When Laws Evolve, Part 2: The Return of the Problem of Law
Modern science cannot sustain the laws
of nature while insisting those laws are merely
temporary habits picked up in a lawless flux
When Laws Evolve: The Emerging Crisis of Modern Science
Part 2: The Return of the Problem of Law
by John D. Wise, PhD
The universe evolves like a life form (Timothy Jackson,[1] iai News, 11 May, 2026). Jackson argues that evolution is the fundamental “structure” of reality, and that natural law is its product, upending classical physics. In doing so, he exposes the acute crisis brewing at the heart of the secular vanguard. This framework inadvertently traps itself in a fatal contradiction by demanding that unintelligible chaos somehow grounds the sanity of human reason.
III. The Problem of Evolving Laws
Once variation is elevated to a first principle and stability is treated as a derivative byproduct, the logic of immanence reaches its most radical destination: the evolution of law itself. If the apparent invariants of biology are merely temporary historical achievements, why should the invariants of physics be exempt?
Jackson does not hesitate to cross this line:
“Evolving laws would not, of course, merely change in ‘random’ ways—they would be just like the (relatively) stable patterns of biology… which have their origins in arbitrary variation but derive their stability from non-random selection.” (emphasis mine)
Here, the conceptual shift reaches its ultimate expression. Laws are no longer the immutable framework within which processes unfold; they are themselves the contingent outcome of process. What had once served as the absolute condition of explanation becomes that which requires explanation.
But at this exact boundary, a classical objection arises: if the laws change, then what is the law that governs the change of the laws? Jackson recognizes this objection, but dismisses it as
“a cherished argumentative strategy of theologians and (broadly speaking) ‘rationalists.’ However, it is predicated on the assumption that there must be a “first cause,” or that the fact of intelligibility in nature requires an a priori guarantor of intelligibility. Causation, laws, intelligibility—so the argument goes—entail a first cause, a first law, ultimately a law-giver.
The evolutionary thinker rejects this assumption.“
But the force of this objection does not depend on its historical applications, and it cannot be neutralized by a casual charge of guilt by association. Its force arises from the inescapable structure of explanation itself.
While one cannot argue that in fact “the evolutionary thinker rejects” the logical step from order to an ordering principle,[2] their subjective rejection of that logical step does not change the objective nature of causal explanation. To say that laws evolve does not explain how their evolution is structured rather than arbitrary. The urgent question is not whether regularities shift, but what makes their shifting intelligible to the scientific mind.
Jackson, like a good Darwinian, intends his appeal to selection to rescue the hypothesis. Just as biological stability is said to emerge from variation through natural selection, so too the stability of physical law is attributed to an analogous selective process operating at a deeper, cosmic level.
But this rescue mission collapses under its own weight. Selection, in order to function as an explanatory principle, cannot operate in a vacuum. It presupposes:
- A field of viable possibilities.
- Criteria of differentiation.
- Stable conditions of persistence.
These background conditions cannot themselves be wholly without structure and intelligibility. If everything varies everywhere without constraint, nothing can ever be selected. If no stable relations exist, no patterns can survive long enough to become cosmic habits.
Making change primary displaces the problem of a ground; it does not eliminate it. Thus, the transcendent order methodological naturalism chased out the front door slips in again unnoticed through the laboratory window. Selection is incomprehensible without an intelligible ground. The fact that this can be ignored by evolutionary biologists – and now even physicists – says more about the state of institutional science today than it does about reality.
To bypass this structural gridlock, Jackson quips that “intelligibility … emerges from unintelligibility all the time,” arguing that “the emergence of the definite from the indefinite… is… the kernel of Darwin’s thought.”
And, of course, it is, and that is precisely the problem.
To speak of emergence in this way is already to presuppose an active intelligibility. To identify a transition from the indefinite to the definite is to recognize structure, distinction, and operational order. As we established in Part One, “emergence” functions within immanentist logic as the invocation of an (un)grounded[3] order, naming the appearance of order as that which explains order,[4] while utterly failing to account for its possibility. Its explanatory power rests, unacknowledged, inside the framework it has banished.
The question therefore remains hanging in the thin air of modern metaphysics: can intelligibility arise from a condition that is, in principle, completely unintelligible? Or does the recognition of order, even when reinterpreted as the emergent expression of an immanent development, point backward to a more fundamental, uncaused Ground?
The proposal that laws evolve extends the logic of variation to its absolute limit. In doing so, it reveals both its rhetorical power and its scientific poverty. Attempting to account for all structure as the product of process, it must rely, at every stage of the argument, on forms of structure tacitly assumed but internally inexplicable.
The problem, once fully stated, sharpens into contradiction.
- The Contradiction: Materialism and the Logic of Emergence
The trajectory traced thus far leads to a point at which the underlying tension within contemporary naturalism can no longer remain implicit. What appears at first as a series of modest methodological adjustments in the lab reveals itself as a deep structural incompatibility between two rival accounts of reality. Jackson laments:
Old habits die hard … the ancient invariants that constrain our thought, even when their obvious historical contingency is acknowledged, continue to make the idea of an evolutionary metaphysics derived from a generalization of biological principles a tough pill to swallow.
On one hand stands the traditional metaphysical inheritance of modern science: physicalism. In this framework, reality is composed of mindless, material entities governed by laws that function as the stable, unyielding conditions of explanation. Intelligibility is secured by the dogmatic assumption that the behavior of the system can be fully accounted for in terms of these underlying regularities.
On the other hand stands the logic increasingly operative within contemporary scientific theory: absolute process. In this framework, becoming takes precedence over being, stability is treated as derivative, and intelligibility is understood as an assembled product emerging from within the flux of the system itself.
These two commitments cannot peacefully coexist.
Materialism requires some form of stable grounding, whether in fundamental particles, quantum fields, or immutable mathematical laws. It demands a fixed reduction base in virtue of which explanation is possible. Without that bedrock, the very concept of a determinate, material universe dissolves into mist.
Yet the logic of emergence systematically erodes that exact bedrock. If all structure is the product of historical process, and if even the laws of physics are subject to evolutionary drift, then no level of reality remains anchored. What used to be the absolute condition of intelligibility is swallowed up by the very movement it was invented to explain.
This results in a fatal intellectual tension. One cannot simultaneously claim that scientific explanation depends upon stable structures, while asserting that all stable structures are merely the contingent outcomes of prior, unguided processes. To do so is to rely, at each stage of the argument, on the very structural stability you have denied at the level of principle.
This is the great, unarticulated crisis of modern science. It continues to operate within a framework that preserves the necessity of fixed structures – a Kantian inheritance, where the conditions of experience are fixed – even as its Hegelian evolutionary logic dissolves their fixity.[5]
For a time, the brilliant practical successes of technology allowed these contradictory commitments to sleep in the same bed. Stable laws could be assumed by the engineer in practice, while process-oriented explanations expanded in scope among the theorists. But as the logic of emergence is pushed down into the deepest subatomic basements of physics, the space for this double-mindedness vanishes.
Generalizing Darwinian reasoning to the level of law itself gives explicit expression to a logic that undercuts the entire enterprise of scientific explanation. The question is no longer whether variation can account for biological diversity, but whether a variation-first framework can sustain the basic sanity of human reason.
The attempt to resolve this tension by subordinating stability to process does not eliminate the need for an ultimate Ground; it intensifies it to the breaking point. If intelligibility is entirely internal to the cosmic process – if it is truly identical with the unfolding process itself – then the universe must be intelligent through and through. In its frantic attempt to avoid a transcendent Creator, the secular vanguard is forced to transform the material universe into a self-articulating, pantheistic Mind.
The modern synthesis of materialism and the logic of emergence is breaking down under its own weight. The contradiction that science has managed to hold together in practice now demands a resolution in principle.
Modern science has arrived at the ultimate boundary of its 19th century paradigm. It cannot sustain the laws of nature while insisting those laws are merely temporary habits picked up in a lawless flux. Either the intelligibility of the universe is grounded in a transcendent Word – a primary, non-derived Order that speaks matter into motion – or reality is an ungrounded illusion, a chain of speech with no Speaker, dissolving into absolute silence.
The fork in the road is immanent, unavoidable, and final. And the resolution cannot long be deferred.
Footnotes
[1] Research Fellow and Co-Head at the Australian Venom Research Unit, University of Melbourne.
[2] It is a startling admission that adds weight to an argument I’ve made many times: science as a discipline and evolutionary biology as a theory are hopelessly contradictory in the traditional logical sense. Absolute flux (like Absolute Idealism) is structurally incompatible with traditional logic. It only makes sense with dialectical logic as primary. Hegel knew this, but science has taken 200 years to catch up.
[3] Hegel loved word-plays like this. His dialectical logic thrives on contradictions like an ungrounded ground.
[4] This self-grounding out of primary flux finds its literary archetype in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. When the archangel Michael asserts that the rebel angels owe their being to the Creator, Satan fiercely denies his transcendent origin, claiming instead to be self-begotten by an intrinsic, immanent process of cosmic development. He asks:
“Who saw/ When this creation was? rememberst thou/ Thy making, th’ Maker? …/ The Gods we are, self-begot, self-rais’d/ By our own quick’ning power, when fatal course/ Had circl’d his full Orbe, the birth matur’d/ Of this our native Heav’n, Ethereal Sons.” (Book V, lines 856–863)
Satan’s argument is the precise poetic forerunner of the modern logic of emergence: it treats structural origin as the inevitable “birth matured” of a closed cosmic system (“fatal course”), thereby attempting to claim the status of an uncaused, self-articulating reality while stubbornly denying the transcendent Word that spoke him into motion.
[5] The combination is inherently unstable. The Kantian inheritance preserves the temporary need for structure, while the Hegelian logic steadily dissolves its permanence. In Hegel’s system, the real is not a collection of static entities governed by external laws, but a self-developing whole in which apparent stability arises from the internal movement of the process itself. This distinction between appearance and reality is the traditional stock-and-trade of philosophy, not science. Think here of Richard Dawkins’ famous dictum in The Blind Watchmaker: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.” But what happens, Dr. Dawkins, when, as is increasingly the case in modern science, the deep architecture of reality itself does tempt us to invoke design, in physics and elsewhere?
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.