I still remember a Sunday School lesson taught to our junior high class by the late Kenneth L. Pike (http://www.sil.org/klp/) , on the benefit and necessity of constraints, a.k.a. Law.
A couple of his examples were a skeleton and a football (i.e. soccer) game.
A skeleton prevents your body from moving in certain ways (without breaking a bone); but without it, humans couldn't walk or even stand up. I think it's interesting that there are no large invertebrates (or even cartilege-skeletoned animals) that live on land. Wikipedia says the coconut crab (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab) "is near the theoretical limit for a terrestrial arthropod" in size... and arthropods of course have a rigid exoskeleton. Giant clams and giant squid can be huge, but must be supported by water, and even they need some rigid structures (shell, beak, bone).
An imaginative person might chafe at the restrictions imposed by the skeleton -- "wouldn't it be neat if I could bend my arm like a tentacle?" But the restrictions imposed by bone in fact enable us to do things we couldn't otherwise attempt... like jump.
The rules of a game are another example of restrictions that enable. A "game" without rules is merely play... In a game where rules are not observed, there can be no meaningful winner or scoring. Within the boundaries of rules, great feats can be achieved... cf. the Olympic games. Without enforced rules against performance-enhancing drugs, physical competition would descend into dangerous self-experimentation. Perceived freedom (to use drugs) winds up in loss of freedom (to compete safely).
A couple of years ago, I came across a website for teens that described itself, "No boundaries. No rules. No adults." A moment's thought reveals that all three of these statements are rules and boundaries... and the third is not even "special" (a meta-rule). In other words, flexibility often seems more appealing on the surface, but when you get down to it, we often want or need things to be a certain way, such as "teens only" ... which requires that there are some ways they cannot be, such as "adults allowed".
The same principles apply in science, and in morality, and in philosophy. In order for proposition P to be true in any meaningful way, it is necessary that not(P) is false. A system without constraints, e.g. where "P is true" does not necessarily imply "not(P) is false", leaves us powerless to infer anything.
Lars
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