An unexpected feature of the universe is its order. How do you explain that the universe conforms to laws of nature? Perhaps these laws are the result of God exercising His will. However, God conforms to a law of nature which is that He can (so it is claimed) do anything. He cannot make himself have this ability to do anything. This represents an order of a sort for which God is not responsible, the way in which his thoughts become reality. But how is this order to be explained? Another solution that might be presented is to say there is no explanation as to why nature conforms to laws. The laws of nature are just brute facts. However for each possible world with ordered laws of nature there is a myriad of other possibilities in which brute facts could have become manifested. Thus the chances that a world would be manifested conforming to regularity would be slim. The brute facts proponent might argue that we have assumed that all the other chaotic possibilities each have an equal probability to the ordered possibility. But maybe there is a bias in favour of there being laws of nature. But then this would constitute a mechanism by which order has a good chance of existing. Without such a mechanism, the brute fact of the existence of laws of nature would be an amazing coincidence in which everything just happens to conform to a pattern.
I would argue that if apparent magic or miracles were possible there must be an underlying mechanism. Against this, Rupert Sheldrake in his book The Science Delusion suggested that one of the apparent delusions in the current practice of science was the belief that a mechanism must underlie any process. I shall argue that any ordered process must have a mechanism otherwise it would constitute an amazing coincidence.
Suppose there is no mechanism which could explain how telepathy worked. This would mean that thoughts in one brain could be duplicated in another brain that has the power to read minds. This would mean the existence of a universe which would normally operate according to rules of science and physics etc but when mind-readers are in the vicinity, the thoughts of others appear in their minds. Now although paranormal powers violate the normal laws of the universe they still have an order of their own in that structures of a certain type (the thoughts of people) lead to corresponding structures in the brain of a mind-reader. How is this order to be explained? We are told that there is no explanation, no mechanism. This constitutes the brute facts model of the universe. But brute facts could produce myriads of other possible structures within the supposed mind-reader, most with no relation to the thoughts of others. Thus by this brute facts model it is improbable that corresponding structures to the thoughts of others would arise n the mind-reader's head. In short, the existence of inexplicable telepathy would be an amazing coincidence. Probably such an amazing coincidence would not happen. If telepathy was detected then there would be an underlying mechanism. If it is just effectively a coincidence that a mind-reader has thoughts that correspond to the thoughts of others, then this casts doubt whether there the thoughts in the mind-reader's head are the causal effect of what goes on in other people's heads. If we are to say that the thoughts in some people were the cause of thoughts in the mind-reader then we need a mechanism to relate these corresponding phenomena otherwise we have just a mere chance correlation.
Take another example such as astrology, in which celestial events involving the planets are the cause of terrestrial events happening to a given person assuming predictions were precise. The chance that such a phenomenon could arise by the random way in which nature selects what brute facts will operate would be pretty slim unless there was a mechanical process which filtered out all other random possibilities, in other words unless there was a mechanical process involved.
A final example is that of a bodiless mind which we call God who can make anything happen. Then by the same token there must be a mechanism which enables Him to do this. However, thinking up how an omnipotent spirit could work is a tough proposition. The way that the God hypothesis appears to work is that all the laws of nature are explained as God using his omnipotent powers to make nature work the way prescribed by the laws of nature. But then you would need to explain how these omnipotent powers themselves work which presumably as an example include making a rhinoceros appear out of nowhere and so forth. We are making the task of explaining the laws of nature harder for ourselves by insisting that God can do anything as opposed to the minimum necessary that would enable Him to start off the Big Bang. However, rather than trying to explain God's amazing abilities would it not be easier to come up with a mechanism that directly explains the laws of nature rather than introducing God as a middle man which involves explaining how a rhinoceros can appear out of nowhere or how a dead person with all their brain cells damaged can come back to life? This would be applying the principle of Occam's Razor where you would only assume the minimum that you need to postulate exists so as to save yourself the job of explaining what does not need to be explained.
