DIVINE HUMEANISM: A CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF PHYSICAL LAWS AND SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION

Abstract

I argue that Christian thinkers should adopt Divine Humeanism as the favored conception of physical laws for unifying their theological, physical, and metaphysical beliefs. In addition to biblical coherence and intelligibility, Divine Humeanism offers a precise definition of miracles that captures all relevant intuitions and explains the metaphysical relationship between natural and supernatural events. Christians should abandon the belief that nature is governed by laws that maintain nature unless God intervenes. Instead, they should believe that God is always volitionally controlling each individual spacetime point, always attentively involved in the happenings of His creation and never disengaged. Miracles are not abrupt interventions but rather deviations from how God typically interacts with nature. With God intentionally directing each spacetime point of reality in predictable patterns, Christians can believe that the past will resemble the future. This makes it possible to have propositional and doxastic justification for using induction and forming inductive inferences.