Science vs. Religion

I don't understand why people assume that natural laws must "exist", and this seems to be a philosophical mistake made by both atheists and theists. Think of how many atheists argue against theism by pointing out how well we can explain everything as a result of natural laws. And think of all the theists who believe they need to deny things like evolution. Even Christians who accept evolution usually find it important to believe only in "theistic evolution", where the laws of nature may be responsible for some of the development of life, but God must have intervened in the natural process. They believe there are 2 separate categories: the things God does directly, and the things that are a direct result of natural laws. So those theists argue for the existence of God based on the things they believe we cannot explain by natural laws. So underlying all this, both atheists and theists generally agree that natural laws explain why things happen rather than just how they happen. But why?

Here's a hypothetical situation to make it more clear what I mean. Suppose we have monkeys living in a walled area with a red button in it. Whenever the button is pressed, a human throws a banana over the wall. However, the monkeys never observe the humans; they just notice the correlation between pressing a button and receiving a banana. If one of the monkeys decided to use the scientific method, they would come up with the natural law of banana-button: pressing a button causes a banana to appear. Suppose then that the monkeys begin to debate whether or not humans exist outside their walls, and what effect those humans have on their life. Would it make sense for any of them, regardless of their belief about humans, to say "well clearly the humans couldn't be directly causing the bananas to appear, because the law of banana-button explains that"? No, because the "law of banana-button" is just a description of things that happen, not the actual cause of things that happen.

So how is this different from the natural laws that we have determined via science? Maybe our natural laws are actually the explanation for why things happen the way they do. Or maybe they are just a useful description of things that reliably occur. This is not a question that can be answered by science. The law of gravity is a reliable way to predict the interaction between two physical objects. But is the law of gravity the cause of what we are observing? Who knows? Why would a theist think that natural laws must operate "on their own", rather than just being our observation of the reliable direct actions of supernatural beings (God, angels, demons, etc.)? And with that in mind, why should the big bang, abiogenesis, or evolution be viewed as threats to the idea that God is the direct cause of the development of the universe and life?

I think this is just not a possibility people usually think of; we are for some reason conditioned to think of natural laws as literal things, like the code of a computer program. But regardless of your religious beliefs, it would be beneficial for people to drop this assumption. For scientifically-minded atheists who are concerned with religious attempts to oppose science, it would remove the underlying motivation for some theists to do that. And for theists, the benefits are that, regardless of how well we are able to explain things through scientific laws, it will not be a threat to theism at all. The current idea of a "God of the gaps", where God is just the explanation of what we cannot explain with science, has led to a concept of God that has consistently been shrinking as we scientifically advance. So why not just accept science as descriptively and usefully true, but not necessarily ultimately true?