ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 moves into the contemporary philosophical question of the nature of the laws of nature. If intervention entails the breaking of natural law, what precisely is being broken? There are four main approaches in philosophy of science: Humean reductionism, supervenience on causal powers, the structure of possible worlds, and nomological realism. The first denies that laws have any metaphysical significance. They are merely statements that organize and systematize scientific knowledge. The second takes laws to depend on dispositions – a technical term. These are responsible for causal regularities among events in this view, not the laws themselves. The third agrees that laws are not fundamental but grounds them in relations among possible worlds: the ways in which reality could have been different. The fourth takes laws to be fundamental: They are metaphysically real and cannot be reduced to any of the other three accounts. What the problem of divine intervention amounts to is a function of which view one holds.
