roles in the

origins of human moral and spiritual capacities.

The evolution of language ability in humans

The relative contributions of biological versus cul-

tural aspects of language cognition depend on its

evolutionary antiquity. If languages have a shallow

prehistory (less than one hundred thousand years),

we can expect little correlated biological restruc-

turing of cognition as a result, except insofar as re-

quired to get this capacity off the ground. In this

case, most of its influence will be traced through

cultural processes. If languages have a deep pre-

history (on the order of a million years), however,

then we can expect that human cognitive and

emotional systems have been substantially shaped

by its ubiquitous presence in all aspects of human

social life. This also should correlate with the ex-

tent to which human ethical and spiritual senti-

ments have become a part of human nature, as

opposed to mere cultural overlays on ape nature.

Assessing the origins of these abilities is com-

plicated by the fact that no direct consequences of

language use are preserved in the fossil record. Pa-

leolithic archeological evidence for symbolic ex-

pression that may signal well-developed linguistic

and spiritual activities is well known from European

cave paintings and carvings and Australian rock

paintings, and from evidence of intentional burials

(possibly including Neanderthal burials, as well as

the burials of anatomically modern humans).

Though the creation of icons and burial of the dead

are not guarantees of shamanistic or religiouslike

activities, they do suggest the existence of sophisti-

cated symbolic reasoning, and this is a crucial cor-

relation. The first sculpted and pictorial forms can

be dated to no earlier than about sixty thousand

years ago, and the most well known date to within

thirty thousand years ago. This is quite recent, con-

sidering that hominids have been on a separate

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evolutionary track from other African apes for at

least five million years, that members of species

similar enough to be included in the genus Homo

have been around for 1.8 million years, and that the

human species Homo sapiens is at least two hun-

dred thousand years old. In general, these earliest

samples of expressive symbolism must be under-

stood not as evidence for the initial evolution of

symbolic abilities but rather for their first expression

in durable media. They likely had long been incor-

porated into conventionalized social activities by

that time. The origins of the symbolic traditions that

these works express in material form could easily

anticipate this data by an order of magnitude.

To get some idea of the possible extremes of

this range of possible dates consider the following.

The earliest direct archeological evidence of lan-

guage is, of course, in the form of early forms of

writing, which are all less than ten thousand years

old, and most considerably more recent (about five

thousand years ago). Since not even the most rad-

ical theorists among archeologists and paleontolo-

gists would date the appearance of modern lan-

guages more recently than about fifty thousand

years ago, this late externalization of language of-

fers a curious challenge: Why did it take so long

for this most important means of communication to

exhibit direct external expression? The same ques-

tion can be asked of the first evidence of pictorial

and carved forms, which date back about sixty

thousand years in Europe and Australia and possi-

bly earlier in Africa (though this African evidence is

currently less well known). Assuming some com-

parable difficulties in externalizing these different

modes of symbolic expression, we might suggest

that, most conservatively, the corresponding dis-

tinctively human symbolic communication must be

at least ten times as old; that is, 5,000 to 50,000

years for modern language, and 50,000 to 500,000

years for some form of language.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is a se-

ries of apparently linked paleontological transitions

evident between 1.6 and 2.4 million years ago in

Africa that suggest that the beginnings of symbolic

communications in some form may date to this fos-

sil epoch. The first clear evidence for the regular

production of stone choppers, at a site called Gona,

can be dated to about 2.4 million years ago. These

are associated with fossil species of the genus Aus-

tralopithecus (possibly A. garhi). Australopithecines

exhibited ape-sized brains, relatively large jaws

with heavy dentition (evidence of a vegetarian di-

etary adaptation), relatively modern bipedal loco-

motion, and also a characteristic sexual dimorphism

(males much larger on average than females),

which is indicative of male competition over fe-

males in a polygynous mating system that is fairly

typical of monkeys and great apes. By 1.8 million

years ago a number of fossil sites begin to demon-

strate hominid species with larger brains and re-

duced dentition, correlated with extensive stone

tool assemblages. These features have prompted

paleontologists to cite this as the point where our

genus, Homo, begins. By 1.6 million years ago

members of our genus, with brains beginning to

cross into the low end of the modern range, had

left Africa to spread into Asia, Southeast Asia, and

possibly throughout more temperate Asian regions

as well, taking with them more sophisticated tools.

Given these unprecedented features, there can be

little doubt that some significant changes in com-

munication and cognition also are contemporane-

ous with these transitions—the first forms of crude

symbolic communication—though it is likely that

the evolution of modern forms of linguistic com-

munication took much longer to develop.

If symbolic communication has been around in

some form for as much as two million years then

we can expect it to have had significant conse-

quences not just for human culture but also for

human brain function. The evolutionary biological

effect of a behavioral adaptation such as this may

be usefully compared to that of dam building in

North American beavers. The evolution of this abil-

ity has changed the niche in which beavers mature

and live, and this has changed the natural selection

forces affecting beaver physiology and behavioral

propensities in succeeding generations. Thus,

beavers exhibit extensive aquatic adaptations as a

feed-forward result of beaver behaviors. This evo-

lutionary process has been called niche construc-

tion. The effects of human symbolic communica-

tion and culture can also be understood as a form

of niche construction, though symbolic culture is

in many ways a far more all-encompassing niche

than a beaver pond. This niche likely favored the

evolution of certain cognitive capacities and social

predispositions relevant to symbolic learning and

communication, but also, as in the case of beavers,

there may be many special features of this artificial

niche that are idiosyncratic to it. Thus, there is

good reason to expect that human brains have

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been reorganized in response to language, a reor-

ganization that included changes affecting emo-

tional, social, and communicative tendencies, as

well as mnemonic, attentional, and motor capaci-

ties supportive of symbolic communication.

Anatomical hints of this effect are evident in the

changes in regional brain proportions (e.g., dis-

proportionately expanded prefrontal cortex), corti-

cal vocal control (unprecedented among mam-

mals), and lowered laryngeal position. Hints from

behavior are even more extensive. These include

the convergent contributions of many systems to

this capacity, its robustness in the face of variations

in learning conditions and the effects of early brain

damage, its highly predictable developmental pro-

gression, the remarkable universality of many of

the structural features of languages, and its un-

precedented efficiency. These effects need to be

understood also with respect to the complex cul-

tural dynamic of language change, which itself is a

kind of quasi-evolutionary process. The ways dif-

ferent languages carve up the meaning and refer-

ence “space” and the syntactic systems that organ-

ize linguistic expression clearly change and evolve

over historical time, and probably with respect to

these biological predispositions and abilities as

background.

Consequences of language ability for

religious and spiritual development

The consequences of this unprecedented evolu-

tionary transition for human religious and spiritual

development must be understood on many levels

as well. There are reasons to believe that the way

language refers to things—symbolic reference—

provides the crucial catalyst that initiated the tran-

sition from species with no inkling of meaning in

life to a species where questions of ultimate mean-

ing have become core organizers of culture and

consciousness. Symbolic reference is reference to

things and ideas that is mediated by an intervening

system of symbol-symbol relationships, as well as

conventions of use that allow there to be consid-

erable conceptual “distance” between a sign vehi-

cle and its object of reference. Unlike icons, which

refer by means of structural similarities between a

sign vehicle and its object, or indices, which refer

via their physical contiguity or invariant causal cor-

relation with their object, this conceptual “dis-

tance” is an intermediate referential step that al-

lows the form of symbols to be entirely

independent of the objects to which they refer.

Symbolic reference is thus both arbitrary and ca-

pable of providing considerable displacement and

abstraction. Displacement refers to the capacity to

refer to things distant in space or time, and ab-

straction refers to the ability to represent only the

more spare and skeletal features of things, includ-

ing their logical features, such as whether they are

even ontologically existent. So it is with the evolu-

tion of this symbolic capacity that it first becomes

possible to represent the possible future, the im-

possible past, the act that should or shouldn’t take

place, the experience that is unimaginable even

though representable. These capacities are ubiqui-

tous for humans and largely taken for granted

when it comes to spiritual and ethical realms, but

this is precisely where crucial differences in ability

mark the boundary that distinguishes humans from

other species.

Consider the ethical dimension of humanness.

Though the family cat may gleefully torment a

small animal causing its terrifying and painful

death, few among us would consider this a moral

issue concerning the cat, though whether to inter-

vene may be a moral dilemma for us. Even when

a large predator, say dog or bear, happens to maul

and kill a human being, efforts to destroy the ani-

mal are not accompanied by moral outrage, just a

desire to prevent further harm. But the situation is

very different in cases where humans perform sim-

ilar actions. It is not merely that we consider non-

human predators to be guiltless because it is in

their nature to kill. We hold them guiltless because

we believe they lack a critical conception of the

consequences of their actions on their victim’s ex-

perience. This ability to anticipate and to some ex-

tent imagine the experience of another are critical

ingredients in this moral judgment.

This does not mean that other creatures are

merely selfish robots. Selfless behaviors of a sort

are not at all uncommon in other species. Care-

giving behaviors by parents are nearly ubiquitous

in birds and mammals, and what we might call

prosocial emotional responses and predispositions

that cause individuals to behave in ways conducive

to social solidarity are especially widespread

among social mammals. However, there need be

little or no role played by intersubjective consider-

ations in the generation of these emotions and

their associated care-giving, protective, and com-

forting behaviors. And if that is so, then it may not

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be appropriate to consider these as moral or ethi-

cal, even incipiently.

There is good reason to believe that the ca-

pacity to represent the intentions and experiences

of others is deeply dependent on human symbolic

capacity. This is because it is a difficult cognitive

task. It involves generating something like a simu-

lation of oneself in different circumstances (i.e.,

projected from another individual’s point of view),

and it must include the emotional experiences this

would invoke as well. This representation is per-

haps supported by recall of images from analo-

gous past experiences, juxtaposed against the im-

ages and emotions of current experience. But the

salience of direct experience, especially one’s cur-

rent emotional state, poses a difficult impediment

to simultaneously representing the perspective of

this other simulated emotional experience. Holding

such mutually contradictory representations in

mind at once is a difficult task, even when there is

little emotion involved, but it becomes deeply

challenging when the exclusive states are heavily

emotion-laden.

All such cognitive tasks depend critically on

the prefrontal lobes of the cerebral cortex. This

brain region is essential to any mental process that

requires holding the traces of alternative associa-

tions and behavioral options in mind to be com-

pared, so that one can act with respect to likely

consequences and not merely with respect to their

general reinforcement value or their stimulus

salience. Reduction of such stimulus drives allows

the most effective sampling of options. It is sug-

gested that the prefrontal lobes are disproportion-

ately enlarged in human brains as an evolutionary

adaptation to the demands imposed by symbol

learning and use. The indirectness of symbolic ref-

erence demands a shift of attention away from im-

mediately associated features and to the relational

logic behind the symbols, which binds them into a

system. So this neuro-anatomical divergence from

the ancestral condition likely contributes to the ca-

pacity and perhaps even a predisposition to gen-

erate the “simulations” required for the representa-

tion of others’ experiences.

But it is the referential displacement provided

by symbols themselves that is probably critical to

reducing the differential in salience of competing

emotional state representations to make this men-

tal comparison possible. Studies with primates and

children have shown, for example, that failures to

make optimal choices when highly arousing stim-

uli (e.g., candy) are presented can be overcome by

substituting representations for the actual thing. By

a somewhat ironic logic, then, it may be the ca-

pacity to use representations to reduce the emo-

tional salience of particular experiences that has

enabled the development of intersubjective em-

pathic abilities.

Symbolic reference also provides a critical sup-

port for an additional element of ethical cognition:

the need to project forward the consequences of

different possible alternative actions. Projecting the

plausible physical consequences with respect to

one’s own needs and desires is difficult enough,

but simultaneously projecting the likely affect on

another’s experience is doubly complicated. This is

the mental equivalent of running simulations of the

effects of simulated actions on simulated emotions,

all in conflict with current experiences and emo-

tional states. As the numbers of potentially inter-

fering images and the intensities of the potentially

conflicting emotions increase, the importance of

symbolic support grows. For this reason, not only

do we recognize that young children have diffi-

culty performing anything beyond simple moral

assessments, but all cultures actively provide nar-

rative and ritual exemplars for guiding its members

in handling ethical matters. The symbolic traditions

that constitute cultures almost universally transmit

the expectation that one is responsible for consid-

ering experiential consequences for others before

acting—a moral imperative. Of course, it is also

this capacity for imagining the experiences of oth-

ers that makes possible the most heinous of human

acts, such as extortion and torture. The emergence

of good and evil are not, then, just mythically

linked. Both are implicit in the symbolic transfigu-

ration of emotional experience and the gift of in-

tersubjectivity that results.

Ultimately, humanness may be most clearly

marked by this transformation of the merely phys-

ical and physiological into the meaningful and im-

plicitly value-laden by virtue of symbolic reference.

Under the influence of the generalizing power of

symbols this experience of ethical significance can

be extended well beyond the social sphere, to rec-

ognize an ethical dimension implicit in all things.

This suggests a way to think about two additional

features that are characteristic of most spiritual tra-

ditions: the ubiquitous assignment of symbolic

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meaning, purpose, and value to things outside

human affairs (e.g., origins, places, natural phe-

nomena, and life and death itself), and the pre-

sumption that there is something like intentionality

or intelligence behind the way that things are and

the unfolding of worldly events.

Both of these nearly universal tendencies re-

flect a complex interaction between the cognitive

predispositions that have evolved to ease the ac-

quisition of symbolic communication and the im-

plicit power of symbols to alter conditions of life in

the world. Since a prerequisite to symbolic refer-

ence is the “discovery” of the logic of the system of

inter-symbolic relationships that supports any indi-

vidual symbolic reference, there are reasons to be-

lieve that the changes in prefrontal proportions

contributed not just an ability to sample these non-

overt relational features, but also a predisposition

to look for them. With symbols, what matters is not

surface details, but a hidden logic derived from the

complex topologies of semantic relationships that

constrain symbol use.

So the neuropsychological propensity to inces-

santly, spontaneously, and rapidly interpret sym-

bols should express itself quite generally as a pre-

disposition to look beyond surface correlations

among things to find some formal systematicity,

and thus meaning, behind them, even things that

derive from entirely nonhuman sources. Every-

thing is thus a potential symbol—trees, mountains,

star patterns, coincidental events—and if the sys-

tematicity and intentionality is not evident it may

mean merely that one has not yet discovered it.

Symbolic meaning is a function of consciousness

and symbols are produced to communicate. So if

the world is seen as full of potential symbols, it

must implicitly be part of some grand effort of

communication, and the product of mind. Whether

this projected subjectivity is experienced as differ-

ent personalities resident in hills, groves of trees,

or rivers, or as some single grand infinite mind, this

personification also taps into the intersubjective

drive that is also fostered by symbolic projection.

In summary, the role of symbolic communica-

tion, and especially language, in moral cognition is

ubiquitous. It has played a role in the evolution of

a brain more capable of the cognitive operations

required; it has provided critical tools for easing

the implicit cognitive strain of performing these

mental operations; and it has made it possible for

societies to evolve means for developing these

abilities (as well as opening the door for the hor-

rors of their abuse). Moreover, the capacity for

spiritual experience itself can be understood as an

emergent consequence of the symbolic transfigu-

ration of cognition and emotions. Human predis-

positions seem inevitably to project this ethical

perspective onto the whole world, embedding

human consciousness in vast webs of meaning,

value, and intersubjective possibilities.

See also SEMIOTICS

Bibliography

Deacon, Terrence. The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution

of Language and the Brain. New York: Norton, 1997.

Deacon, Terrence. “How I Gave Up the Ghost and

Learned to Love Evolution.” In When Worlds Con-

verge: What Science and Religion Tell Us about the

Story of the Universe and our Place in it, ed. Clifford

Matthews, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and Philp Hefner.

Chicago: Open Court, 2002.

Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and

the Meaning of Life. New York: Touchstone, 1995.

Katz, Leonard, ed. Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-

Disciplinary Perspectives. Thorverton, UK: Imprint

Academic, 2000.

Langer, Susanne. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. 2.

Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.

Wilson, David Sloan. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Reli-

gion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2002.

TERRENCE W. DEACON

LAWS OF NATURE

It is generally held that the search for laws is part

and parcel of natural science. Statements of the

laws of nature provide the most systematic and

unified account of phenomena; they are used to

make predictions, and they figure centrally in ex-

planation. But are the laws of nature real? Do they

belong to the world or do they rather reflect the

way people speak about it? Do they merely de-

scribe the facts and processes in nature or do they

govern them? In other words, do laws possess a

modal force, the force of nomological necessity,

not attaching to merely contingent facts? And if

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they do, how does one get a handle on this im-

portant distinction between laws and nonlawful ac-

cidental generalizations? These questions continue

to be widely debated and there is no generally ac-

cepted philosophical theory of the laws of nature.

It is also unclear whether any single theory could

do justice to the diverse kinds of laws used in dif-

ferent scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, bi-

ology, psychology, etc.). Finally, it is a matter of

controversy how the laws of various disciplines are

related to each other.

Do laws describe or prescribe? Some

historical background

The question of whether laws describe or pre-

scribe the course of nature has always been given

particular emphasis in the debates. Most historians

agree that the concept of scientific law as it is used

today did not become widely accepted until the

scientific revolution marking the birth of modern

science. The ancestors of this concept, however,

are old and include the ideas of social, legal, and

moral order, which themselves can be traced to

the notion of divine legislation. This notion is

clearly associated with the prescribing force vari-

ous laws (lex, regula) possess due to their origin in

God’s will—be they the natural laws of moral con-

duct or the laws of mechanics. The mathematician

and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), in

particular, explicitly related his law of inertia to the

sustaining power of God. Even as late as the En-

lightenment age, philosophers such as Mon-

tesquieu (1689–1755) attributed the order of na-

ture to the hand of God. But alongside this

divine-necessitation understanding, natural scien-

tists and philosophers as different as Roger Bacon

(c. 1220–1292) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)

advanced a quite different conception of law that

was free of theological connotations and had to do

with observable and measurable regularities in na-

ture. The view of laws as regularities capable of

being inductively inferred (or even “deduced,” as

Isaac Newton [1642–1727] thought) from phenom-

ena and then used in prediction and explanation

became firmly entrenched in the new science of

mechanics and in many other disciplines in the

decades following the scientific revolution. Such

regularities were widely interpreted as being de-

scriptive, not prescriptive. Rather than being

imposed on phenomena, they simply reflected

the way things are. This interpretation received

a stamp of approval in the empiricist tradition

and especially in the philosophy of David

Hume (1711–1776). In was, however, challenged

in twentieth-century philosophy, especially after

the demise of logical positivism, the rise of scien-

tific realism, and the revival of metaphysics.

A taxonomy of scientific laws

The sciences display a wide variety of laws. Some

laws are deterministic, the paradigm example

being the laws of Newtonian mechanics, which

prompted the astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace

(1749–1827) to invoke his famous image of a

demon capable of performing an arbitrary number

of calculations in a finite amount of time. If the

demon knew all the laws pertaining to the interac-

tion of matter particles and the exact configuration

of all the matter in the universe at a certain mo-

ment of time, he would be able to predict with ab-

solute accuracy the state of the entire world at any

future moment, as well as retrodict its past states.

Given the deterministic laws and initial conditions,

there is only one way for the phenomena and

processes to occur. Probabilistic or statistical laws,

in contrast, only attribute a certain probability to

such occurrences. The laws of statistical mechan-

ics, of Mendelian genetics, and of social and eco-

nomic development are in this category. Since

such laws are not the most fundamental laws of re-

ality, however, their probabilistic character may not

be irreducible. But if the currently dominant inter-

pretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then

indeterminism is a feature of even the most basic

laws of nature.

Laws pertaining to natural processes (deter-

ministic or not) and relating their earlier and later

stages (e.g., a putative chemical law to the effect

that putting together substances X and Y results in

an explosive reaction) are often referred to as

causal laws. The relationship between causal laws

and causation (in particular, whether the former

are constitutive of the latter) is a matter of dispute.

Far from all laws are causal, however. Some laws

assert a synchronic dependence among several

quantities (e.g., the ideal gas law relating pressure,

volume, and temperature). Still other laws state

that an entity of a certain kind has a certain prop-

erty (e.g., water’s boiling point is 100° C).

Finally, there are conservation laws (of matter,

momentum, energy, etc.), other basic principles

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such as relativistic and gauge invariance, and pro-

hibitions such as Pauli’s exclusion principle and

the principle ruling out superluminal signals. How

should they be classified? Are they on the same

footing with other laws? Or are they rather second-

order constraints on first-order laws? In any case,

they are of paramount importance. Thus the in-

variance of some physical quantities with respect

to coordinate and other kinds of transformation is

bound up with the concept of symmetry and has

been a powerful heuristic tool in the search for the

fundamental forces of nature.

This classification of various types of laws can

be extended in many directions. The diversity of

laws calls into question any attempt to provide

their universal form.

Philosophical theories of laws

Philosophical theories of laws are focused on the

ontological status of the latter. In many ways, the

ongoing debate about this status is a successor of

the older dispute between the descriptive and pre-

scriptive views of laws. It is hard to get rid of the

feeling that when water boils at 100° C (under nor-

mal atmospheric conditions), it does so not simply

as a matter of fact but out of necessity. Moreover,

if no samples of water were ever heated to 100° C,

it would still be true that, were an arbitrary water

sample so heated, it would boil. Advocates of ne-

cessitarian theories attribute this necessity to nature

and hold some facts about the world responsible

for the modal power inherent in natural laws.

Philosophers in the empiricist tradition, however,

have always thought otherwise. Instead of attribut-

ing nomological necessity to nature, they have at-

tempted to achieve the effect of this necessity by

working in rather barren metaphysical landscapes.

In spite of the sustained critique leveled against

this attitude beginning in the early 1960s, it re-

mains very influential, under the name of the reg-

ularity theory.

According to this theory, laws of nature are

nothing but universal truths of spatio-temporally

unlimited scope that can, in many cases, be ex-

pressed by quantified material conditionals in-

volving only qualitative and local predicates:

( x)(Px  Qx); for example, “All frogs are green,”

“All metals expand when heated,” “All electrons

have a unit electric charge.” Laws, in other words,

are cosmic regularities. On this view, being such a

regularity is necessary and sufficient for being a

law. What makes it a matter of law that water boils

at 100° C is the cosmic fact about the instantiation

of first-order properties—the fact that all actual

samples of water at 100° C found in the history of

the universe have boiled, are boiling, and will boil.

The manifestly Humean character of this concept

of lawhood made it one of the cornerstones of log-

ical positivism.

The regularity theory confronts many prob-

lems. First of all, being a cosmic regularity is nei-

ther necessary nor sufficient for being a law. Some

laws are probabilistic (e.g., those of quantum me-

chanics) and hence compatible with any actual de-

gree of correlation between the relevant P’s and

Q’s. There are also uninstantiated laws. For exam-

ple, Newton’s first law, which states that an object

will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a

straight line unless acted upon by a net external

force, probably has no instances at all. It is (ar-

guably) a genuine law of nature nonetheless. Thus

being a (cosmic) regularity is not necessary for

being a law.

It is also not sufficient for it. To use the

renowned example of the philosopher Karl Popper

(1902–1994), suppose every moa (an extinct

species of bird in New Zealand) that ever lived

died before age fifty as a result of some ubiquitous

disease, thus giving an instance of cosmic regular-

ity. There is, however, no law corresponding to

this regularity. Every moa could have lived longer

but, as a matter of fact, has not. The regularity in

question is merely accidental, not genuinely law-

ful. But the theory is incapable of distinguishing

these two cases.

This has prompted a modification in the regu-

larity account based on the notion of counterfac-

tual conditional. Genuine laws of nature, but not

accidental uniformities, can be said to support (that

is, imply) the relevant counterfactuals. Thus the

regularity from Popper’s example does not imply

“If something were a moa, it would have died be-

fore age fifty.” On the other hand, a genuine law

that moa have a certain number n of chromosomes

does imply the counterfactual “If something had

been a moa, it would have had n chromosomes.”

To be able to use this criterion, however, one

needs an independent account of truth conditions

for the relevant sort of counterfactuals, namely,

those that are not also counterlegals violating the

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laws of nature. But it is hard to see how one could

know which counterfactuals are true and which of

them are not counterlegals without already know-

ing what laws of nature there are.

It has been argued that laws, but not mere reg-

ularities, possess considerable explanatory power.

While this is true, it can hardly serve as a criterion

of lawhood. Something is not made into a law

when its statement becomes explanatorily power-

ful. It is powerful because it is already a statement

of law. A similar objection applies to the best ver-

sion of the regularity theory, which was anticipated

by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and Frank Ramsey

(1903–1930) and elaborated in the 1970s and 1980s

by David Lewis (1941–2001). According to Lewis, “a

contingent generalization is a law of nature if and

only if it appears as a theorem (or axiom) in each

of the true deductive systems that achieves the best

combination of simplicity and strength” (p. 73).

This account makes lawhood relative to merely

epistemic (hence subjective) standards of simplicity

and strength pulling in opposite directions.

These and other problems have led to the

emergence of necessitarian alternatives to the reg-

ularity theory. One such alternative, widely known

as the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong theory, takes

laws to be grounded in relations between univer-

sals. A lawful regularity, such as the fact that all

metals are electric conductors, obtains because

being a metal nomologically necessitates being an

electric conductor. Although such a relation be-

tween the two universals, metallicity and conduc-

tivity, is itself contingent (could have failed to take

place), its actual presence confers on particular

facts falling under it the right sort of necessity (i.e.,

the nomological of physical necessity), which sus-

tains the relevant countarfactuals and accounts for

the explanatory power of this law. On the con-

trary, no relation of necessitation obtains between

being moa and dying before age fifty. The corre-

sponding cosmic regularity is still there but only as

a matter of historical accident, not as a matter of

nomological necessity.

To uphold such a theory, however, one has to

accept, not only real universals (entities such as

metallicity, in addition to actual metals) but also

contingent relations of nomic necessitation be-

tween them. Such relations must then translate into

the relations among particulars. Some authors have

argued that these commitments create serious dif-

ficulties (Bas van Fraassen’s problems of identifica-

tion and of inference).

The second major type of necessitarian theory

states that laws derive from causal powers (dispo-

sitions and propensities) of objects. The posses-

sion of such powers by natural kinds of objects

(e.g., elementary particles, chemical elements) dis-

poses their bearers to behave in specific ways or to

exemplify other characteristic properties. On this

account, most properties—and especially those of

the fundamental objects—are ultimately disposi-

tional in nature. For example, the electric charge

possessed by the electron disposes the latter to in-

teract in a certain way with the electromagnetic

field. Laws of nature, on this account, simply cod-

ify the natural behavior of things enforced by their

intrinsic causal powers. Moreover, natural kinds

possess their dispositional properties essentially:

Nothing counts as an electron unless it has a unit

electric charge, a specific mass, spin 1/2, and per-

haps other essential dispositional properties. The

major difference of this account from the relations-

between-universals view is erasing the boundary

between what things are and how they behave. On

the former view, all electrons have a certain charge

because of the relation between the two univer-

sals: electronhood and a determinate chargehood.

On the latter view, part of what makes something

an electron is having a certain charge. Instead of

being imposed “from above,” in the form of the

necessitation relation between universals, lawhood

emerges “from below,” from the ascription of es-

sential dispositional properties to particulars.

One difficulty with this view is that it raises the

specter of virtus dormitiva: Causal powers of fun-

damental objects turn out to be their irreducible

dispositional properties that must be possessed

even when they are not manifested. But what ex-

actly is involved in saying that a certain substance

has an irreducible disposition that is not currently

manifested? What keeps such a pure disposition in

existence? Other questions arise: Do fundamental

objects, such as electrons, have one disposition or

many? If many, what accounts for their connection?

Thus all major philosophical accounts of laws

have their difficulties. This has led some authors to

skepticism about the possibility of a satisfactory

analysis of lawhood or even to the view that the

notion of law must be rejected altogether as being

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