On Hume and order in nature

[jthegreat]

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.