Erasmus Darwin

[Mojo]

These "natural laws" are our human understandings and approximations of the real natural laws that exist.

Certainly. And?

But no one on this thread has said that. Moreover, take Newton. You're essentially saying since he believed in God that he just stopped trying to understand the world.

Nobody on this thread has said that. Newton seems to have been motivated to discover the laws by which the universe operates in order to better understand "the mind of God", but he didn't include God in those laws. The laws he discovered would have been the same if he had been an atheist.

Where did the laws come from? I know I know, it is naturalistic turtles all the way down.

We will probably always get to a point at which (if we are being honest) we have to say "I don't know". That is no reason for saying "Goddidit". If you want to say that (in the context of science) you have to produce some evidence for the proposition.

 

[Soapy Sam]

The word "law" means several things, one of which is a hill.

The existence of a hill need not imply a hill maker.

Because we use the same word, "law" to mean both "Formal rule of human society" and " discovered pattern of nature" , need imply no similarity whatever between the two concepts.