We live in a world with consistent laws. F = ma, the sun rises in the east, that sort of thing. Many of these laws can be reduced to more basic laws, all the way down to fundamental rules of physics.
Fundamental laws can’t be explained by appeal to lower-level laws. So where did they come from? How were they “written”, so to speak?
I find this question compelling in the abstract, and an answer might even be useful in practice. If we knew the process behind the laws of nature themselves, that might help us figure out what kinds of laws are likely to exist.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it can have an answer. A cause or creator for the laws of nature themselves would be a logical impossibility, like a four-sided triangle.
To explain why, consider what we actually mean by the question. A cause for the laws of nature would be something without which the laws of nature would not exist. For example, those who say “God made the laws of nature” (by far the most popular answer to this question) mean that if God did not exist, or if God had not chosen to make the laws, then the laws would not exist.
And statements about counterfactuals (i.e., about what would have happened if something had been different) need laws of nature in order to work. For example, I am the cause and creator of this blog post, because without me it would not exist. But we can only say that because we live in a universe where this blog post is unlikely to spontaneously pop into existence. In a universe where this exact blog post is guaranteed to appear on this server at this time whether or not anyone bothers to write it, you couldn’t really say that its existence was a result of my decision.
What about the laws of nature themselves, then? Imagine the situation “just before” they were written. Without God (or other cause/creator), would they have come into existence in exactly the same form?
If “Yes”, then the cause we have identified is not really the cause.
If “No”, then why not?
If the answer is something like “Because it just doesn’t seem like these laws of nature should spontaneously pop into existence”, then I respectfully point out that “Laws of nature don’t spontaneously pop into existence” is itself a law of nature, which don’t exist yet.
In other words: causes require counterfactuals, and counterfactuals require laws of nature to dictate what should happen. If we imagine some state “before” or “outside” the laws of nature, then there’s no way to say what-would-have-happened-if, and therefore no way to say that the laws of nature wouldn’t have happened without their putative “cause”. Thus there is no meaningful sense in which it is a cause.
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