Abstract: In our experience so far, the universe has worked in remarkably regular ways, and these regularities call for explanation. One way of accounting for them would be to suppose that things have been kept regular by laws of nature, construed as forms of natural necessity, and if we can make sense of there being such laws, this mode of explanation is the most plausible one. Another attractive feature of it is that, if it is accepted, it points the way to a solution to the problem of induction; for, assuming that the relevant laws are uniform across space and time, we know that the way things turn out in the unexamined cases, will conform, in the nomologically relevant respects, to the way they have turned out in the examined cases. If nomological explanations are excluded, the only alternative way of accounting for the regularities, with any prospect of acceptability, would be theistic. Can we, then, make sense of there being laws of the relevant sort? Only, I think, by construing a law as what is created by the causal imposing of a regularity on the universe as a regularity. But the only plausible account of such causal imposing would be theistic. So, whatever explanatory role, if any, we assign to laws, there is a strong case for the acceptance of theism. Once theism is accepted, there are further reasons for insisting that the God it postulates imposes regularities on the universe in a law-creating way.

Keywords: causal imposing, explanation, God, induction, laws of nature, natural necessity, nomological, regularity, theism, universe