Science, Naturalism, and the Idea of the Supernatural

Religion is typically thought to involve belief in the supernatural. Yet the two categories that make up this definition are modern and distinctively Western. The concept of “the supernatural” is absent from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Church Fathers. While the Latin “supernaturalis” makes a belated appearance in the thirteenth century, it is not really until the early modern period that we encounter the idea of an exclusive disjunction between natural and supernatural. As for the opposing positions of natural-ism and supernatural-ism, these labels first emerge in the late nineteenth century. This leaves us with the obvious question of how adherents of pre-modern religion conceptualized their own commitments and their view of the world, given that a concept that we now regard as integral to religious commitment was unavailable to them.

The other term in our modern understanding of religion, the epistemic category “belief,” also turns out to be recent and singularly Western. The relative novelty of this notion is more difficult to establish, since canonical Christian writings do have expressions that can be plausibly rendered as “faith” or “belief.” But attending to the history of the relevant terms reveals that they have undergone significant changes of meaning over time, with a gradual shift of emphasis away from belief as trust to something more like propositional assent. Over the centuries, the original affective and social dimensions of faith and belief have gradually given way to more epistemic and evidentialist understandings. These changes help us understand what makes unbelief a new historical possibility in the modern period. We might say that contemporary naturalism arises not so much from challenges to the credibility of belief, but rather from a transformation of our understanding of what “belief” itself consists in along with new conditions for its justification. These transformations inform what it means both to deny and affirm religious belief in the modern West.

In what follows I will focus primarily on the historical emergence of our modern natural/supernatural distinction. My suggestion will be that what we see in this history is a series of developments that laid the conceptual foundations for modern naturalism, understood in the straightforward sense of “a denial of supernatural entities and powers.” From the early modern period onwards, Christianity gradually came to assume a new form that made its denial both possible and credible. This situation was not the direct result of philosophical critiques of theistic commitments; neither did it arise out of any incompatibility between the new natural sciences and Christian faith. Rather, these now familiar sources of critique were enabled by developments internal to Christianity. These transformations are marked to some degree by the appearance of the new conceptions of the supernatural and faith/belief. Modern religion, understood as belief in the supernatural, and modern naturalism, understood as its denial, emerge as two sides of the same historical trajectory.

From a cross-cultural and historical perspective, few societies seem to have developed a natural/supernatural dichotomy comparable to our modern Western understanding. In his 1912 classic, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durkheim observed that “the idea of the supernatural, as we understand it, is recent. It presupposes an idea that is its negation.” In keeping with this assessment, a number of anthropological studies have revealed that many traditional societies are innocent of a natural-supernatural distinction. Thirty years ago, Marvin Harris observed that “few preindustrial cultures make a neat distinction between natural and supernatural phenomena.” Such cultures, he continues, often “simply lack emic categories for ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural.’” If anything, the case since then has become even clearer. In The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (2022), the distinguished cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins spoke of “the awakening ethnographic chorus” regarding the restricted applicability of the Western divide between natural and supernatural.[1]

What is true for non-traditional Western cultures holds for pre-modern Europe, too. The original detective work on this issue was conducted in the mid-twentieth century by Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, whose careful study of early Christian and medieval literature revealed that the word “supernatural” (supernaturalis) does not appear in the Latin lexicon until the thirteenth century.[2] Even then, these usages, which occur primarily in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, do not refer to a clearly delineated two-tiered reality but to a mode of the operation of divine grace. Only in the early modern period, in the wake of post-reformation debates about grace and human nature, do we see a hardening of the natural/supernatural dichotomy. Tellingly, we do not encounter the word “supernatural” in official doctrinal statements of the Catholic Church until the middle of the sixteenth century.[3]

One of the factors that prompted the arrival of the supernatural was an early modern theological debate—one that now seems so recondite that it can be difficult for modern readers to discern precisely what was at stake. At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that the medieval view was that it was the “natural” condition of the world to be at every moment open to the “supernatural.” While creation was invested with its own integrity, it was nonetheless always oriented towards the divine source of its being. On the modern view that developed in the context of Reformation controversies about “pure nature,” the operation of “the supernatural” came to be understood more as an external incursion into the independent operations of a nature that could be understood on its own terms. De Lubac plausibly argued that the modern erasure of a sense of the sacred can be partially attributed to this early modern partitioning of reality into the natural and supernatural.[4] This suggestion comports with Charles Taylor’s more recent contentions about the arrival of what he calls the “buffered self,” which is to say, modern individuals who differ from their medieval forebears in that they are no longer permeable to the direct influence of “supernatural” powers. In this respect, individuals in the pre-modern West have something in common with members of traditional societies.

While there is little doubt that theological debates about “pure nature” represent an important phase in the emergence of modern naturalism, in the sphere of the natural sciences (or “natural philosophy” to use the correct historical designation), a parallel series of conceptual changes also played a significant role. It is often thought that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is characterized by science asserting its independence from theology. In fact, something like the opposite was the case. Natural philosophers began to directly invoke theological positions to a degree that their medieval counterparts had not, in order to provide a theological foundation for the new science. A conspicuous example is the novel idea of invariant laws of nature. René Descartes, who pioneered this conception, contended that all of the motion in the universe was directly caused by God, who moves matter in keeping with laws that he has arbitrarily willed. The universality and immutability of these laws was attributed to the immutability and omnipotence of the divine lawgiver. This new voluntarist approach displaced Aristotelian understandings of causation which had attributed a degree of independent causal efficacy to natural things, accommodating a number of different channels for the operations of the Deity in the natural world. Now, in effect, there was a single mode of (efficient) causation, and it lay not in things, but in God.

The immediate consequence of this new approach was a radical supernaturalism. All putatively natural events were, in fact, the direct consequence of divine volitions. Descartes could declare in the Meditations (1641), that “nature” is in fact “nothing other than God himself.”[5] Cartesian philosopher, Nicolas Malebranche, also insisted that “there is no other nature, that is, there are no other natural laws, except the efficacious volitions of the almighty.”[6] This understanding of laws of nature became fundamental to the experimental science developed in England by the newly established Royal Society. Robert Boyle, one of the pioneers of experimental natural philosophy, argued that motions of natural bodies did not result from any inherent properties but depended directly “on the will of the divine author of things.”[7] Newtonian philosopher and theologian Samuel Clarke wrote along the same lines that “the course of nature, truly and properly speaking, is nothing else but the will of God producing certain effects in a continued, regular, constant, and uniform manner.”[8] This understanding of the divine foundation of natural laws remained a standard view among leading scientific figures for more than 150 years. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, in his definitive account of the present state of the natural sciences, the polymath John Herschel could still confidently describe laws of nature as arising “out of the constant exercise of God’s direct power.”[9]

Fatefully, however, this theistic understanding of laws of nature proved to be a Trojan Horse for modern naturalism. The theologically motivated reduction of the complex, multi-layered, causal economy of the Middle Ages to a single and undifferentiated layer of divine causation was susceptible to a simple redescription in naturalistic terms. Laws of nature, once understood as laws imposed on nature by God, could be understood simply as laws intrinsic to nature. This change of theological valence was effected in the nineteenth century, when naturalists such as Thomas Henry Huxley mounted a hostile takeover of the concept of laws of nature, happily accepting their universality and inviolability, but denying the theological premises upon which those characteristics had rested. Ironically, laws of nature had now became a reason to deny God’s activity in the natural world.

This radical reversal flew in the face of the foundational role played by theological considerations in the original formulation of the idea of laws of nature, to say nothing of the explicit theological commitments of most of the key players in the scientific revolution—Kepler, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, and others. These convictions were shared by a good number of leading nineteenth-century “men of science,” including John Herschel, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, and William Benjamin Carpenter.

How, then, was this momentous volte-face carried off? A key element of the strategy of Huxley and his fellow naturalists was the provision of an alternative history of science, one that elided the role played by theological considerations and sidelined the conspicuous religious commitments of scientific innovators, past and present. For Huxley, this involved playing up the modern natural/supernatural dichotomy and inventing the associated “-isms” of naturalism and supernaturalism. The emergence of modern science could then be portrayed as the outcome of a hard-won victory of “naturalism” over “supernaturalism.” Since the dawn of recorded time, Huxley portentously announced, “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 civilization.”[10]

In broad outline, Huxley’s history went something like this. Ancient Greek philosophers made the first move towards naturalism by eschewing the theological myths of their forebears and attempting to account for the world in terms of purely natural principles. Naturalistic science then stalled with the advent of Christianity which diverted attention away from natural events “to the problems of the supernatural world.” Science was eventually revived in the seventeenth century with the innovations of Descartes whom Huxley alleged to have been the first to clearly formulate the modern principle of scientific naturalism.[11] This vindicatory history sought to show that naturalism was not a short-term fad, but the restoration of a venerable approach to nature that had suffered a long hiatus during the medieval period owing to ecclesiastical censorship and the predomination of theological concerns.

Part of what made this revisionist history plausible, despite its distance from what had actually transpired, was its affinity with post-Enlightenment progressivist histories which posited “laws” of social development according to which human cultures progressed through various stages. These stages typically involved a movement away from magic and religion, towards science. Best known perhaps, is the model set out by positivist philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who proposed that human knowledge exhibits a pattern of development through three successive phases: theological, metaphysical, scientific. Huxley, admittedly, had little time for more speculative aspects of Comte’s thought, but the general idea of intellectual progress and the idea of stages of intellectual development became part of the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist. Similar patterns of cultural development were proposed by anthropologists such as E. B. Tylor and James Frazer, sociologist Lester Ward, and historian Henry Thomas Buckle, each of whom proposed that civilizational progress consisted in the gradual displacement of religious understandings of the world by scientific ones.

This general approach also helps account for the rise of the closely related “conflict thesis” according to which the history of science can be characterized as an enduring warfare between science and religion. One of the two chief progenitors of the conflict narrative, the Anglo-American chemist and would-be historian John Draper, wrote in his best-selling History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) that the history of science is to be understood as “the history of two contending powers.” His co-conspirator, Andrew Dickson White, proposed in his equally popular History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896) that we can observe in history a “conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought—the theological and the scientific.” These influential but deeply flawed accounts, curiously still cited by some twenty-first-century advocates of conflict, closely parallel the history espoused by Huxley, although the latter’s deployment of the naturalism/supernaturalism dichotomy is distinctive, as too is his central role in establishing and promoting scientific naturalism.

Approaching the past with a political agenda and a preconceived mould of how events must necessarily unfold does not make for good history. The ancient Presocratic philosophers, credited by Huxley et al. with the inauguration of naturalism had, in fact, almost invariably invoked unifying divine principles to account for nature’s uniform operations. As classicist Daryn Lehoux observes, “ancient philosophers who invoke divinities do so, nearly universally, to account for nature’s regularity.”[12] The inception of Christianity further reduced scope for the operations of various gods and demigods by asserting that nature was under the control of a single omnipotent Deity. Christian apologist Lactantius (c. 250 – c. 325), to take just one example, argued that “the motion of the stars is not voluntary, but of necessity, because they obey the laws appointed for them [by God].” The stars, in other words, were not divine self-movers, but moved in accordance with divine ordinances. Christian monotheism thus acted as a force for the de-sacralization of nature. It was accordingly regarded by its pagan opponents as “the destroyer of gods.”[13] Scholastic natural philosophers of the Middle Ages furthered this “naturalistic” impulse by explicitly excluding miracles from the business of natural explanation. Nicole Oresme (d. 1382), best known for his summary of arguments for and against the diurnal rotation of the earth, stated that even the most marvelous events in nature do not warrant the invocation of God or preternatural causes: “it is not necessary to have recourse, because of the diversity and marvellousness of effects, to the heavens and unknown influence, or to demons, or to our glorious God.”[14] When we get to the seventeenth century, natural philosophers, as already noted, to some degree reversed Oresme’s cautious naturalism, asserting that God was the direct cause of all regular motion in the universe. This stance still maintained the rational orderliness of nature, but understood it in terms of God’s direct activity. None of this is suggestive of an enduring conflict between naturalism and supernaturalism, even if we could project those categories onto the past. Huxley’s history gets pretty much everything backwards.

It is all the more remarkable, then, that nineteenth-century narratives linking science and naturalism found a willing audience and are recounted to the present day. The 1922 announcement of philosopher Roy Wood Sellars that “we are naturalists now,” may have been premature, but it was prophetic.[15] The intellectual endeavors of the Western academy are now largely premised on the assumption that naturalism is true. Sociological data suggest that most academics do not believe in what “the supernatural” represents.[16] And even if they do, such belief is usually irrelevant to their intellectual practice. Methodological naturalism is the ruling ideology of virtually all disciplines of the modern academy (perhaps excepting, on occasion, theology).

The ubiquity of naturalism is part of a broader story of secularization, although there are different versions of the secularization thesis and significant challenges to its validity. What we can say with a degree of confidence is that the concepts of “natural” and “supernatural” are now firmly embedded in our conceptual lexicon and that they facilitate an understanding of the world that pits naturalistic science against religious “supernaturalism.” History would suggest that this dichotomy is not, in fact, an essential element of religious conviction; neither is it a cultural universal. It is also clear that the deeply misleading conflict narratives constructed in the late nineteenth century remain pervasive.

One reason for the persistence of this mistaken view of the past lies in the compelling nature of story-telling. Science communicators have established that narratives are far more effective in shaping public opinion than the presentation of mere facts: “Narrative’s ability to create its own version of truth is what makes it attractive to scientists looking for alternative ways to influence public opinion,” as one researcher has put it.[17] The myth-makers of the nineteenth century had an intuitive sense of this. This principle also helps explain why the assiduous efforts of historians over the past three decades to correct these false narratives by appealing to the facts seem to have been mostly in vain.[18] Another factor in the success of the naturalism vs. supernatural account is the way it confirms our own rational superiority to religiously benighted predecessors (and to the faithful in other cultural traditions). In practice, this amounts to a supine acceptance of the dubious progress stories that originated with propagandists of the Enlightenment. The narrative of naturalistic science gradually dismantling religious superstition has become, as Dan Edelstein writes, “the story we tell ourselves about our values, our government, and our religions.” Yet it was and continues to be, a “master narrative of modernity, even a myth.”[19] Finally, this belief in the inevitability and superiority of naturalism draws support from the conviction that naturalism and science are inextricably bound together and that the success of science is owing to its embrace of naturalistic principles and its rejection of “supernaturalism.” As we have seen, this assumption is confounded by the theological commitments of key actors in the history of science, and by the problematic projection back in time of natural/supernatural distinction that those actors did not subscribe to.[20]

What follows from all of this? I am not sure that methodological naturalism, as such, needs to be abandoned. After all, if the above analysis is correct, modern naturalism, invented in the nineteenth century, is simply a thin secular veneer that overlays a theological conviction about why the universe exhibits the kinds of regularities it does and why we might have some degree of confidence that we can discover them. It is rather a matter of understanding what “naturalism” really amounts to; that it does not entail a rejection of the supernatural; that it does not have a long history going back to the ancient Greeks; that history cannot be understood in terms of the gradual overcoming of supernaturalism by its naturalistic counterpart. Hard-core apologists for naturalism, then, may need to engage in some self-reflection about what their position actually entails or, at the very least, where it came from.

Related to this, understanding the contingent nature of our present natural/supernatural distinction might help promote a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of our past and of other cultures. History and anthropology present us with an immense amount of data attesting to experiences of the putatively “supernatural.” Yet our present methodological approaches seem to imply that the relevant testimonies to these experiences are, not to put too fine a point on it, false. In his wonderfully evocative They Flew (Yale, 2024), Carlos Eire has recently raised the question of what historians should do with such testimonies, implying (I think) that our naturalistic presumptions should no longer simply be taken for granted. The issue also becomes acute in current moves to accord validity, even scientific status, to various forms of indigenous knowledge. These well-motivated efforts are ultimately incompatible with the prevailing naturalistic commitments of the academy—unless the suggestion is that such forms of knowledge be shorn of their integral “supernaturalistic” components. On this score, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Lawrence Krauss and their fellow travelers are nothing if not consistent in their rejection of such calls, recognizing that they run counter to the present naturalistic assumptions of the natural sciences.[21] Here again, if this nettle is to be grasped, it may entail thinking more deeply what naturalistic commitment amounts to. And the history of naturalism in the West may help here.

Finally, while much of this essay has focused on scientific naturalism and its historical origins, this analysis also has implications for Christian self-understanding. It is surely significant that Christianity managed quite well for a millennium without a concept of the supernatural. It might be worth pondering whether framing religious commitment in terms of this modern distinction might be related to the present dominance of naturalistic understandings of the world. This was de Lubac’s suspicion. Central to his historical concerns was the question of whether modernity’s natural/supernatural disjunction was “a suitable instrument for penetrating the whole of reality and the life of the authentically sacred.” It is fair to say to his response to this question was an unambiguous “no.” Persisting with this two-tiered vision of reality was a sure sign of our participation in and contamination by “a shriveled rationalized world.”[22] This is not the occasion for further analysis of de Lubac’s theological arguments, which have proven controversial in some quarters. But we can say that parallel developments in the history of the natural sciences, which fell beyond the range of his investigations, lend his conclusions considerably more weight. One thing certainly remains clear: paradoxically, the idea of the supernatural is far more important to those who wish to deny its reality than it ever was for the religiously committed.

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