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Just a quick post related to my discussion with NotReady about Hume and order in nature. Hume argued that there is no way to deductively prove that nature is ordered, and therefore must be presupposed.

After a lot of that, I think he's right that it can't be proved deductively, but I also think it doesn't matter because it doesn't have to be. Order in the universe is axiomatic. The fact that "things" exist and interact at all shows that the universe is ordered, at least on a macroscopic scale. Life, for example, just wouldn't be possible in true chaos.

This isn't to say that the universe is necessarily eternally ordered, but for right now, the fact that it's ordered is axiomatic.

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While Hume did note that you cannot show that nature is uniform via a deductive argument, that much is already granted. Hume's main point was that we cannot show that nature is uniform by induction, because every inductive argument must presuppose the uniformity of nature.

I don't get the rest of what you say. I'm not sure what you mean by "order in the universe is axiomatic," unless you just mean something like we can observe that nature is uniform and therefore can accept it as a given. But that's just Hume's point--we cannot just accept it as a given, because there is no rational ground for showing that nature is uniform--either across time or across space (e.g., we cannot show rationally that the same laws of nature that we take to govern natural phenomena will hold tomorrow, or that they hold in some distant region of the universe as yet unseen).