Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Introduction

Many atheist thinkers assume that the fundamental laws of nature “just are” – that they exist without further explanation, as brute facts. This assumption raises a profound philosophical question: are we truly satisfied to treat the universe’s basic operating principles as primitive, unexplained features of reality? In this article, we will explore the implications of viewing natural laws as brute facts. We will draw on the insights of philosophers like David Hume, David Lewis, Bas van Fraassen, Nancy Cartwright, Alexander Pruss, and others who have probed the nature of laws and the limits of naturalistic explanations. We will also consider theological perspectives – especially from Islamic thought – that regard the orderliness of nature as an intentional product of divine will and wisdom rather than a happy accident. Throughout, the tone will remain respectful yet probing, aiming to shine light on a philosophical “elephant in the room”: the ultimate origin and intelligibility of nature’s laws. In the end, we will reflect on whether positing a rational source (e.g. God) offers a more coherent framework for understanding natural laws than simply accepting them as brute facts.

The Naturalistic Stance: Laws as Brute Facts

In a naturalistic or atheistic worldview, it is often held that the universe and its laws require no explanation beyond themselves – they are “just there.” Bertrand Russell famously exemplified this stance in his debate with F. C. Copleston, saying “the universe is just there, and that’s all.”​

In this view, asking “Why do these laws of nature exist?” might be seen as a misguided question – the laws simply exist as the foundational brute facts of reality, without cause or reason. Some contemporary scientists and philosophers echo this sentiment, suggesting that no further metaphysical explanation is needed for the uniformity of nature; it is an ultimate given.

Why would someone adopt this brute-fact stance? One motivation is to avoid an infinite regress of explanations. Eventually, every explanatory chain must terminate in something fundamental. For the naturalist, the buck stops at the basic constituents of the universe (matter/energy and the laws governing them). As the atheist philosopher Bede Rundle argued, perhaps matter or the physical cosmos itself has necessary existence and needs no cause – “matter/energy is the necessary being,” so its particular configuration is contingent but its existence is uncaused​. On this account, the laws of physics might be seen as either logically necessary or simply eternally existing features of reality. The influential empiricist David Hume already in the 18th century took this approach to its extreme: he eliminated the idea of any inherent powers or causes behind natural events. In Hume’s view, “things do not move as they do because they are caused by anything… They just do so move; and this is a brute fact about the world”, with causal forces being mere illusory patterns our minds project​. In other words, for a thoroughgoing Humean, the world’s regularities have no deeper cause – they are just observed regularities.

This naturalistic assumption of brute fact laws often goes unexamined in popular discourse. The cosmos works in consistent ways, and that consistency itself is treated as ontologically basic. Some atheists argue that introducing a divine creator to “explain” the laws merely shifts the brute fact one step back – if God is posited, one could ask “why does God exist with such-and-such nature?” So, they prefer to regard the existence of our particular laws as the final stop. Indeed, it is sometimes asserted that positing fewer entities is more parsimonious: if we have to pick a brute fact, the raw universe might seem simpler than a complex deity​. The naturalist may contend that we should not demand an explanation for the fact that nature is lawful – it could simply be an unintelligible stopping-point for explanation, no different in principle from a theist’s stopping-point in God.

Brute Facts and the Limits of Explanation

Treating natural laws as brute facts carries significant philosophical baggage. A brute fact is, by definition, something that has no explanation – it “cannot be further explained or explains itself.”​ Declaring the most fundamental facts of existence to be brute can have a unsettling implication: it suggests that at bedrock, reality is not fully intelligible – there is a point beyond which reason cannot probe. This raises a challenge to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), the venerable idea (going back to Leibniz and others) that for anything that exists or any fact that obtains, there must be a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise. If one embraces brute facts, one is effectively denying the PSR at some ultimate level​. Many philosophers find this move problematic. As Alexander Pruss argues, the demand for explanations is deeply woven into rational inquiry and even the practice of science; simply labeling something a brute fact should be a last resort​. Pruss warns that too quick an appeal to brute facts “would undercut the practice of science”, which flourishes by assuming that phenomena can be explained​. If scientists historically had assumed every mysterious pattern was just a brute fact, science may never have progressed.

On the other hand, defenders of the brute-fact stance reply that explanation must terminate somewhere – even a theist who explains the world by God ultimately has no explanation for God (theists simply assert God is a necessary being with no external cause). Thus, the atheist might argue, everyone has a stopping point; why not stop at the universe’s laws themselves? As the empiricist Bas van Fraassen notes, “the quest for explanation has to stop somewhere.”​ Van Fraassen contends that even scientific realists end up with “brute fundamental laws” at the base of their explanations​. For example, Newton famously explained a host of phenomena by gravity, but he had no explanation for gravity itself – it was, at that stage, a brute fact (Newton admitted, “I frame no hypothesis” about the cause of gravity). Van Fraassen and others suggest that it is not irrational for a naturalist to “bottom out in brute…laws”​ once we have pushed inquiry to the limits of empirical investigation. This view implies that the demand for a further reason “why these laws?” is not answerable and need not be pursued.

Yet, treating laws as inexplicable can feel intellectually unsatisfying. It means accepting that there is no reason the cosmos couldn’t have been utterly different – it just happens to operate under elegant, mathematically describable principles, and that’s that. It also raises the question of coincidence. Consider the remarkable fine-tuning of the universe’s physical constants (the strengths of forces, particle masses, etc.). In a single-universe, atheistic view, it is an “inexplicable, ‘brute’ fact that the universe exists and is fine-tuned” for life​. The odds against just randomly having life-permitting laws are astronomically high, yet the naturalist must say “well, we just got lucky – there is no deeper explanation.” Critics point out that appealing to brute fact here might be equivalent to saying it’s a fluke that, for example, a fair lottery came up with the one winning ticket on the first try. One might reply that if the universe were not fine-tuned, we wouldn’t be here to notice, so there is a selection effect. Still, the “brute fact” answer to the question of cosmic order effectively labels the most striking features of reality – existence itself and the rational order of nature – as groundless mysteries. Theists and even some philosophically-inclined agnostics see this as a significant cost of naturalism, a point we’ll revisit later.

Regularity or Necessity? What Are Natural Laws, Anyway?

Underlying the discussion is a philosophical debate about what laws of nature are. Are they merely descriptive regularities – observed patterns with no force of necessity – or are they prescriptive, somehow making things happen out of necessity? This is the debate between regularity (Humean) theories and necessitarian theories of laws. It turns out that how one views this can influence whether one treats laws as brute facts.

• Humean Regularity View: Following Hume, this view holds that laws of nature are simply summaries of what does happen in the world. All there is at bottom is what David Lewis called “a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another.”​ The laws are not an additional ingredient over and above the events; rather, laws supervene on the total pattern of occurrences. David Lewis, a contemporary philosopher, championed a Humean approach: a law is basically a statement that figures in the simplest, most powerful description of the mosaic of events (the so-called “Best System” analysis). In this view, there is nothing making electrons obey the laws of physics – the fact that electrons behave in certain regular ways is the law. There is no necessity to it, beyond the brute fact that nature’s pattern is what it is. As Lewis put it, “all there is in the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of fact” governed by no additional principles​. The regularity theorist is comfortable saying that if, as a matter of brute fact, every time A happens B follows, then “A causes B” or “it is a law that A brings about B” – and that’s the end of it. Things could conceivably have been different (there is no logical contradiction in imagining different regularities), but in our world they just happen to follow certain stable patterns.
• Necessitarian (Non-Humean) View: In contrast, other philosophers argue that laws govern the behavior of things with a kind of necessity. D. M. Armstrong, for example, proposed that laws are relations among universals – a law that Fs cause Gs might be a real necessary connection N(F, G) in nature​. On this view, it’s not merely that all Fs happen to be followed by Gs; rather, given the law, an F must be followed by a G (barring interference). Necessitarians think there is an objective modality in nature: laws compel or necessitate outcomes. This often goes along with believing in inherent causal powers or dispositions in objects (a view revived by “new essentialists” like Brian Ellis, who hold that things have intrinsic natures that make them behave lawfully​). For a necessitarian, it is less palatable to say laws are “brute” – if laws involve real necessity, one might feel there must be some reason or source for that necessity. (After all, why should F-ness be necessarily tied to G-ness unless something underpins that link?) Some necessitarians appeal to a divine legislator or to metaphysical principles to ground the laws’ necessity. Others, like Armstrong, do not invoke God but simply take the necessitation relation itself as a fundamental feature of reality. In either case, the existence of a particular necessary connection could itself be considered a brute fact unless explained further.

It’s worth noting that even Humean thinkers distinguish between accidental regularities and genuine laws. For example, “All spheres of pure gold are less than 10,000 kg” might be accidentally true (maybe we’ve just never gathered that much gold in one place), whereas “All spheres of uranium-235 are less than 10,000 kg” is lawlike (because beyond about 50 kg, U-235 undergoes runaway fission and can’t form a stable sphere)​. Humeans like Lewis try to capture this difference by invoking counterfactual stability or the idea of truth in all possible worlds close to ours​. Ironically, this raises modality through the backdoor: one has to talk about what would happen if circumstances were different. David Lewis himself famously embraced modal realism – the idea that all possible worlds are real – partly to make sense of talk about “laws in other possible worlds.” According to Lewis, “absolutely every way that a world could be is a way that some world is.”​ Thus, what we call the laws of nature are just the facts about this particular world; if things had been otherwise, that “otherwise” is realized in some other world. Lewis’s modal realism is an extravagant view (all logically possible universes exist as concrete realities​), but it underscores a key point: from a strictly atheistic perspective, one could avoid calling our laws “special” by imagining a multiverse or plurality of worlds where all possibilities play out. In effect, one might say our universe’s order doesn’t need explanation because every conceivable law-set exists somewhere – we just inhabit one of the many. However, most people (including most atheists) find Lewis’s modal realism a bit hard to swallow, as it multiplies realities without empirical evidence. More commonly, atheists who feel the force of fine-tuning will appeal not to a metaphysical plenitude of all possible worlds, but to a scientific multiverse hypothesis. The multiverse idea posits an ensemble of many (perhaps infinitely many) actual universes with varying parameters; this can make our universe’s life-permitting laws a matter of chance selection from a wide sample. Still, the multiverse, if true, would itself presumably operate under some higher-level laws or principles (which one may again ask “why those?” about), so it is not a complete escape from the brute fact issue – it only pushes the question up one level.

Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives on Laws and Naturalism

Let us now introduce some key thinkers and their viewpoints, to see how the assumption of brute fact laws is treated in recent philosophy:

• David Hume (1711–1776): Hume is a towering figure in forming the regularity view. As mentioned, he denied that we can perceive any necessary connection in causation – we just observe A followed by B repeatedly. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume argued we have no a priori reason to assume every event must have a cause, or that the whole universe must have a cause​. He even entertained the idea (in his Dialogues) that the universe might be a necessarily existing being, though he was skeptical of such metaphysics. Hume’s skeptical empiricism undercuts the need to find a deeper explanation for laws: in his radical view, “[Things] just do so move” and their lawful behavior is a brute fact of “the world.”​ Hume’s stance was in part a reaction against earlier rationalist or theistic philosophies that posited occult forces or divine decrees to explain nature. By stripping away those, Hume left us with a universe of events whose regularities simply are. Many atheists, knowingly or not, inherit Hume’s legacy when they regard the question “Why are there natural laws at all?” as unnecessary.
• David Lewis (1941–2001): A modern champion of Humeanism, Lewis advanced a systematic vision of a law-governed cosmos without any governing laws “out there.” In his “Humean supervenience” doctrine, he states that the world is a mosaic of fact, and laws supervene on that mosaic. We saw his quote above emphasizing a “vast mosaic of local matters of fact.”​ Lewis’s analysis of laws (the Best System account) says that laws are those generalizations that best balance simplicity and explanatory power in describing the mosaic. Notably, nothing enforces the laws – they have no “teeth” except that they are a compact description of what happens. This means that in Lewis’s atheistic metaphysics, it is ultimately a brute fact that the mosaic has the shape it does. If a different mosaic of events had obtained, a different set of “laws” would have been the best summary. Lewis recognized that his view cannot explain why this mosaic exists instead of another, except by invoking modal realism (all mosaics exist in their own worlds, so ours doesn’t need special explanation beyond being one of the lot). Modal realism aside, Lewis accepts that, within one world, laws do not have deeper justification. They are primitives in the ontology.
• Bas van Fraassen (b. 1941): Van Fraassen is a leading figure in anti-realism about scientific laws. In Laws and Symmetry (1989), he famously asked “What if there are no laws of nature?” – by which he meant no real, governing laws beyond consistent regularities. He “categorically rejects the notion that scientific laws represent necessary connections.”​ For van Fraassen (an empiricist), talk of laws is mostly a convenient shorthand; he suggests that scientists could do just as well by speaking of empirical regularities and the models that capture them. The term law in science, he argues, is often an “honorific” we give to some regular patterns, but it carries misleading metaphysical baggage of necessity​. From his perspective, “things just happen and regularities suffice to provide explanations, predictions and manipulation”​ – adding an assumption of hidden necessity or a cosmic lawgiver is unnecessary. Van Fraassen would thus fully embrace that it is a brute fact how the world behaves; our job is just to describe it, not to ask “why this regularity rather than that.” He also points out pragmatically that scientists never actually test for metaphysical necessity – we only observe what happens, not what must happen. So, any talk of laws being more than brute regularities goes beyond empirical science. His view underscores why a naturalist might be content without deeper explanation: if seeking an ultimate reason is seen as going beyond what science can establish, an empiricist might simply decline to speculate further.
• Nancy Cartwright (b. 1944): Cartwright is a philosopher of science known for challenging the idea of universal, exceptionless laws. In How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983) and The Dappled World (1999), she argues that the world is not ruled by a single set of neat laws everywhere; rather, reality is “dappled” – a patchwork of different domains, each with its own regularities and capacities. She notes that the regularities promised by fundamental physics are rarely apparent in the messy world we observe​. Often laws hold only ceteris paribus (all else equal) and in carefully controlled conditions (like laboratories). Cartwright’s view implies that what we call “laws” are often idealized abstractions. Importantly, she emphasizes there is “nothing necessary about [the regularities]” – nature could conceivably behave otherwise, and indeed sometimes does (when other factors interfere). For instance, the law of gravity is always operating, but you won’t observe a nice inverse-square law trajectory if you launch a paper airplane outdoors – other forces disrupt it. Cartwright’s perspective aligns with the notion that if the universe’s order is contingent and piecemeal, the fact it exhibits any lawfulness at all may itself be something requiring explanation. However, a strict naturalist could take Cartwright’s lesson differently: perhaps there are no simple “laws of everything,” just brute factual regularities in different contexts. Either way, Cartwright provokes us to think: if laws are not iron-clad dictates but more like tendencies or “capacities” of things, the ultimate explanation might lie in the nature of those things. This starts to sound more like Aristotelian or theistic thinking (where things have natures or a Creator that endows them with properties) – a direction Cartwright herself does not fully embrace, but which shows the thin line between saying “laws are brute facts” and seeking some underlying principle.
• John Mackie (1917–1981): Mackie was an atheist philosopher who tackled the question of the universe’s existence in his work The Miracle of Theism (1982). He famously argued that we have “no right to assume” the universe must satisfy our desire for explanation. Responding to those who demand a reason for the universe, Mackie said this is just an “intellectual preference for causal order”, but “the universe need not comply.”​ In other words, it could simply be that at the fundamental level things are brute – and that’s not a defect in the universe, but a limit of our expectations. Mackie’s stance is often cited by atheists as a principled position: nature doesn’t owe us an answer. We can investigate how things work, but asking “ultimately, why?” might be pushing beyond what makes sense. This view directly challenges the intuition that everything must have a reason, and it cautions that our instincts for explanation could mislead us when applied to Reality as a whole.
• Alexander Pruss (b. 1973) and other defenders of PSR: On the other side of the spectrum, philosophers like Pruss (a prominent theist) argue vigorously against brute facts. Pruss’s writings (e.g. The Principle of Sufficient Reason, 2006) maintain that accepting any unexplained contingent fact undermines the very rationality of inquiry. He even suggests that a consistent embrace of brute contingency can lead to radical skepticism – if things can just happen for no reason, how can we trust any order or inference? He writes, for instance, that “Claiming to be a brute fact should be a last resort” because it cuts the ground from scientific reasoning​. If one were to truly believe events could occur with no cause at all, then (in an extreme scenario) one might worry that the Sun could just vanish tomorrow without cause, or our memories might randomly reset – after all, if brute happenings are possible, anything goes. (Most atheists would respond that statistically, brute irregularities of that sort never happen – but the point is, without PSR we lack a principled guarantee of order.) Pruss and others uphold that the only way to have a fully coherent worldview is to insist that even the laws of nature have an explanation – which, they argue, ultimately points to a necessary, self-explanatory being (i.e. God). They often invoke the argument from contingency: the universe, being contingent (it could have been otherwise, as evidenced by us conceiving different laws or no universe at all), cries out for an external explanation. Only a metaphysically necessary entity can terminate the regress of explanations without itself being a brute unexplained contingent fact​s. We will discuss this line of thought more in the theological section.

In summary, contemporary philosophy of science and metaphysics presents a spectrum of views. Many secular philosophers lean toward Humean or empiricist positions that tolerate brute facts (at least at the level of laws and initial conditions), whereas others, including theists and some rationalist-inclined thinkers, find that stance unsatisfying or incoherent. Now, let’s turn to how a theological perspective – particularly an Islamic one – approaches the question of natural laws. We will see that what atheists call “brute facts,” classical theists call “signs of intentional design.”

Theological Alternatives: Divine Will and the Intelligibility of Natural Law

Religious traditions have long wrestled with the nature of causation and laws, often arriving at a very different picture from brute naturalism. In Islamic thought especially, the regularity of the natural world is viewed not as an unexplained primitive fact but as a deliberate product of God’s will (irada) and wisdom (hikma). The Qur’an explicitly teaches that nature’s order is intentional and reliable. It repeatedly refers to the “sunnat Allah” (the way or practice of God) in creation, and emphasizes that one will “never find in the way (sunnah) of Allah any change or alteration.”​ In other words, God has established an order in the world, a consistent “way” in which things usually occur, and He does not capriciously break this order. The Qur’an presents the regularities of nature as “manifestations of God’s will” and testaments to divine wisdom, encouraging observers to reflect on the signs (ayat) in the heavens and earth​. The underlying message is that nature is intelligible because it is authored by an Intelligence. Rather than being a random or brute fact, the cosmos’ law-like structure flows from a rational source. One Islamic writer summarizes the Quranic view: “The Quran…emphasizes both [nature’s] inherent order and its role as a testament to divine wisdom. It encourages believers to observe and reflect upon the universe, viewing its consistent patterns as manifestations of God’s will.”​

In Islamic theology, there has historically been a rich discourse on how exactly God’s will relates to natural causation. Two broad approaches emerged:

• Voluntarist Occasionalism (e.g. Al-Ghazālī and the Ash‘arite school): On this view, God is the direct cause of every event. What we call “laws of nature” are really just habits or patterns in God’s activity. The medieval theologian Al-Ghazālī argued that fire does not burn cotton because of some inherent power in the fire, but because God directly causes the cotton to burn on contact with fire – and He does so consistently according to His custom (ʿāda)​. God could suspend this regularity (as He did, for example, when Abraham was thrown into the fire and miraculously was not burned, according to Islamic narrative). The Ash‘arite rationale for this occasionalism was to safeguard God’s omnipotence and the contingency of the world on God’s will. Importantly, even though this might sound like “anything goes,” the Ash‘arites emphasized that in practice God’s custom is stable – otherwise, moral life and rational inquiry would be impossible. They believed God, in His wisdom, usually acts in predictable ways so that humans can learn, plan, and be tested in a consistent environment. Thus, for an Ash‘arite, the uniformity of nature is guaranteed by God’s voluntary commitment to run the world orderly. Far from a brute fact, it is a sign of God’s benevolence and reliability.
• Rationalist Naturalism (e.g. the Falāsifa like Ibn Sīnā, and the Mu‘tazilite theologians): These thinkers took a somewhat different tack. They acknowledged secondary causes and intrinsic natures in things (often drawing from Aristotle). Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) for instance held that God, as the Necessary Existent, emanates an ordered cosmos where each thing has certain essential properties and causal powers. The order of nature, in this view, reflects God’s wisdom in endowing creatures with beneficial traits and a harmonious interconnection. A Mu‘tazilite theologian would say that fire burns because God created fire with a nature that burns – God could override it, but He usually doesn’t, because His wisdom entails consistency. This approach still ultimately roots the existence of laws in God (He chose to create natures with certain regularities), but it allows one to speak of causes in nature in a more “scientific” way. The key point is that even here, the laws are not brute or unreasoned: they are the way they are because God selected them out of divine wisdom. In fact, scholars note that the very concept of “laws of nature” in the Western tradition historically arose from a theological analogy: God as the cosmic Lawgiver who ordained laws for matter just as He ordains moral laws​. The 17th-century pioneers of science (Galileo, Kepler, Newton, etc.) believed a rational God had implemented mathematical order in creation, which is why we expect nature to have consistent laws in the first place​. Islamic civilization likewise fostered science under the view that studying nature is essentially reading the signs of God’s design. The Qur’an’s constant invitation to “travel in the earth and see how He brings life into being” and to ponder the heavens and earth gave religious sanction to seeking causal knowledge – with the crucial understanding that these causes ultimately trace back to God.

From an Islamic perspective, then, the coherence of the naturalistic worldview is enhanced, not undermined, by acknowledging a divine foundation. The laws of nature are intelligible because they come from an Intellect. The metaphysical groundwork is that Allah, “the Creator and Sustainer of our universe…guarantees the laws governing it.”​Thus, believers find it reasonable that the universe operates by consistent principles – it reflects the consistent will of God who “has subjected all that is in the heavens and the earth” for our benefit​. Even the remarkable fine-tuning of the cosmos is not a brute fluke but an act of intentional calibration. Many Muslim thinkers would echo the sentiment of the famous Western scientist (and devout monotheist) Isaac Newton, whom the article above quotes: “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.”​

In Islamic terms, the regular motion of sun and moon by precise calculation (mentioned in Qur’an 55:5–7) are signs of Allah’s creative command and purposes​.

One might ask: doesn’t invoking God as the explanation simply make God a brute fact instead? Theological traditions have answers to this. In classical Islamic (and generally theistic) philosophy, God is not a contingent being but a necessary being – the one whose existence is self-sufficient and eternal. God’s existence is often conceived as “wājib al-wujūd” (necessary-of-existence) in Islamic terms, or in Western terms, God is said to exist a se (by Himself). This means that, unlike the universe’s laws which seem arbitrary (they could have been otherwise) and thus cry out for explanation, God’s nature is the explanation for why God exists (God is, by definition, the one reality that must exist and cannot be otherwise). Admittedly, this is heavy metaphysics, and a full defense of it is beyond our scope. The upshot is: theists assert that they are not arbitrarily stopping the explanatory “taxi” at God – rather, they have reached the only possible terminus, a being whose existence is self-explanatory​. Atheists may remain unconvinced by that move, but it highlights a crucial difference in worldview. Theism claims the universe’s lawfulness is rooted in Reason (Logos) or Will, whereas atheistic naturalism ultimately attributes the lawfulness to luck or unexplained necessity.

Regularity, Fine-Tuning, and the “Elephant in the Room”

Considering all the above, we can identify a kind of philosophical “elephant in the room” for naturalism: the existence of an orderly, mathematically elegant, life-supporting cosmos is an astounding fact that naturalism must simply take as given (or relegate to multiverse speculation). Often this point is overlooked or brushed aside in atheistic accounts of reality. The focus is usually on how the laws work, never why such laws exist. This isn’t to say atheists never ponder it – some do, and they offer ideas such as quantum cosmologies that try to show the laws could emerge from a primordial chaos, or they argue that asking “why is there something rather than nothing?” might be meaningless. Yet, to many philosophers (even non-religious ones), the contingency of the laws of nature remains deeply puzzling. The eminent cosmologist Paul Davies (noted for being agnostic) once commented that the laws “seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design,” and he asked, “where do the laws of physics come from?” Naturalism, if it treats them as brute facts, effectively responds: “They come from nowhere; they just are.” This answer can feel like quietly ignoring the elephant – the very rationality and structure in the universe that makes science possible in the first place.

Moreover, if one adopts the Humean view that laws are just descriptive and “things just happen” with regularity, one inherits Hume’s famous problem of induction: how can we be sure the future will resemble the past? If there is no reason underpinning the regularity, our expectation of continued regularity is, strictly speaking, an unsupported assumption. Philosopher of science John Foster noted that a theist, who believes God’s rationality upholds the order, has a principled reason to trust induction, whereas a hard empiricist can only say “it’s always been that way, so it likely will be” – a statement that itself seems to presuppose a uniformity principle that has no proof. In practice, even atheists live as if the world’s order is dependable and rationally accessible – which could be seen as an implicit faith in the stability of laws. This internal tension is seldom made explicit.

The fine-tuning issue intensifies the elephant’s presence. The constants and initial conditions of our universe lie in a very narrow range that permits chemistry and life. Naturalistic scientists acknowledge this with terms like “anthropic coincidences.” If one does not accept a multiverse solution, one is left saying “we just got lucky that the laws are like this – a gigantic cosmic lottery win.” Some atheists do indeed take this line, calling the fine-tuning a brute fact or a “fortunate coincidence.”​

Others, like physicist Sean Carroll, argue that maybe any outcome can seem special in hindsight, so we shouldn’t be too amazed – someone has to win the lottery, so to speak. But many thinkers feel this underestimates the peculiarity: it’s more as if the same person kept winning a lottery rigged 10^120 to 1 against them. Treating that as a brute fact would normally be unacceptable – we’d look for a reason (the analogy in cosmology being that a designer rigged it, or that there were countless draws in a multiverse). The point here is not to “prove” God from fine-tuning, but to highlight how brute-fact naturalism has to swallow a lot of improbability with no explanation.

In philosophy, sometimes a distinction is made between a metaphysically necessary truth and a brute contingent truth. If atheists could show that the laws of nature are not actually contingent – that they had to be the way they are – then the need for explanation diminishes. But no such demonstration is forthcoming; if anything, modern physics points to many conceivable alternative universes with different laws. Hence naturalistic metaphysics appears to rely on a huge unexplained contingency at its core. This might be seen as a soft underbelly of the worldview. It doesn’t refute atheism, but it does mean an intellectually curious atheist should admit, “Yes, at some fundamental level, my view has an unexplainable given.” And this is exactly what some atheists, like Russell and Mackie, do admit. The theist simply pushes back: “Perhaps that given isn’t brute at all, but points to a higher reality.”

Conclusion: Brute Fact or Rational Source?

We have surveyed how the assumption of brute fact laws functions in atheistic thought and the counter-perspective offered by theism (with a focus on Islamic theology). Philosophically, treating the laws of nature as primitive facts has the advantage of parsimony – it stops the regress of “why?” questions in a straightforward (if blunt) way. It also avoids introducing God or other metaphysical entities that themselves raise further questions. However, this stance comes at a cost: it leaves a lot unexplained and arguably undermines the sense of the world as ultimately intelligible. The naturalist must accept that the most important features of reality – that there is a universe, that it behaves in a stable law-like manner, and that it happened to have the kind of laws that allow complex life and mind – have no deeper reason. For some, that is a tolerable mystery. For others, it is a signpost pointing beyond the naturalistic framework.

Theologically, we find a coherent alternative: a rational Creator whose will endows the universe with order and purpose. In Islamic thought, this idea is encapsulated in the concept of God as al-Ḥakīm (The Wise) – nothing in creation is ultimately pointless or uncaused; even the regularities are willed for good reasons. This does not mean we humans can discern the reason for every natural law or constant (many remain inscrutable), but it affirms that such reasons exist in principle (in the mind of God). Thus, reality is not just a brute fact – it is a meaningful fact. Nature’s laws are like the grammar of a language, and God is the author of the story being told through that language.

Is positing God a “better” explanation for the laws of nature than accepting brute fact naturalism? That depends on what one values in an explanation. If one prioritizes logical completeness and avoidance of radical contingency, then positing a necessary being who designs the laws does provide something that brute-fact naturalism lacks – namely, a terminus of explanation that (the theist claims) has self-sufficient reason. It imbues the existence of lawfulness with purpose: the universe is law-governed because a lawful order accomplishes objectives (like supporting life, facilitating understanding, manifesting divine attributes, etc.). This speaks to our intuitions that profound order should have an origin in Mind rather than arising from mindless chaos. On the other hand, if one prioritizes simplicity in terms of ontological commitments, one might see invoking God as adding an unnecessary layer – especially if one is not persuaded that the concept of a necessary being is coherent. An atheist might argue that we should stick with the simplest theory that fits the observable facts, and that bringing in God raises new questions (like the problem of evil, or the need to reconcile quantum randomness with divine plan, etc.).

Importantly, even if one introduces God, that does not make scientific laws any less lawful. A theistic universe would look empirically just like ours – falling apples, stable orbits, quantum fields, and so on – but with an ultimate foundation that secures those patterns. Some theologians caution that science, methodologically, proceeds as if nature is a closed system (methodological naturalism), and that’s fine; the role of God as explainer comes in at a meta-level, not within the scientific equations. Thus, the debate is not science vs religion, but two philosophical interpretations of why science is possible at all.

In closing, the assumption that the laws of nature are brute facts is not a trivial matter – it is a sweeping statement about the metaphysical groundwork of reality. We have seen that it affects how one views everything from the reliability of science to the significance of life. Theism, particularly in the Islamic conception, challenges that assumption by asserting that the universe is rooted in rationality. Rather than “the universe is just there,” it says “the universe is the way it is because God wills it so, for wise reasons.” This doesn’t nullify scientific discovery – it ennobles it, as uncovering the craftsmanship of the Creator. Whether one finds this worldview more compelling than brute fact naturalism will depend on one’s assessment of those “elephant in the room” questions. Is the remarkable order of the cosmos likely to be a brute, purposeless fact? Or does it indicate a rational mind behind the scenes? This remains one of the grand questions where philosophy, science, and theology intersect.

Ultimately, each person must confront that question and follow the evidence and reasoning as far as it goes. But at the very least, acknowledging the assumption – that treating natural laws as brute facts is a choice laden with philosophical implications – brings the elephant into focus. From there, one can earnestly consider whether the seat of ultimate reality is an inexplicable blind order or an explicable divine will. The conversation between atheism and theism on this matter is far from over, but it is a conversation well worth having, for it touches on the deepest mysteries of existence: Why is the world intelligible, and what (if anything) makes it so?

Sources:

• Hume’s view of laws as “brute facts” summarized by Ellis ​link.springer.com.
• Lewis’s Humean mosaic and modal realism​ link.springer.com​plato.stanford.edu.
• Van Fraassen on laws as regularities without necessity ​link.springer.com.
• Cartwright on the lack of necessity in physical laws ​philosophynow.org​philosophynow.org.
• Pruss on the scientific need for sufficient reason ​plato.stanford.edu.
• Russell’s “universe is just there” brute fact assertion​ thinkingdeeply.medium.com.
• Cosmological argument context on brute facts vs necessary being ​plato.stanford.edu​thinkingdeeply.medium.com.
• Fine-tuning as brute fact vs multiverse ​rintintin.colorado.edu​rintintin.colorado.edu.
• Quranic perspective on natural order as divine wisdom​ aboutislam.net ​thequran.love.
• Islamic view: God guarantees the laws of nature ​thequran.love.