Acknowledgements
This volume had its origins in a conference held at Florida State University in February 2013. The meeting was to mark the retirement of the distinguished historian of science and medicine, Ronald L. Numbers, and to explore some of the themes of his seminal work on the historical relations between science and religion. One of those themes was scientific naturalism, and it became clear over the course of the meeting that there was room for a volume that dealt in detail with the historical origins of scientific naturalism, covering different historical eras and various scientific disciplines—hence, this present collection. A number of the contributors to this volume were present at that meeting. Other attendees offered helpful commentary and critique of those early drafts, and joined in what were extremely productive discussions of key issues. There is a long list of people to thank for those contributions: Terrie Aamodt, Keith Benson, Jon Butler, Ted Davis, Matt Day, Noah Efron, John Evans, Dana Freiburger, Fred Gregory, Florence Hsia, Judith Leavitt, Sue Lederer, David Livingstone, Jay Malone, Gregg Mitman, Blair Neilson, Efthymios Nicolaidis, Shawn Peters, Bob Richards, Todd Savitt, Rennie Schoepflin, Adam Shapiro, Hugh Slotten, Elliot Sober, John Stenhouse, Rod Stiling, William Trollinger, Steve Wald, John Harley Warner, and Stephen Weldon. Particular thanks are due to Jeffrey Jentzen, and to the Department of Medical History and Bioethics of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for their financial support. Michael Ruse was a congenial and entertaining host at FSU, and also made a generous contribution, both materially and intellectually. Finally, we must express a special debt of gratitude to The Historical Society, Boston University, and Donald A. Yerxa, who were enthusiastic supporters of this project from the start, and whose generosity has made possible this collection.
Like that original meeting, this volume is dedicated to Ron Numbers, an outstanding scholar and dedicated teacher, a source of encouragement and inspiration to generations of historians, and, for many of us, a valued colleague and dear friend.
1. ‘All Things are Full of Gods’: Naturalism in the Classical World 19 Daryn Lehoux
2. Naturalist Tendencies in Medieval Science
Michael H. Shank
3. Laws of God or Laws of Nature? Natural Order in the Early Modern Period 58
Peter Harrison
4. Between Isaac Newton and Enlightenment Newtonianism: The ‘God Question’ in the Eighteenth Century 77 J. B. Shank
5. God and the Uniformity of Nature: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Physics
Matthew Stanley
6. Chemistry with and without God
John Hedley Brooke
7. Removing God from Biology
Michael Ruse
8. Christian Materialism and the Prospect of Immortality
Michelle Pfeffer
9. The Science of the Soul: Naturalizing the Mind in Great Britain and North America
Jon H. Roberts
10. Down to Earth: Untangling the Secular from the Sacred in Late-Modern Geology
Nicolaas Rupke
11. Naturalizing the Bible: The Shifting Role of the Biblical Account of Nature
Scott Gerard Prinster
12. Anthropology and Original Sin: Naturalizing Religion, Theorizing the Primitive
13. The Theology of Victorian Scientific Naturalists 235 Bernard Lightman
List of Figures
1.1. Sidney Harris on Method. © ScienceCartoonsPlus.com 36
4.1. Étienne-Louis Boullée, imagined cenotaph for Isaac Newton, interior view with orrery above tomb. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 78
4.2. God as Architect/Builder/Geometer/Craftsman, The Frontispiece of Bible Moralisée (mid-thirteenth century), ÖNB Vienna, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, f.1 verso. Wiki-Commons. 82
4.3. Christ Salvator Mundi, artist unknown, lower Rhine, 1537–45. Getty Images. 83
4.4. William Blake, Newton. Source: Tate Images. 96
12.1. Jacket of William K. Gregory, Our Face from Fish to Man (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929). 217
Notes on Contributors
John Hedley Brooke is Andreas Idreos Professor Emeritus of Science and Religion, University of Oxford. He has published extensively on the interface between science and religion, the history of natural theology, and the Darwinian revolution. His books include Science and Religion around the World, edited with Ronald L. Numbers (Oxford, 2011), Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, edited with Ian Maclean (Oxford, 2005), and Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991).
Constance Clark is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She is the author of God—or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age (Johns Hopkins, 2008). Her current research focuses on the history of popularizations of evolution, palaeontology and anthropology, especially in museums and zoos, and on the visual culture of popular science.
Peter Harrison is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia. His six books include The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago, 2015)—based on his 2011 Gifford Lectures, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998) and Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science (Chicago, 2011), co-edited with Michael H. Shank and Ronald L. Numbers.
Daryn Lehoux is Professor of Classics at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. He is the author of What Did the Romans Know? (Chicago, 2012) and Astronomy, Weather, and Calendars in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 2007) as well as the co-editor, with A. D. Morrison and Alison Sharrock, of Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science (Oxford, 2013). He has published numerous papers and chapters on the ancient sciences and on the epistemology of nature.
Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, Toronto. Lightman’s most recent publications include Victorian Popularizers of Science (Chicago, 2007), Victorian Scientific Naturalism (co-edited with Gowan Dawson; Chicago, 2014), Evolution and Victorian Culture (co-edited with Bennett Zon; Cambridge, 2014), and The Age of Scientific Naturalism (co-edited with Michael Reidy; Pickering & Chatto, 2014). He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.
Notes on Contributors
Michelle Pfeffer is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Her research explores the multifaceted discussions about the human soul in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which embraced scientific, philosophical, medical, theological, and historical discourses. Her particular interests lie in the contentious debates over the immortal and immaterial nature of the human soul. Other research interests include early modern medicine, the history of scholarship, and religiously motivated responses to contemporary ‘materialist’ science.
Scott Gerard Prinster is a PhD candidate at the University of WisconsinMadison, under the guidance of Ronald L. Numbers. His dissertation addresses the shifting relationships between biblical knowledge and scientific knowledge in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century United States. Other research interests include American intellectual history, the popular spread of scienceand-religion dialogue, and the construction of expertise and attitudes towards educated authority and intellectualism.
Jon H. Roberts is the Tomorrow Foundation Professor of History at Boston University. He has written a number of articles dealing primarily with the history of the relationship between science and religion, as well as the book Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Notre Dame, 2001) which received the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. He has also co-authored with James Turner The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton, 2001). He is currently working on a book dealing with American Protestant thinkers’ treatment of the mind between the outset of the settlement of North America and 1940.
Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University. The author or editor of over fifty books, most on or around the history and philosophy of evolutionary theory, his next two books are Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, (Oxford), and (co-authored with Robert J. Richards) Debating Darwin: Mechanist or Romantic? (Chicago). He is now writing a book on evolution and literature.
Nicolaas Rupke recently retired from the Chair of the History of Science at Göttingen University and now holds the Johnson Professorship of History at Washington and Lee University. A geologist and historian of geology, his publications cover issues that pertain to the relationship of Bible and science. Among his books are Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (Chicago, 2009), Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago, 2008) and the edited volume Eminent Lives in Twentieth-Century Science and Religion (Peter Lang, 2009). Currently he is working on the non-Darwinian tradition in evolutionary biology.
J. B. Shank is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota, and the Director of the University of Minnesota Center for Early Modern History and the Mellon Foundation funded Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World. His research focuses on the history of the mathematical and physical sciences in early modern Europe and their relation to the broader intellectual and cultural history of the period. He is the author of The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2008).
Michael H. Shank is Professor of History of Science and Integrated Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has broad interests in the physical sciences (and their analogues and contexts) before 1700. His primary research interests focus on late medieval natural philosophy and astronomy. He is the author of ‘Unless You Believe, You Shall Not Understand’: Logic, University, and Society in Late Medieval Vienna (Princeton, 1988), and co-editor (with Peter Harrison and Ronald Numbers), of Wrestling With Nature: From Omens to Science (Chicago, 2011).
Matthew Stanley is an Associate Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago, 2007), which examines how scientists reconcile their religious beliefs and professional lives. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the British Academy, and the Max Planck Institute. He currently runs the New York City History of Science Working Group.
Introduction
Peter Harrison
In 1922, Canadian philosopher Roy Wood Sellars confidently declared that ‘we are all naturalists now’.1 While Sellars’s announcement was perhaps a little premature, it is difficult to deny, almost one hundred years later, that commitment to some form of naturalism is the default position in virtually all departments of human knowledge. ‘Naturalism’, of course, can mean a number of different things. But what most forms of scientific naturalism have in common is a commitment to the methods of the natural sciences and to the reliability of the knowledge generated by those methods. As Sellars himself expressed it, naturalism is not so much a philosophical system as ‘a recognition of the impressive implications of the physical and biological sciences’.2 When we inquire further into what, specifically, is naturalistic about the sciences, the simplest answer is that their methods involve a rejection of supernatural or spiritual explanations and a focus on what is explicable in terms of natural causes, forces, and laws. Naturalism and science thus go hand in hand. This volume is about that partnership, and its long and intriguing history.
THE VARIETIES OF NATURALISM
While the subject of this book is the history of scientific naturalism, it is helpful to begin in the present with contemporary debates about naturalism and its relation to the natural sciences. Modern discussions of scientific naturalism
1 Roy Wood Sellars, Evolutionary Naturalism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1922), p. i.
2 Sellars, Evolutionary Naturalism, p. i. Sellars’s son, Wilfred Sellars, put it even more starkly: ‘science is the measure of all things’: Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 173. On the varieties of naturalism see Geert Keil, ‘Naturalism’, in The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 254–307; David Papineau, ‘Naturalism’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 edn), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/.
usually distinguish between methodological naturalism and metaphysical (or ontological) naturalism.3 The former, as the name suggests, refers to the methods employed by the scientist, which involve a bracketing out of any supernatural or non-physical explanations in the pursuit of an understanding of the world. Adoption of methodological naturalism is thus usually thought to be consistent with having religious commitments—it is just that these commitments are deemed irrelevant to the conduct of science. This tidy way of setting aside the religious views of scientific practitioners has been standard practice within the scientific community for some time, and theistic scientists have been among its most enthusiastic proponents. The expression ‘methodological naturalism’ was coined by theologian and philosopher Edgar S. Brightman in a 1936 address to the American Philosophical Association. While the term was not widely adopted at the time, since the 1990s it has become increasingly prominent in discussions about the nature of modern science, partly owing to its endorsement and popularization by Christian philosopher Paul de Vries.4
Adoption of methodological naturalism is now widely regarded as one of the key ways of demarcating science from non-science. In legal battles over the status of scientific creationism and intelligent design, successive US courts over a period of three decades have endorsed the principle of methodological naturalism as an essential feature of science. When rendering his 2005 verdict on the ‘unscientific’ status of intelligent design, Judge John E. Jones thus declared that ‘expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena’. The judge went on to say that this avoidance of reference to the supernatural was a ‘self-imposed convention of science’ and ‘is referred to by philosophers as “methodological naturalism” ’.5 The expert testimony to which the judge referred included statements from theologian John Haught, philosopher Robert T. Pennock, and biologist Kenneth R. Miller.
If methodological naturalism is not necessarily inimical to theism, the same cannot be said for metaphysical naturalism. This is the position that goes
3 For this distinction see, e.g., Robert Pennock, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999), p. 191; Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke, and Johan Braeckman, ‘How Not to Attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical Misconceptions about Methodological Naturalism’, Foundations of Science 15 (2010): pp. 227–44; B. Forrest, ‘Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection’, Philo 3 (2000): pp. 7–29.
4 ‘Such a universal naturalism—common to idealists and realists, to naturalists and theists alike—may be called scientific or methodological naturalism. But methodological naturalism is sharply to be distinguished from metaphysical naturalism.’ Edgar Sheffield Brightman, ‘An Empirical Approach to God’, Philosophical Review 46 (1937): pp. 157–8; Paul de Vries, ‘Naturalism in the Natural Sciences’, Christian Scholar’s Review 15 (1986): pp. 388–96. See also Ronald L. Numbers, ‘Science without God: Natural Laws and Christian Beliefs’, in Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 39–58.
5 Tammy Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District et al., 400 F.Sup2d 707 (2005). No. 04cv2688.
beyond a mere methodological stance to assert that in reality there are no supernatural agents or forces, and that the natural sciences have the potential to explain everything. Naturalism in this sense, explains philosopher Kai Nielsen, ‘denies that there are any spiritual or supernatural realities’.6 Fellow philosopher David Papineau concurs with this characterization, adding that what follows from it is that all natural phenomena are physical and that all natural events are explicable, in principle, in terms of the laws of physics.7 Metaphysical naturalists reject the existence of anything beyond the physical world and often represent themselves as being resolutely opposed to religion, superstition, and obscurantism. Papineau suggests that ‘the great majority of contemporary philosophers’ fall into this camp.8
While these definitions might seem clear enough in theory, in fact, understandings of scientific naturalism—its dual forms and their implications—have become the subject of considerable controversy.9 As we have already seen, one of the chief sites of contestation in the United States concerns the scientific status of intelligent design and ‘scientific creationism’. The distinction between methodological and metaphysical naturalism also invites the question of how they are related, and whether one might lead to the other. The advocacy of methodological naturalism by religiously committed philosophers and scientists would suggest that the principle is, at the very least, consistent with religious belief. This is because naturalistic methods are understood as a self-imposed limitation upon science, and one that restricts its competence to explanations of physical realities. The spiritual and supernatural, on this view, lie beyond the scope of scientific investigation. It follows that methodological naturalism insulates the realm of theology and the supernatural from scientific scrutiny. The US National Academy of Sciences puts it this way:
Because science is limited to explaining the natural world by means of natural processes, it cannot use supernatural causation in its explanations. Similarly, science is precluded from making statements about supernatural forces because these are outside its provenance.10
This stance is consistent with a more general position on the relations between science and religion that sees them as operating in independent spheres or ‘non-overlapping magisteria’, to use the well-worn phrase of Stephen J. Gould.11
6 Kai Nielsen, ‘Naturalistic Explanations of Religious Belief’, in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 402.
7 David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 16.
8 Papineau, ‘Naturalism’.
9 For difficulties of definition see Hans Halvorson, ‘What is Methodological Naturalism?’, in The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, ed. Kelly James Clark (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 136–49; Michael Rea, ‘Naturalism and Material Objects’, in Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, ed. William J. Craig and J. P. Moreland (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 110–32.
10 National Academy of Sciences, Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1998), p. 124.
11 Stephen J Gould, Rock of Ages (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), p. 5.
This irenic arrangement has not found favour with all scientists and philosophers, however. Some critics have labelled this stance ‘accommodationism’, arguing that advocacy of methodological naturalism in the sense outlined above concedes far too much to religion, and is itself a form of theology.12 It has also been suggested that methodological naturalism, far from insulating religion from the potentially corrosive influence of the natural sciences, ultimately points to the truth of thoroughgoing metaphysical naturalism. The reasoning goes like this: modern science assumes no supernatural causes; modern science has been remarkably successful; hence, its working assumption must be correct and metaphysical naturalism is true.13 This argument evinces a significantly different understanding of methodological naturalism to the one set out above, regarding it as a provisional hypothesis that is subsequently justified in light of the successes of modern science. If this view is correct, it follows that the realm of the supernatural cannot be quarantined from scientific investigation in the way that many theistic scientists suggest. Rather, methodological naturalism is ‘a provisory and empirically grounded attitude of scientists which is justified in virtue of the consistent success of naturalistic explanations and the lack of success of supernaturalistic explanations in the history of science. Science does have a bearing on supernatural hypotheses, and its verdict is uniformly negative.’14 The logic of this position shows why metaphysical naturalists typically reject the existence of the supernatural and at the same time argue for the omnicompetence of science. Clearly, then, there are two opposing understandings of the implications of methodological naturalism.
Another area of contemporary controversy has to do with whether methodological naturalism is an appropriate investigative strategy for committed theists. While religious scientists have been prominent advocates of the standard version of methodological naturalism, a few of their coreligionists differ. Most obviously, advocates of intelligent design have argued that there may be scientific grounds for thinking that such mechanisms as natural selection offer inadequate explanations of some features of living things. Naturalistic explanations of certain complex features of living things are argued to be
12 See, e.g., Jerry A. Coyne, ‘Science, Religion and Society: The Problem of Evolution in America’, Evolution 66–8 (2012): pp. 2654–63.
13 See, e.g., Forrest, ‘Methodological Naturalism,’ esp. p. 21; Pennock, Tower of Babel, p. 191; Michael Ruse, Darwinism and its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 48; Coyne, ‘Science, Religion and Society’.
14 Boudry, Blancke, and Braeckman, ‘How Not to Attack Intelligent Design Creationism’, p. 227. A similar line of argument may be found in Paul Draper, ‘God, Science, and Naturalism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, ed. William Wainwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 272–303; Forrest, ‘Methodological Naturalism’; Alexander Rosenberg, ‘Disenchanted Naturalism’, in Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and its Implications, ed. Bana Bashour and Hans D. Muller (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 17–36; Brian L. Keeley, ‘Natural Mind’, in The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, ed. Kelly James Clark (Oxford: Blackwell, 2016), pp. 196–208. For a critique see Peter Harrison, ‘Naturalism and the Success of Science’, Religious Studies, forthcoming.
impossible in principle, and it follows that complete explanation must involve recourse to design.15
A related line of argument comes from the Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, who suggests that we think about methodological naturalism as a constraint on the ‘evidence base’ of scientific enquiry. Plantinga proposes that the evidence base of Christians should include the existence of God and presumably of divine actions. This expanded evidence base would in principle give rise to a different kind of investigative activity that he has termed ‘Augustinian Science’. Plantinga concedes that his perspective is ‘unpopular and heretical’, but nonetheless thinks it worth pursuing. This is partly because of his conviction that, in spite of its neutral pretensions, science as currently practised is in fact incipiently atheistic. To this extent he seems to agree with those who argue that the success of methodological naturalism points to the truth of metaphysical naturalism.16
In sum, contemporary arguments about naturalism go to the heart of the nature of modern science, and have a significant bearing on such varied issues as the legitimate bounds of scientific explanation, the plausibility of religious beliefs, and the content of school science curricula. Yet controversies about naturalism show little sign of abating, and there are deep-seated differences between the various parties to the debate.
What contribution might a history of the sciences and their relation to naturalism make to these discussions?
Apart from the intrinsic interest of the episodes considered in this volume, taken together they amount to an assessment of the historical claims made in the context of the various arguments outlined above. Thus the common claim that naturalism in some form has characterized science ‘since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ is one that can be assessed, and a number of chapters deal directly with this issue. A related historical claim made by advocates of metaphysical naturalism concerns ‘the consistent success of naturalistic explanations and the lack of success of supernaturalistic explanations in the history of science’. This suggests that a ‘hard’ naturalism that denies supernatural realities is not just an uncritical starting point or an unwarranted premise, but a stance for which supporting evidence can be provided. David Papineau maintains that ‘familiarity with the relevant scientific history’ will lead to the conclusion that metaphysical naturalism is more than just a
15 For a concise account of the intelligent design movement, see Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), ch. 17.
16 Alvin Plantinga, ‘Methodological Naturalism?’, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 49 (1997): pp. 143–54. Plantinga has also advanced arguments suggesting an incompatibility between evolutionary theory and ontological naturalism. See James K. Beilby (ed.), Naturalism Defeated: Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley, Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 31–51.
matter of ‘nailing one’s philosophical colors to the naturalist mast’.17 Again, this volume provides such a ‘relevant scientific history’, although what that history demonstrates is not as clear-cut as Papineau supposes.
An even more fundamental task is to consider whether those who studied nature in the past thought in terms of an unqualified dichotomy between ‘naturalistic explanation’ and ‘supernaturalistic explanation’. If not, the investigation of the putative long-term superiority of naturalistic over supernaturalistic explanations might turn out to be more complicated than at first thought. As we shall see, the distinction between natural and supernatural, which in modern discussions is regarded as largely unproblematic, has an important history that shows how interdependent and interactive these notions have often been. In the past, ideas about the relative self-sufficiency of the natural realm typically relied upon deeper metaphysical or theological assumptions that could not themselves be established by naturalistic methods. This issue will be briefly discussed below, and explored further in several of the chapters.
A final general question concerns another way in which a particular version of the history of science is taken to support some contemporary doctrine of naturalism. Most often this is a narrative that sees naturalism beginning with the ancient Greeks, going into decline in the Middle Ages, and being restored with the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Essentially, this is a story about the connection between naturalism and human progress—one that not only attributes the success of the sciences to their naturalistic assumptions, but which also regards commitment to the supernatural as inimical to scientific progress. A number of the essays in this volume explore this narrative and offer challenges to it.
Rather than proceed at this point to a summary of the specific contents of each contribution, we will instead discuss them in relation to four prominent themes that emerge out of them: the natural–supernatural distinction; the idea of laws of nature; naturalist theories of the person; and the significance of naturalistic approaches in the historical and human sciences.
NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL
The ‘nature’ of which contemporary naturalism is an ‘ism’ derives its primary sense from a contrast with the supernatural. Yet this now-familiar natural–supernatural distinction is by no means a self-evident one. Strictly speaking, it is the product of a set of reflections that took place in the Latin Middle Ages.
17 Papineau, ‘Naturalism’. For the contrary argument see Hilary Putnam, ‘The Content and Appeal of “Naturalism” ’, in Naturalism in Question, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 59–70.
Crucially, the appearance of this distinction does not coincide with what is usually regarded as the birth of scientific thought among the Greek philosophers of the fifth and sixth centuries bc. For these Presocratic thinkers, nature (phusis) seems to extend to everything there is: gods, human beings, animals, plants, and stones. As Daryn Lehoux demonstrates in his chapter on ancient science (Chapter 1), for the first Greek natural philosophers the gods were part of the furniture of the natural world, and hence our familiar natural–supernatural distinction was not then in play.18 Subsequently, Plato (429–347 bc) was to suggest that there might be more to nature than his predecessors had supposed. As is well known, he suggested that the phenomena of the visible realm were dependent upon a more fundamental reality—the unseen and unchanging world of forms. Aristotle (384–322 bc), too, criticized his philosophical forebears for assuming that ‘nature’ was all-inclusive. In his threefold division of the sciences, nature became the subject matter of natural philosophy (analogous in many respects to what we now call ‘natural science’), while the more elevated sciences of mathematics and theology dealt with unchangeable realities: mathematics with unchangeable things that were in some sense inseparable from matter; theology with that which was wholly independent and self-subsistent—God. While Aristotle largely focused his attentions on the material realm, in his scheme of things nature was still dependent on God.19
As J. B. Shank points out in his contribution (Chapter 4), Greek science was both ‘naturalistic and anchored in notions of the divine at the same time’.
The Greeks’ way of dividing up intellectual territory already poses intriguing questions for metaphysical naturalists—how, for example, the truths of mathematics might be accounted for in terms of pure naturalism.20 But more importantly, given that the Presocratic thinkers included the divine in their speculations about nature, this history generates some difficulties for the common narrative that traces the origins of scientific naturalism to ancient Greece. While Plato and Aristotle observed a distinction between the material world and what lay beyond it, they proposed that the more elevated sciences pertained to the latter realm. Furthermore, most versions of natural philosophy
18 Neither is it clear that the distinction exists in other cultures. See, e.g., Lorraine Aragon, ‘Missions and Omissions of the Supernatural: Indigenous Cosmologies and the Legitimisation of “Religion” in Indonesia’, Anthropological Forum 13 (2003): pp. 131–40.
19 Aristotle, On the Heavens 278b–279b; Metaphysics 1064a29–1064b13. There is still room for discussion of precisely what Aristotle meant by theology (theologikê), and what he imagined its relation to natural philosophy to be. See, e.g., Richard Bodéüs, Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000); Stephen Menn, ‘Aristotle’s Theology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle, ed. Christopher Shields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 422–64.
20 Philosophers such as W. V. Quine have suggested that the applications of mathematics provide an adequate empirical foundation, but this naturalistic solution is by no means universally accepted. See, e.g., James Robert Brown, Platonism, Naturalism, and Mathematical Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2001); Penelope Maddy, Naturalism in Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
(excepting perhaps that of the Epicureans) invoked some principle beyond mere material nature in order to account for the intelligibility of the cosmos—a principle that was either immanent or transcendent. Finally, ‘natural’ was not then contrasted with ‘supernatural’—a notion that had yet to be invented—but with what was artificial (or man-made), or ‘violent’, or to do with laws and human conventions.21
The Greek idea that there was something beyond nature proved congenial to later Christian thinkers, whose understanding of a transcendent, creating Deity posited a similar distinction between the mundane world of created things and the ultimate reality upon which that world depends. However, the explicit terminological distinction between natural and supernatural did not emerge until the twelfth century. The scholastic philosopher Peter Lombard (d.1164) sought to distinguish between two modes of causal activity in the world—one in which events unfold according to the order that God has implanted in things, and another in which God acts directly and without the mediation of created causes.22 In characterizing this latter mode of divine activity he was to speak of a cause that was ‘beyond nature’ (praeter naturam) or ‘preternatural’. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) was to popularize the term ‘supernatural’ (supernaturalis) to label this mode of divine action.23 The natural–supernatural distinction thus began to crystallize in the thirteenth century as a means of distinguishing two kinds of divine activity: one in which God works with the order he embedded into things; the other when he acts miraculously and independently of created causes.24
Two aspects of the social and intellectual context of this period are relevant to the emergence of this distinction. First was a concern to develop formal criteria for the miraculous, prompted by the procedures required for canonization. Earlier Christian thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo (354–430) maintained that there was no ultimate difference between miraculous and mundane events. Both were equally the direct work of God. So-called miracles were simply distinguished on the basis of their unusualness and the fact that they were beyond our present knowledge of nature. However, in the later Middle Ages a tightening up of canonization procedures—through which individuals were accorded
21 See, e.g., Aristotle, Physics 192b9–193b23; On the Heavens 268b27–270a13; Nicomachean Ethics 1134b18–1135a6.
22 Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 2.18.5. On the emergence of this distinction see Robert Bartlett, The Natural and Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–33. For an anthropological perspective see Lucien Lévy Bruhl, Le surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalité primitive, new edn (Paris: PUF, 1963).
23 Henri de Lubac, ‘Remarques sur l’histoire du mot “Surnaturel” ’, Nouvelle revue théologique 61 (1934): pp. 350–70; Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Crossroad, 1998).
24 It also follows that Christian theology did not always require this formal distinction, and more recent theological understandings of God as ‘the ground of being’ suggest that it is dispensable. See, e.g., Niels Henrik Gregersen, ‘Naturalism in the Mirror of Religion: Three Theological Options’, Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 1 (2014): pp. 99–129.
sainthood—brought with it a requirement for unambiguous evidence of the performance of a miracle.25 This in turn called for a much more formal distinction between what could be accomplished through the powers vested in natural things by God (natural) and what was brought about solely by direct divine action (supernatural). Yet, even in instances of natural causation, God was typically imagined to be active both on account of his conservation of natural causes and his concurrence with their operation.26
A second relevant consideration was the great confluence of Christian and Aristotelian thought in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. As Michael Shank argues in Chapter 2, during this period the desire to appropriate ancient Greek philosophy led to the quest for a common intellectual ground, constituted by a tacit agreement to rely upon ‘naturalistic’ explanation alone. What this entailed, in essence, was a deliberate bracketing of appeals to divine revelation, and a quest for explanations that were in principle available to all irrespective of religious creed. Albert the Great (c.1200–1280), for example, put forward the idea of ‘explaining the natural naturally’ (de naturalibus naturaliter), by which he meant offering explanations of events without invoking miraculous divine activity. As Michael Shank suggests, this sounds very much like methodological naturalism as we now understand it. That said, this neutral and naturalistic territory, common to Greek, Islamic, and Christian thinkers, was still understood as entailing commitment to some version of theism. ‘Natural’ causes were themselves understood as reliant upon God for their efficacy. It was just that in the case of ‘natural’ occurrences God worked through the order that he had implanted in things, while in the case of the miraculous events he brought about effects directly. In short, naturalistic explanation was not opposed to theistic explanation per se, but merely to a particular kind of theistic explanation.
All of this suggests that recent philosophical discussions that stress the historical failure of ‘supernatural explanations’ when compared with ‘naturalistic explanations’ fail to take cognisance of the way in which this distinction functioned in the past. No significant medieval natural philosopher ever argued that supernatural explanations might offer an account of how nature usually operates. Indeed one reason for making the distinction was to make possible the identification of miraculous events, which become visible only against the background of the regularities of nature which were themselves attributable to divine providence.
The conceptual interdependence of Western conceptions of ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ from the Middle Ages onwards is a common theme of a number of
25 For Augustine and Aquinas on miracles see Peter Harrison, ‘Miracles, Early Modern Science, and Rational Religion’, Church History 75 (2006): pp. 493–511. On the significance of canonization, see Laura Smoller, ‘Defining the Boundaries of the Natural in the Fifteenth Century’, Viator 28 (1997): pp. 333–59.
26 Alfred J Freddoso, ‘God’s General Concurrence with Secondary Causes: Why Conservation is not Enough’, Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): pp. 553–85.
