What would it mean if it could be decisively historically and conceptually demonstrated that Thomas Huxley’s conception of scientific naturalism is completely fraudulent? After reading Some New World you will have to ask this question, because this is precisely what Peter Harrison forensically demonstrates.
In the review essay that follows I will take broadly descriptive looks at Pro-fessor Harrison’s book through four different lenses, before making a brief exploration of the central question that this book so powerfully puts to us: “what do we do with naturalism?” (379).
To the four lenses. Peter Harrison’s book could be creatively described as a collaborative enterprise produced by four literary personas who look some-thing like urbane Australian versions of Michel Foucault, Peter Berger, Søren Kierkegaard, and Josef Pieper. On the Foucauldian front, Harrison is a masterful exponent of the meticulous historical genealogy, with the aim of showing up the present in a strange new light. That is, by unpacking how a long chain of contingent historical developments has led us to the present he shows us that the normality we live within and take for granted is not simply true and obvious, but could have been very different and is, actually, rather bizarre (as are all historical contexts). On the Berger front, Harrison has a keen eye for what a sociologist of knowledge might call the lifeworld meta-structures that presently shape our collective norms. Harrison is very interested in what we assume to be reasonable and normative, and in what we take for granted in the common lived experiences of our times. On the Kierkegaard front, Harrison is a skilful exponent of indirect theological communication. And – though again, tacitly – Harrison is also a quiet but serious theological philosopher of history and nature in the broadly Aquinan and Aristotelian tradition, like Pieper.
Let us look at Harrison’s book as a work of historical genealogy.
The genealogy Harrison expounds lays out the manner in which scientific naturalism, from the time of Thomas Huxley, came to be in direct and vociferous conflict with its invented or unnaturally born opponent, religious supernaturalism. Huxley advances this conflict in his struggle for public epistemic authority with ‘the church’. Under Huxley’s able ministrations Secular Science set about strategically white-anting the Christian Religion in order to replace it as the source and bastion of public truth, reason, and right morals. This struggle was effectively over by the late twentieth century, leaving us, at present, in the strange place where the Christian religion – which gave rise to scientific naturalism – has been overthrown by vigorously irreligious public truth categories and Western culture is now decisively post-Christian. There is no real ‘science verses religion’ conflict going any more, because public meaning categories – particularly in our universities – have been effectively purified of any overt and respectful recognition of their Christian heritage. In effect Harrison gives us a scientifically focused version of Charles Taylor’s account of the arrival of a boldly secular age in the West. But make no mistake, to understand how this transition from faith-grounded Christian naturalism to anti-supernatural and irreligious naturalism happened is no easy matter. In reading Some New World we receive the long and de-tailed back-story in historical and philosophical explanation which is necessary for this crucial transition to even becomes visible to us. And I must say, that in his now well-loved style, Harrison performs this ‘make visible’ his- genealogy with consummate clarity and depth.
Sketching the outline of his historical genealogy in very broad strokes, one key aspect of the story goes something like as follows.
Once – to paraphrase John Milbank – there was no supernatural. The term only becomes a live idea – and then with a very different meaning to its pre-sent expression – in the thirteenth century. For in its pre-modern Christian context, the natural was nested in, and dependent on, yet not reducible to, the supernatural. In this complex environment the regularities of natural pheand our own epistemic powers to in some measure grasp natural reality, were upheld and guaranteed by God. Things develop in complex ways as a result of fourteenth-century nominalism and voluntarism, and dramatically, as a result of the Reformation, and then reactively with the counter-Reformation invention of natura pura, until the high point of the career of the Western idea of the supernatural can be found in the occasionalism often assumed in the new natural philosophy of early modernity. Here – pace Newton – gravity and the laws of nature are the finger of God directly governing the regularities of nature. Here ‘nature’ – unlike in the ontologically mutilayered and multi-agential Middle Ages – is reductively subsumed into a monolithic ‘supernature’. But, as Harrison puts it,
[early modernity’s] scientific supernaturalism … was susceptible to a hostile takeover in which God’s immediate action could be simply redescribed in purely naturalistic terms. All that was required was for God’s ongoing but immutable activity to be given a new label: ‘nature’. This option was not realized until the nineteenth century when habituation to the notion of laws of nature lead to amnesia regarding its theological origins. (238)
Come the late nineteenth century and Thomas Huxley is implementing this hostile takeover by polemically retrofitting history with the shamelessly false assertion that scientific naturalism has always been at war with religious supernaturalism. This assertion powerfully lifts the modern perpetual conflict thesis into the air. The false myth of a perennial and titanic struggle between religious superstition and agnostic reason, resulting in the final triumph of rational scientific naturalism over anti-scientific supernaturalism has re-mained, to this day, a fundamental article of faith for the secularized post-Christian West that came into being in the late twentieth century.
Harrison’s careful genealogies of both ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism’, with their rich variations and inversions of meaning and their intrinsically theological origins, enables us to see how strange and contestable these nor-mal features of our present post-Christian lifeworld reality are. Harrison per-forms this same genealogical operation with the historical meaning careers of ‘belief’, ‘faith’, ‘evidence’ and ‘knowledge’. The cumulative effect – sup-ported by mountainous and fascinating footnotes – is striking. We can better see what a strange new world secular modernity is, with its post-Huxleyan scientific naturalism, when we compare it with the strange old worlds that gave it birth. Indeed, a proper understanding of the long arc of pre-Humean natural philosophy makes the turning of Hume on his head almost unavoida-ble. That is, it is we who live in some strange new world when it comes to the long and deep common-sense approach to nature and the divine, not our supposedly infantile progenitors from the premodern past.
As an aside, I noticed a very gently done and appropriate drawing on his own empiricist Presbyterian background, when Harrison mentions in passing the brilliant up-ending of Hume’s reasoning by his contemporary Scottish critics, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, and James Beattie. For those empirically minded Protestant Christians out there, it obviously takes a Scott to beat a Scott. But let us move on to Harrison’s other personas, starting with the so-ciologist of knowledge.
We live within history. The present is never discontinuous from the past. A richer knowledge of the past enables us to see the present better. What we see in the present is structures of common norms, convictions, and reality practices which are integral with the common knowledge of our times. Modern naturalism – and here we are talking about a Huxleyan reductively scien-tific and functionally materialist naturalism – shapes everything we think and do, and the very framing of common meanings. The buffered self – the self that is not porous to the divine within and beyond the natural and the self – arises out of this naturalism. But what a strange buffering we have, for actu-ally, the richness of ordinary reality entirely escapes the flat and spiritless frames of meaning our concepts and shared cultural mythologies assume.
I went to my local sushi bar for lunch today. As I was sitting in the corner waiting for my lunch, I looked around me and listen to the background music. It was the music of the buffered and naturalistic self. The very smell and feeling of the music assumed that I was a moral emotivist and a hedonic nat-uralist, and that meaning and value are cultural glosses that we create and paste over the top of a locked-in and intrinsically meaningless individualism. Funnily enough, the medium and mood of this music is also what I encounter at church on Sunday. As regards the smell and feel of contemporary worship, religious words in themselves don’t seem to improve things much above the level of the music in the sushi bar. But in the sushi shop, the four Japanese people running it – two mature and skilful male chefs, a petite and graceful young woman on the front counter, and a shy, thickly built, and naturally awkward adolescent cleaning – are all remarkably beautiful and luminous spiritual beings performing a hospitality craft that is richly artistic and spiritually generous. The rituals of food preparation and the liturgies of dining are inescapably and inherently natural and spiritual at the same time. The con-trast between the assumed mood and common knowledge assumptions of the music and the actual human experience I was within, was really jarring when I stopped to notice it.
Harrison’s book deeply notices the way modern naturalism frames every as-pect of normal social reality in our times. Understanding naturalism is not an academic ‘science and religion’ mind game. And this is something perhaps easily missed in much specialist academic literature in this field. For it is not science that is a problem, it is the anti-supernatural naturalistic framing of the meaning of science (and knowledge and nature must always have a meaning to us) which requires our very serious and deeply engaged attention. Harrison attends to the problem of modern naturalism, and the way we understand sci-ence and religion, with a very engaged, very concerned, sociologist of knowledge eye.
Then there is Harrison the indirect theologian. Kierkegaard gets only one passing mention in Some New World, but Harrison has read the great Dane very deeply. Kierkegaard – following Plato’s conversational, often open, and sometimes inconclusive method – believed in throwing the reader onto their own existential resources, rather than just telling them what they should think. But Kierkegaard, like Plato, is very skilful in leading the reader to the right theological question.
There is a deep theological insight behind the genealogies and sociological observations that Harrison makes, but these insights themselves are carefully concealed as the unstated guiding star of his investigations. If you only look at how (as a historical scholar) he sails, it will look like he is a master adven-turer on a surprising journey of discovery, and one will want to come on board and be a part of his exciting trip to exotic lands. But actually, he is not simply venturing into uncharted waters. He is being guided by a very specific star in his voyages of discovery. But he wants us to discover that star for ourselves, and will not actually point it out. But I will tell you what this guid-ing star is: it is Christ the Logos of creation. (And on that, do read John Betz’s amazing book by that title.)
‘Science and religion’ matter to Harrison for reasons that are far deeper than mere scholarly interest. Being a historian of science and religion is, in fact, a vocation for Harrison, and an act a loyalty to (as Augustine puts it) Christ the Teacher, who is the Truth. Modern science and modern history do not traffic in Truth, and the Word must never be mentioned, or else one’s credibility as a constructor of naturalistic, contingent, and provisional truths will unravel in the community of scholars. scholars. Harrison carefully keeps his place in the com-munity of scholars by respecting the rules of small T truth in which they all trade. But… unstated, yet always present, a very serious theological integrity shapes and guides his scholarship.
Speaking (as I am) as a philosophical theologian, Harrison takes 380 pages of densely argued text to make two very elementary points in Christian philosophical theology. Firstly, it has always been, and remains, eminently sensible to understand natural illumination (ordinary ratio-empirical reason) as a divine revelation, and secondly; there is no inherent reason why naturalism, science, and theology should not be happily integral. However – and this is where all the heavy historical scholarship lifting comes in – historical genealogies can be traced that show how our academic culture came to reject these two, shall we say, self-evident theological truths, which possibly all other cultures and times have accepted.
There is great need for scholars like Harrison who are serious theologians but who can move freely, and with just respect, in the secular academy.
Finally, Harrison is a theological philosopher of both history and nature. In both domains he is a Thomistic Aristotelian. As Stewart Umphrey outlines in his technical but very helpful book The Aristotelian Tradition of Natural Kinds, and Its Demise, Aristotle’s commonsense approach to natural philosophy is deeply persuasive but impossible to maintain without good faith in the indemonstrable theological warrants that it is natural and necessary for all students of nature to assume. In the more accessible book Aristotle’s Children, Richard Rubenstein makes a similar point. However much modernity defines itself as a rejection of Aristotle, it remains true that modern science is deeply indebted to the ancient Stagirite (biology in particular). Again, his philosophical commitments are not overt, but Harrison thinks like a modern Aristotelian about nature, and his confidence in modern science itself is premised on the Western natural philosophy outlook that was richly theolog-cally integrated with Christian faith by Aquinas. When it comes to the philosophy of history, the thinker Harrison appeals to most directly is from Catholic Germany, but is the Jewish Protestant Karl Löwith. Löwith makes a persuasive argument that what we in the West mean by history is deeply indebted to Hebrew and Christian faith, and thus history is tacitly theological, and the assumption that normative directions and in-trinsic purposes can, in some measure, be discerned in history relies on divine creation and eschaton bearings from outside of history. It is these extra-his-torical reference points that make any meaning at all in history possible. Oth-erwise – as perhaps Henry Ford said – history is just one damned thing after another.
On the tacitly theological grounds of any meaningful history, Karl Löwith, Josef Pieper (see his The End of Time), and Eric Voegelin are in complete agreement. And frankly, they must be right and Ford, or Arnold Toynbee, must be lying. But there are reasons tied up with analogical metaphysics why Protestants are in some regards less able to read any real meaning from his-tory and nature than is a Thomistic Catholic. For this reason, I will align Har-rison’s philosophy of history more with Pieper than with Löwith.
It struck me when reading Some New World how boldly philosophical – in a Thomistic Aristotelian register – and passionately theological – in a no frills orthodox Christian manner – this book is. As a philosophical theologian I sometimes throw friendly barbs in Harrison’s direction about fence-sitting historians. But whilst the philosophy and theology are under the surface of the iceberg in Harrison’s work, the signs of what lie beneath the water under-gird every page if you have eyes to see. And if you do not, you are getting a solidly theological and philosophical lesson through the medium of history even so.
History has been used as a central polemic tool in the evisceration of traditional Christian theology and in the cultural de-Christianisation of the West in our times. History is not ever philosophically or theologically neutral, which does not imply that there are no real truths of fact and meaning to be discovered in history. Harrison is very aware of all this as he writes. There is a lot going on under the surface of his careful historical arguments, and that is what makes this book such a rich and valuable read.
Finally, what do we do with naturalism?
Harrison argues that naturalism as a strictly heuristic and methodological de-vice guiding the operational assumptions of the practices of modern science is both harmless and helpful. This may well be the case. But Harrison’s book also shows us that metaphysical naturalism has been deeply taken up by our institutions of learning and education. As a result, our children and scholars are deeply formed to unquestioningly believe that it is really the case that reductively materialist naturalism is the Truth about reality. But it is bigger even than that. Our worlds of technical and political power, our worlds of legal and moral meaning, our worlds of stories and entertainment, have also come to believe in the language and norms of metaphysical naturalism. And it is bigger than that. The deep penetration of Western culture by metaphysical naturalism (in, ironically, our post-metaphysical times which make this penetration possible) has been the main driver of science and religion conflict since the late nineteenth century. There really was a war between science and religion from about 1870 to about 1970. The only reason we do not feel that conflict now is because the war is over. This war for public epistemic authority was decisively lost for religion, and it was decisively won for metaphysical naturalism. Christians interested in science and religion should not, it seems to me, be lulled into a false sense of peace and tranquillity between science and religion, just because the war is over. And just because there is a firm consensus among historians of science that a putative perpetual war be-tween supernatural religion and natural science is completely historically fraudulent, does not mean that the de-Christianisation of the West did not happen through the successful propagation of Huxley’s cultural mythology. Such realizations are the very important take-home matters of pondering that Harrison’s book leaves us with. And I highly recommend the book, and the pondering of what it draws to our attention. This is a very significant work, by one of our most eminent contemporary historians of science and religion, and its implications need to be wrestled with in the most serious and concerted fashion.
Paul Tyson
The University of Queensland
Republished with permission of Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology, 3 (3) September 2024 pp. 29-35
