Every experiment assumes the universe will behave tomorrow the way it behaved today. Naturalism uses that assumption every waking hour — and cannot explain it.
Ask a scientist why water boiled at the same temperature this morning as it did yesterday, and he will point you to the laws of physics. Good answer. Now ask the harder question: why are there laws at all? Why does matter obey anything? Why is the universe not random static — and why should we expect it to keep behaving next Tuesday?
At that point the answers stop coming, because the question has moved out of science and into the ground science stands on. Every lab, every equation, every repeated experiment runs on a set of assumptions no experiment can prove: that nature is uniform, that logic holds, that mathematics maps onto matter. The Christian has a reason to expect all three. Philosophical naturalism — the claim that matter and energy are all there is — uses all three every day and can account for none of them. This post is about that unpaid bill.
The Assumption Under Every Experiment
Science works by repetition: run the test, run it again, publish what holds. But repetition only proves anything if the universe is uniform — if the future will resemble the past, if the laws that governed the lab on Monday still govern it on Friday. That assumption is called the uniformity of nature, and here is the uncomfortable fact the philosophers have known for centuries, at least since David Hume pressed it: you cannot prove it without assuming it. Say “nature has always been uniform before, so it will be tomorrow,” and you have used the very principle you were supposed to be proving. The argument travels in a circle.
None of this makes science bad. It makes science a borrower. Uniformity is not a conclusion science reached; it is a faith science was founded on. The only question is which worldview can pay for it.
Laws Written in a Language Nobody Material Speaks
Go one layer deeper. The regularities of nature are not vague habits — they are precise, universal, and mathematical. The same inverse-square law that bends a thrown baseball governs a galaxy a billion light-years away. Physicists have long marveled at what one famous essay called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences — equations worked out on a chalkboard, decades ahead of any observation, turn out to describe particles no one had yet seen. Why should scribbles of pure reason fit the physical world like a glove?
And notice what laws of nature actually are: they are not physical objects. You will never trip over the law of gravity or put a liter of logic in a beaker. Laws are immaterial, universal, unchanging — which is precisely the kind of thing a universe made only of matter is not supposed to contain. When the naturalist says matter obeys laws, he is speaking, whether he likes it or not, the language of legislation. And legislation is what minds do.
The Brute-Fact Answer, Weighed Fairly
The thoughtful naturalist has a reply, and it deserves an honest hearing: “The laws are simply a brute fact. The universe just is orderly. Explanation has to stop somewhere — you say God, I say the laws themselves.”
Take that seriously, and then weigh it. A brute fact is not an explanation; it is a decision to stop explaining. And it stops at a strange place — at contingent regularities that did not have to exist, written in mathematics, intelligible to minds, holding steady across billions of years. That is a lot of unexplained rationality to shrug at, especially for a worldview that prides itself on never shrugging. The Christian claim is not one brute fact versus another. It is that order comes from an Orderer — that the intelligibility of the universe is exactly what you would predict if a rational Mind spoke it into being. One view predicts the data; the other merely inherits it. And it is no accident of history that modern science was cradled in a civilization that believed in one rational Lawgiver — its pioneers expected to find laws precisely because they believed Someone had legislated them.
What Scripture Actually Claims
Here is the remarkable thing: the Bible does not merely allow for a law-governed universe. It asserts one, in writing, millennia before anyone owned a telescope. After the flood, God makes a promise of regularity:
“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
Genesis 8:22 (NASB1995)
Centuries later, God stakes the security of His covenant people on that same regularity — and gives it a name:
“Thus says the LORD, ‘If My covenant for day and night stand not, and the fixed patterns of heaven and earth I have not established, then I would reject the descendants of Jacob…'”
Jeremiah 33:25–26 (NASB1995)
A covenant for day and night. Fixed patterns of heaven and earth. Scripture’s word for the laws of nature is covenant — regularity as promise-keeping. The sun does not rise because the universe is a machine; it rises because God is faithful. That is why the believer is not surprised that experiments repeat. Uniformity is what the character of God looks like when it is expressed in physics.
Not a Watchmaker Who Walked Away
And the New Testament sharpens the claim to a point. The order of the universe is not only authored; it is presently maintained — personally:
“He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
Colossians 1:17 (NASB1995)
“And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.”
Hebrews 1:3 (NASB1995)
Upholds — present tense, continuous. The regularity your experiment counts on, the gravity your next step trusts, the electron shells that keep your chair solid beneath you this instant: Scripture attributes every bit of it to the active, moment-by-moment word of the Son. The deist’s absentee watchmaker is not on offer here. The universe is regular the way a held note is steady — because Someone is still holding it.
Which means the naturalist and the believer live in the same universe but read it opposite ways. One sees rules with no ruler, mathematics with no mind, promises with no promiser — and builds his whole rational life on the ledge of that unexplained order. The other hears in every sunrise exactly what Romans 1:20 says has been audible all along: “His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”
The Upholder Entered What He Upholds
Now follow the doctrine to its staggering end. The Word who legislates the fixed patterns — “all things came into being through Him” (John 1:3) — did not remain on the far side of His laws. “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The Mind behind the mathematics took on a body governed by the very gravity He sustains, walked under the covenant of day and night He swore to Noah, and went to a cross He had every power to refuse.
And even now, the regular universe is preaching. Jesus said the Father “causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). Paul told a pagan crowd that God “did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good and gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons” (Acts 14:17). Every ordinary sunrise you have ever trusted was common grace — the patience of the Upholder, giving one more regular, reliable, covenant-kept day in which to be reconciled to Him. The universe is orderly because God keeps His promises. The cross is proof He keeps the costly ones too. Trust the One who holds all things together, and the ground under your feet — and under your reasoning — finally has a foundation.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist