The birth of naturalism
The modern era is often seen as the triumph of science over supernaturalism. But what really happened is far more interesting
By any measure, the scientific revolution of the 17th century was a significant milestone in the emergence of our modern secular age.
This remarkable historical moment is often understood as science finally liberating itself from the strictures of medieval religion, striking out on a new path that eschewed theological explanations and focused its attentions solely on a disenchanted, natural world.
But this version of events is, at best, half true. Medieval science, broadly speaking, had followed Aristotle in seeking explanations in terms of the inherent causal properties of natural things.
God was certainly involved, at least to the extent that he had originally invested things with their natural properties and was said to ‘concur’ with their usual operations. Yet the natural world had its own agency.
Beginning in the 17th century, the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes and his fellow intellectual revolutionaries dispensed with the idea of internal powers and virtues. They divested natural objects of inherent causal powers and attributed all motion and change in the universe directly to natural laws.
But, for all their transformative influence, key agents in the scientific revolution such as Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton are not our modern and secular forebears.
They did not share our contemporary understandings of the natural or our idea of ‘laws of nature’ that we imagine underpins that naturalism.
To find where our sense of science and natural law comes from, we have to move forward, all the way to the late 19th century. Only then do we see the appearance of the same substantive understanding of scientific naturalism that is commonplace today.
In essence, this is the view described and endorsed by the theoretical physicist Sean Carroll in The Big Picture (2016):
There is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the ‘laws of nature’, and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation.
There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life.
Richard Dawkins advocates a similar understanding of naturalism in The God Delusion (2006), declaring that ‘there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe …’ This position informs not only the sciences but the humanities, too.
The great majority of contemporary philosophers, writes the philosopher David Papineau, concur in their rejection of supernatural entities. Indeed, this seems to be one of the few things on which philosophers are able to agree.
The phrase ‘scientific naturalism’ and its modern, secular meaning of a purely naturalistic approach to the world comes to us from Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was a talented and energetic 19th-century biologist who gained a formidable reputation as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’.
He was the one who popularised the use of the expression ‘scientific naturalism’ and associated it with the progress of the modern sciences. Huxley was concerned with what he saw as the undue influence of ecclesiastical authorities on the content and conduct of science.
Given the extent to which Anglican clergymen in England dominated scientific posts in universities and scientific institutions such as the Royal Society, this concern was entirely understandable. With like-minded individuals such as the Irish physicist John Tyndall, Huxley sought to wrest control of science from the religious establishment.
Integral to his mission was a characterisation of science as intrinsically naturalistic, as opposed to a theology that was said to be intrinsically supernaturalistic. Both of these terms, used in this sense, were coinages of the 19th century.
In fact, Huxley adopted his naturalism/supernaturalism dichotomy from the language of German biblical criticism, in which he took a particular interest.
To help legitimate his ‘scientific naturalism’, Huxley provided naturalism with a long history dating back to the Presocratic philosophers of ancient Greece. History would show, so the argument went, that ‘supernaturalistic’ interference in the sciences had always been counterproductive.
Huxley went so far as to suggest that the historical process of civilisation could be understood as a perennial struggle between two fundamentally opposed approaches: naturalism and supernaturalism.
In ‘Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions’ (1892), he wrote:
‘Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation.’
In Huxley’s view, science was the enemy of supernaturalism, and the march of civilisation was to be understood in terms of naturalism gradually gaining the upper hand over supernaturalism.
While Huxley was an excellent biologist and remarkably well read in contemporary philosophy and theology, his historical reconstructions left much to be desired. For a start, scientific luminaries of the past such as Kepler, Descartes, Boyle and Newton had in fact cherished strong religious beliefs and had typically regarded these beliefs as foundational to their scientific endeavours.
The same was true for many of Huxley’s distinguished scientific contemporaries including Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin. Yet Huxley’s historical reconstructions struck a chord by tapping into a growing historical sensibility that envisioned a scientifically advanced Europe moving beyond its religious past and abandoning its commitment to belief in supernatural entities.
A measure of support for Huxley’s version of history came from the nascent social sciences, which developed in the wake of the Enlightenment and sought to offer ‘scientific’, or least non-providentialist, accounts of the development of human history.
One of the best-known and most influential schemas was that of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who maintained that human knowledge inexorably passes through three successive stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the ‘positive’ (or scientific).
On this model, rather than contributing positively to scientific progress, theological assertions were primitive forms of thought that would inevitably be displaced by more developed forms.
Progressivist three-fold typologies of this kind would subsequently become commonplace in the anthropological literature.
The influential Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer, in his massive, multivolume work The Golden Bough (1890), offered a sustained argument for the natural progression of human knowledge from superstitious belief in magic, through religion, to an enlightened acceptance of science.
These transitions were typically understood as laws of human progress, analogous in certain respects to laws of nature in the realm of the sciences.
Similar sentiments underpinned the 19th-century invention of what historians of science refer to as ‘the conflict thesis’, which holds that this history is characterised by unremitting warfare between science and religion.
The history of science is in reality ‘a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers’, wrote John Draper in his widely circulated History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874).
The other chief progenitor of the conflict thesis, Andrew Dickson White, offered a similar judgment in his two-volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), maintaining that Western intellectual history is to be understood in terms of a ‘conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific.’
Crucially, these historical models assumed that Europe was in the vanguard of the march of progress. Draper declared that nations ‘pass through an ascending or descending career’. He wrote that Newton represented the pinnacle of civilisational ascent, while ‘the Australian savage’, whose life ‘is like that of a beast’, was its nadir.
It followed that features of Western exceptionalism, such as its increasingly naturalistic outlook, were not historical aberrations, but rather evidence of civilisational superiority. Few social scientists today would profess overt allegiance to these deterministic historical models in the form in which they were originally set out.
Arguably, however, tacit assumptions of Western superiority still cast a shadow on our present historical and anthropological understandings. This applies, for example, to our disingenuous bracketing of the truth claims of many traditional cultures and, indeed, of our own forebears.
In practice, this amounts to dismissing them as false, but without having to say so.
Leaving aside these associations with Western triumphalism, Huxley’s version of history, in which supernaturalism is engaged in an enduring struggle with naturalism, suffers from two fatal flaws.
First, past historical actors, and indeed many non-Western cultures, observe no clear distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Second, and somewhat paradoxically, religious assumptions about the way in which nature is ordered turn out to have been crucial to the emergence of a naturalistic outlook.
To most modern Westerners, the natural/supernatural distinction seems obvious and, well, natural. Yet, a few historians and social scientists have provided intimations of its historical and cultural novelty.
In his classic book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), the sociologist Émile Durkheim attempted to arrive at a definition of religion that fitted all of the relevant phenomena. He dispensed with the common assumption that ‘belief in supernatural beings’ was an essential component of religion, pointing out that ‘the idea of the supernatural arrived only yesterday.’
It has become increasingly apparent that Durkheim was understating the case: in most traditional cultures, the idea of the supernatural never arrived at all. In his posthumously published The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (2022), the iconoclastic University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins enumerated instance after instance of societies that are completely innocent of any distinction between natural and supernatural.
Sahlins described the deployment of this dichotomy in anthropological contexts as an ‘ethnographic original sin’. More generally, he points out that our ways of understanding non-Western cultures often involve the imposition of ‘a misleading conceptual apparatus composed of nearly equal parts of transcendentalist equivocation and colonialist condescension.’
Our present natural/supernatural distinction is a clear case in point, and its uncritical application to an understanding of our own history is no less problematic.
How, then, did we come to inherit this salient distinction, and what does its history tell us about the way we apply it to our own culture and those of others? A key phase in the evolution of our modern natural/supernatural distinction came in the European Middle Ages, where we encounter its first linguistic footprints.
The initial detective work was conducted by the 20th-century Jesuit scholar Henri de Lubac, whose comprehensive survey of texts of the ancient and medieval periods, Surnaturel (1946), revealed that the word ‘supernatural’ (supernaturalis) and its equivalents were almost completely absent from canonical writings until the 13th century.
In fact, we do not encounter the word ‘supernatural’ in the official documents of the Catholic Church until 1567. Christianity had thus existed for more than a millennium without a concept purportedly central to its identity as a religion.
De Lubac showed that the first occurrence of the expression ‘supernatural’ came in the writings of the influential 13th-century Dominican philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas.
While Aquinas’s deployment of this new terminology did not yet represent the exclusive disjunction we are now familiar with, it nonetheless provided the vocabulary that would subsequently develop in our natural/supernatural divide.
It is something of a miracle that the fruits of de Lubac’s labours have come down to us at all. The initial draft of his Surnaturel was compiled while he was on the run from the Nazis in 1940s France.
A paper shortage then seriously impacted the publication of the work and limited its initial circulation. Finally, having escaped the unwelcome attentions of Nazis, his own Church took a dim view of his work and its implications, casting him into intellectual exile for several years.
Happily, his fortunes changed and he now enjoys a reputation as one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of the 20th century. That said, in spite of its importance, Surnaturel has yet to be translated into English.
De Lubac’s investigation of the idea of the supernatural was not motivated by an idle curiosity about the history of particular words. He harboured a suspicion that the appearance of the modern natural/supernatural distinction had been instrumental in the process of secularisation.
In his view, this conceptual development was deeply implicated in the emergence of the idea of an independent and self-subsistent natural world – one that could operate without its supernatural counterpart.
In retrospect, the rationale is clear: modern naturalism logically depends on the viability of a natural/supernatural disjunction. What follows is that the historical advent of the idea of the supernatural, paradoxically, established the conditions for the denial of what it was supposed to represent.
De Lubac’s argument about how Aquinas’s relatively innocent distinction eventually morphed into something that was inimical to a religious outlook on the world focused on a series of recondite theological discussions about ‘pure nature’ that took place in the 16th century.
The import of these early modern theological discussions is now obscure to most of us, but the case that de Lubac makes is plausible. In any case, there were additional developments in the natural sciences relating to supernaturalism that were just as influential, and their significance is a little easier to follow.
Here again, the relevant history reveals some surprises. Counterintuitively, the explanations deployed by the pioneers of experimental science were more supernaturalistic than those of their medieval predecessors.
This is taken from a long document, read the rest here aeon.co
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