I was using "the final laws of nature" in the sense of a complete
description (perhaps compressed, such as "the set of all integers" rather than
a detailed listing of them) of the universe, and so with that sense I would
include God's personal action. Thus I was using "laws" in a descriptive rather
than a prescriptive sense. Now maybe "law" even in this sense has a
connotation of being a compression of the information, and so if one cannot
compress (e.g., give simpler reasons explaining) God's personal action, I
should not have used the word "law" for it. On the other hand, I think that
many, such as Jonathan Edwards, would say that there are simpler reasons for
God's personal actions, such as God's supreme wisdom and goodness, even if they
might not believe that these reasons can be expressed in the mathematical form
of the present laws of physics. So I am not sure these people (including
myself) would be averse to using "law" for God's personal actions even if "law"
is taken to imply a compression of the actions.
On the question of the division of what Craig prefers to call
"operation principles" (but which I don't clearly see as different from laws,
unless he simply means that they are just partial descriptions rather than a
complete one, or maybe that they can conflict, so that they do not always
apply) into the two types ("normal-appearing" and "personal action"), I guess
that I would like to see more clearly evidence for this division. Valuing
simplicity of descriptions is a very strong motivation (particularly for a
scientist, but I would think for anyone), and to me it strongly suggests the
working hypothesis that there is no such division, but this seems theologically
rather unpalatable to many of us. So what strong evidence is there that there
really is this division, and that it is not just wishful thinking? (Of course,
one could counter that it is just wishful thinking to suppose that the division
is not there, but one would like evidence rather than just opposing wishful
thoughts.)
Don Page