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We humans are proud of our ability to discover “laws of nature” and use them to our advantage. We are also proud of our ability to create laws and rules to govern our own behavior. But as we all know, when human laws conflict with laws of nature, nature always wins. We can no more make Corona viruses illegal than King Canute could order the tides to stop. We can only try to change our own behavior by adopting new rules or laws for us to follow.
Speed limits for driving provide a simple example of the difference between laws of nature and human laws. If a driver takes a curve too fast and goes off the road, that violates a law of nature, but if a driver goes too fast through a school zone, that violates a human law. Laws of nature are self-enforcing, while human laws must be enforced by humans. We can evade human laws by cheating, but we can’t cheat nature.
We learn natural laws inductively, by examining many cases, by making hypotheses that attempt to explain natural phenomena, and by systematically testing those hypotheses. That’s the scientific method. We learn human laws by agreeing to them, being taught them, and enforcing them, however unnatural they may seem. That’s the legislative, legal method.
Both kinds of laws have limitations. We describe natural laws as well as we can, but nature does what it does regardless of our…
