The Human Question

Hence treating science qua repository of the knowledge of such laws is a religious activity. What color is necessity?  What shape?

This relates to that analysis of mechanism where a person discovers a machine/or/device and tries to analyze it without guessing its purpose....he would describe it in lawful language. The new point is that engineering (techne/ars in Greek/Latin) is able to use nature for achieving human purposes precisely by thinking of nature as an instrument.  In order to give a supervening purpose to nature, it must describe it in a manner that is, in a sense, ateleological.  And that language is naturally mathematical.  A cook counts how many eggs; a cosmetologist talks about hair length, a farmer talks in geometrical language about how to plow the field. Could we include hypothetical reasoning w/ mathematical? That's probably not 100% on target, but I do think I'm on to something...

Suppose you encounter a machine whose purpose you cannot fathom.  You can analyze how each part pushes and pulls the other and even the various ways in which the combined parts may act.  You can describe those movements in terms of laws.  And these laws are laws open to the possibility of having one purpose or another.  That is, you can know HOW the parts behave without determining whether they even have a purpose. Suppose, however, that the evidence is overwhelming that it is indeed a human built machine:  in such a case you can can know THAT the whole has a purpose without knowing WHAT the purpose is.  In a sense, the purpose is not the sum of the parts, but rather the same sum in relation to a specific purported purpose had by the one who designed it. BTW: I don't know what the purpose of this analysis is...