Scientific law

In their Science & Grace (Crossway 2006), Tim Morris and Don Petcher helpfully define a law of nature as “God’s sustaining of, or man’s description of, that pattern of regularity that we observe in nature as God works out His purposes towards His own ends in HIs covenant faithfulness, through His Son, the eternal Word, by means of His Spirit.”

As this definition makes clear, they distinguish between “law of nature” as an objective regularity of creation and the human description of that law. Of the first, they claim that law refers to a pattern of recurring events, rather than individual events, but they stress that “we make no assumptions that the law is universal in any sense other than as related to God’s purposes. In other words, it does not govern apart from God, and it only governs its appropriate subjects.”

On the description side, they emphasize that we can never pretend that scientific descriptions of the phenomena are precisely descriptive of what’s happening. They may be very precise, but we can’t know that: “the fact of the matter is that we don’t really know if our descriptions coincide with reality exactly, and all we have to work with is our descriptions and our experience.”

This is helpful, particularly as an antidote to the widespread assumption that scientific descriptions somehow give us the “baseline” reality of a phenomena. But this formulation perhaps sets descriptions and experience off in opposition in an unhelpful way. To what extent are experiences shaped or even constituted by descriptions?