[Y]ou... may say, "Well look, we've got no space, no time, no particles, no radiation. That's a pretty good approximation of nothing, but there's still the laws. Who created the laws? And... what we've discovered... in the last ten years or so, and... this is speculative, but it's based on everything we know of in particle physics... It's quite reasonable to suspect that even the laws themselves came into existence when our universe came into existence... There could be many different universes and in each one of them the laws of physics are different. They spontaneously arise when the universe arises.

The more man inquires into the laws which regulate the material universe, the more he is convinced that all its varied forms arise from the action of a few simple principles. These principles themselves converge, with accelerating force, towards some still more comprehensive law to which all matter seems to be submitted. Simple as that law may possibly be, it must be remembered that it is only one amongst an infinite number of simple laws: that each of these laws has consequences at least as extensive as the existing one, and therefore that the Creator who selected the present law must have foreseen the consequences of all other laws.

It would be a triumph to find universal laws of organization for life, ecosystems, and biospheres. The candidate criticality law is emergent and not reducible to physics alone.

To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. That a pitched coin should sometimes turn up heads and sometimes tails calls for no particular explanation; but if it shows heads every time, we wish to know how this result has been brought about. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason.

In a world divided by differences of nationality, race, colour, religion and wealth [the Rule of Law] is one of the greatest unifying factors, perhaps the greatest, the nearest we are likely to approach to a universal secular religion. It remains an ideal, but an ideal worth striving for, in the interests of good government and peace, at home and in the world at large.

Here, then, is the genesis of two of the most important historical premises of Western science. The first is that there is a law of nature, an order of things and events awaiting our discovery, and that this order can be formulated in thought, that is, in words or in some type of notation. The second is that the law of nature is universal, a premise deriving from monotheism, from the idea of one God ruling the whole world.

Even the attitude towards Law itself will have changed. In the dim past the laws of the earliest great civilizations were founded upon the ultimate Divine Principles and Laws which were at work behind all manifesting life, and which were earnestly studied by the priesthood who were usually the law-makers by virtue of that same study. Today many of those old laws would still be invaluable but for the fact that although they have stood the test of time they have been cumbered up by a succession of haphazard man-made laws which depended not upon the Ageless Wisdom for their worth, but upon the mood of some rather mediocre Government.

...The world needed to suffer in order to understand the simplest of universal principles, the unity of man with man and with God. The world of men had to reap the harvest of its seeds of hate, selfishness and greed it had been sowing for centuries. It had to reap this harvest in order to learn that universal law is inevitable and inescapable.

If the laws of physics are so powerful that they can create life … who created the laws?!

Nothing can better express the feelings of the scientist towards the great unity of the laws of nature than in Immanuel Kant's words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe: the stars above me and the moral law within me."… Would he, who did not yet know of the evolution of the world of organisms, be shocked that we consider the moral law within us not as something given, a priori, but as something which has arisen by natural evolution, just like the laws of the heavens?

The laws of nature, as analyzed mathematically and descriptively by Ptolemy and Galen, bore an interesting, and perhaps not entirely accidental similarity to the law of nations and of nature, as discerned by a long succession of Roman jurists. ...The concept of an objective law applicable to human affairs, yet operating in accord with Nature and Reason and apart both from divine revelation and from human whim or passion, was peculiar to Rome and societies descended from Rome.

It offends reason to believe that a well-established natural law can admit of exceptions. A natural law must hold everywhere and always, or be invalid. I cannot believe, for example, that the universal law of gravitation, which governs the physical world, is ever suspended in any instance or at any point of the universe. Now I consider economic laws comparable to natural laws, and I have just as much faith in the principle of the division of labor as I have in the universal law of gravitation. I believe that while these principles can be disturbed, they admit of no exceptions.

Granting, I say that competition has hitherto been the universal law, the last word, of nature, still if only one man should stand up and say, "It shall be so no more," if he should say, "It is not the last word of my nature, and my acts and life declare that it is not," then that so-called law would be at an end.

[T]he universe, we may rest assured, is all alike, the intricate and the simple. It is all a universe of law, from the daisy to the star and from the diatom to the philosopher, from the flowing rivers and growing fields to the processes of our own brains.