1 The concept of ‘laws of nature’: a historical survey Alin Christoph Cucu University of Lausanne Taken from Interacting Minds in the Physical World (PhD thesis, University of Lausanne 2022) For better or worse, the view that the laws of nature were simply God’s decrees soon gave way to the reified version more common today (…). If a phenomenon is explained by way of natural law, many infer that there will be no need to appeal to God, thus setting the two in opposition to each other. Such a dichotomy would have been quite puzzling to those who first used the notion of laws to describe nature. (Koperski 2020, 80) The thesis of this chapter is that the notion of ‘laws of nature’ has Christian origins, and that modern science and philosophy have adopted it while eviscerating it of its theistic roots, thereby bequeathing to us the almost tyrannical ideology of laws without a lawmaker and thus without exceptions. More specifically, my claim is that labeling natural regularities ‘laws’ is a product of the influence of voluntarist theology on 17 th century science. Before that, virtually all science that had been done in Europe was inspired and influenced by a mix of Christian and Aristotelian thought in which the notion of ‘laws’ barely ever emerged; after the ‘voluntarist revolution’, a slow drift away from the theistic roots of ‘laws of nature’ was followed by a landslide set off mainly by Thomas Huxley in the second half of the 19 th century, after which the nowadays ubiquitous dichotomy of ‘science vs. religious myths’ became the standard paradigm. The realization that analyzing nature in terms of laws is a predominantly theistic idea opens up new alleys for rethinking the relationship between free agency and natural regularities: if there is a lawmaker, then there is the possibility for exceptions from the laws for special purposes, for the lawmaker is the highest instance with respect to the enactment of the laws. However, it might also provide remedies for the diverse problems the secular accounts to be discussed in chapter 13 face. 1. Before the 17 th century In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the term ‘law’ was very seldom used in connection with nature, and often in a way clearly different from our modern scientific conception 1 . Jane Ruby characterizes the ancient Greek era as featuring a “sharp distinction between nomos as a human conception imposed on nature and physis as the natural order” (Ruby 1986, 354). She specifies further: 1 This may sound odd, since above I expressed my view that the precise content of the concept of laws of nature is often unclear. How could one then state a difference between two things if one of them is ill-defined? As will become clear, the ancient and medieval use of ‘law’ in connection with nature is evidently one that mainstream science and philosophy would nowadays emphatically deny. And that of course is at once a starting point to delineate what we mean by the concept today.