Not any more than any other laws. No, of course not. But human laws have authors, which is my point. So why when we observe laws in nature do we presume that they have no author? This is contrary to other lived experiences. The presumption should be otherwise.
"I don't know of any un-authored laws"
Stop anthropomorphizing natural occurrences.
I'm not.
The 'laws' of nature are human descriptions of natural consistencies. We observe something that occurs the same way every time and can be modeled mathematically so we call them 'laws'.
Is the "Law of Gravitation" a law or a consistency, that is, is it a statistical probability? My understanding is that the law admits of no exceptions.
Yes. The question is, do we presume that these laws are the result of a law-giver, as are all other laws? Or do we presume otherwise, against all other experience with law?
Some people will do anything, including play semantic games, to make it look like there 'has to be' an intelligent designer.
It is rational to assume that where there is a law there is a law-giver, and where there is design there is a designer. No one's forcing you to take the side of irrationality. You have chosen it freely.
Maybe you could state for us what you think it is.
You mean, like common law? The laws of grammar?
It is rational to assume that where there is a law there is a law-giver, and where there is design there is a designer.
Dawkins answers:
"-- Any entity capable of deliberately designing a living creature, to say nothing of a universe, would have to be hugely complex in its own right. --
-- The designer's spontaneous origin ex nihilo would have to be even more improbable than the most complex of his alleged creations.
Unless, of course, he relied on natural selection to do his work for him! And in that case, one might pardonably wonder (though this is not the place to pursue the question), does he need to exist at all? --"
Can you [or anyone here] answer the resulting rational question? -- Who designed the Designer's "spontaneous origin"?
You are equivocating. Humans do author laws. Physical laws are simply a description of observations. There are no 'laws' in nature. There are in the physical world consistent phenomena that we observe. The consistency allows us to develop mathematical models that describe those actions under specific conditions.
You are conflating the 'law' with the phenomenon.
"Is the "Law of Gravitation" a law or a consistency, that is, is it a statistical probability? My understanding is that the law admits of no exceptions."
The 'Law of Gravity' is a law, as penned by humans. The law of gravity (our description) breaks down in the micro world of quantum physics. Most laws do have exceptions, even the 'Second Law of Thermodynamics' for some substances as they approach zero degrees K.
"It is rational to assume that where there is a law there is a law-giver, and where there is design there is a designer. No one's forcing you to take the side of irrationality. You have chosen it freely."
What is bordering on the irrational is to assume that because humans create legalities that we call laws that the phenomena behind the laws of physics must have been produced by law-givers. The laws of nature (I'm using this as a shorthand to refer to the phenomena the laws describe) and the laws of man are not similar.
The same goes for design. We design. We can recognize our own work. Because some features of nature remind us of our own work we jump to the conclusion that it too must be designed. This is a huge jump. What isn't contained in this equation is our reliance on nature to give us design ideas. The similarity of our design to nature's design is based on our observation of nature, our innate abilities and limitations and the constraints the laws of physics (my shorthand again) places on both us and nature.
As for Dembski's ideas of complexity and specificity as well as his unfounded and unsupported 'Law of Conservation of Information' have been roundly debunked by a mathematician and a biologist Here and by others Here and Here.
The assumption that only intelligences can produce complexity that appears to have a purpose is simply that, an assumption.