If it is valid to ask about a stone’s continuing existence, it is certainly valid to pursue the question to a conclusion.[1] So let’s iterate the principle that everything, even constancy, has an explanation. We ask, “Why don’t the conservation laws cease to operate?” As the observed constancy of energy requires a law of conservation of energy, so that law’s observed constancy requires a meta-law conserving it. No new premise or logical principle is involved. We can then ask why the meta-conservation law continues to operate and get a meta-meta-law. It is easy to see that an infinite regress of meta-meta-meta-laws gets us nowhere. In fact, the entire series is just one more thing in need of an explanation. The only way to satisfy the scientific requirement for an explanation is with an object that does not depend on a further conservation law, but is self-conserving. That is God. Unless there is a being that holds itself in existence, the whole structure of science – that phenomena have explanations – fails. The choice is to accept God’s existence and on-going operation, or to abandon science.

An analogy may help. Naturalists are like children whose toys work when plugged into wall sockets. Because the toys work, they think they know all there is to know about pow­ering toys. In the first stage of the proof, I take them outside, show them the power lines and explain that if the socket is not connected to the power lines, their toys won’t work. Then we trace the power back through trans­mission lines and substations. Naturalists believing in infinite regresses think if we just keep adding more lines and substations, we won’t need a power plant. They are wrong. Unless there is a power plant on line, their toys won’t work.

Let’s note some points before moving on to objections:

1.   The argument doesn’t depend on time-sequenced caus­ality. For A to be conserved here and now, its conservation law must operate here and now. The argument says nothing about creation in the past.

2.   Accordingly, supposing the big bang was resulted from fluctuations in a prior chaos does not avoid the logic. To have explanatory value prior state fluctuations must be subject to natural laws leading right back to God.

3.   The universe is as inseparable from God as from its other laws. This is an immanent God. However, there is noth­ing in the argument confining God to our universe. If one believes in dynamically linked multiverses, the same explanation, the same God, causes them all. Multiverses depend on God – not the reverse. The only dependence of God on the universe is logical. The universe is our evidence for knowing God, not God’s reason for exist­ing. God is self-explaining.

4.   God is immaterial in the same sense the laws of nature are. The conservation and other laws are not composed of particles or fields. They are immaterial govern­ing principles. So is God.

What does this show? First, the laws of nature are an incomplete answer to why Paley‘s stone continues to be. There are gaps, as required by Stenger. Second, the premises of scientific logic entail that God exists, is the ultimate source of the laws of nature, and through them of the continuing existence of every material object. This answers Stenger’s requirement that God be “a nanosecond by nanosecond participant in each event.” It does not show that God is intelligent. I will discuss mind in the universe in the next chapter.

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"All men by nature desire to know." Aristotle, Metaphysics A, 1