History: Religion, Greek Philosophy, and The Role of Roman Law in The Development of The Concept of
Compared to pre-modern accounts of causality, laws of nature fill the role played by divine causality on the one hand, and accounts such as Plato's theory of forms on the other.
The observation that there are underlying regularities in nature dates to prehistoric times, since the recognition of cause-and-effect relationships is an implicit recognition that there are laws of nature. The recognition of such regularities as independent scientific laws per se, though, was limited by their entanglement in animism, and by the attribution of many effects that do not have readily obvious causes—such as meteorological, astronomical and biological phenomena—to the actions of various gods, spirits, supernatural beings, etc. Observation and speculation about nature were intimately bound up with metaphysics and morality.
In Europe, systematic theorizing about nature (physis) began with the early Greek philosophers and scientists and continued into the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods, during which times the intellectual influence of Roman law increasingly became paramount.
The formula "law of nature" first appears as "a live metaphor" favored by Latin poets Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Manilius, in time gaining a firm theoretical presence in the prose treatises of Seneca and Pliny. Why this Roman origin? According to Lehoux's persuasive narrative, the idea was made possible by the pivotal role of codified law and forensic argument in Roman life and culture.
For the Romans . . . the place par excellence where ethics, law, nature, religion and politics overlap is the law court. When we read Seneca's Natural Questions, and watch again and again just how he applies standards of evidence, witness evaluation, argument and proof, we can recognize that we are reading one of the great Roman rhetoricians of the age, thoroughly immersed in forensic method. And not Seneca alone. Legal models of scientific judgment turn up all over the place, and for example prove equally integral to Ptolemy's approach to verification, where the mind is assigned the role of magistrate, the senses that of disclosure of evidence, and dialectical reason that of the law itself.
The precise formulation of what are now recognized as modern and valid statements of the laws of nature dates from the 17th century in Europe, with the beginning of accurate experimentation and development of advanced form of mathematics.. The modern scientific method which took shape at this time (with Francis Bacon and Gallileo) aimed at total separation of science from theology, with minimal speculation about metaphysics and ethics. Natural law in the political sense, conceived as universal (i.e., divorced from sectarian religion and accidents of place), was also elaborated in this period (by Grotius, Spinoza, and Hobbes, to name a few).
Read more about this topic: Physical Law
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