Science And Secularization

Science And Secularization Peter Harrison Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), 47-70. Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization In his 1973-4 Gifford Lectures on the topic of “The Secularization of the European Mind”, Cambridge historian Owen Chadwick tells of a Harrow schoolboy who in the 1880s learned that “Darwin had disproved the bible” and adjusted his religious faith accordingly.1 The anecdote represents a common, if unreflective, view about the relationship between modern science and secularism which sees an incompatibility between scientific theories and methods on the one hand, and traditional religion on the other, such that the advance of the former will necessarily entail retreat of the latter. The tale is repeated in Charles Taylor’s 1999 Gifford Lectures, also devoted to the theme of secularization. 2 Again, Taylor presents the story as representative of a standard view about the reasons for a putative decline in religious belief and practice. Like Chadwick, Taylor does not think that this theory has much to commend it, yet as his repetition of the story suggests, this is a narrative that has not gone away. The idea that the forces of science and modernity have inexorably pushed the gods into an involuntary redundancy remains a powerful one, and the notion of a fundamental opposition between science and religion is often thought to be characteristic of Western modernity. In this paper I will evaluate the “science causes secularization” narrative, and offer an account of its long history. After considering a number of versions of the thesis, and the criticisms that have been levelled against it, I will provide an alternative account of the relationship between science and secular modernity, one that accords to science 1 Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 164. 2 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization a more prominent role than it occupies in influential accounts such as those of Chadwick, Taylor and others, but which I hope is less susceptible to the distortions and oversimplification that beset the common story. Clearly, in these discussions much hangs upon what counts as secularization. As a starting point, I will follow José Casanova in taking secularization to encompass three related processes: first, and most simply, a decline in religious belief and practice; second, the increasing differentiation of secular spheres from religious institutions and norms; and, third, the relegation of religion to the private sphere.3 However, much of this paper is about narratives that seek to relate science and secularization, and these narratives typically assume “secularization” to be mostly about the first of the senses above. Conversely, when historical actors speak of a process of decline in religious belief and practice I will take them to be articulating some version of a secularization thesis. 1. The “Popular Narrative”: Secularization And The Stages Of History In June 2012 the Irish biopsychologist Nigel Barber made international headlines with his bold prediction that atheism would “defeat religion by 2038”. Barber contended that with “better science ... there is less fear and uncertainty in people’s daily lives and hence less of a market for religion.” He also explained that advanced technology and medicine would give rise to material benefits “that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs.”4 While few have offered so precise a timetable for the defeat of religion at the hands of an advancing science, the general sentiment that science has caused, is causing, and will cause, a decline in the power of religious faith is relatively common in works of popular science, in the polemical writings of the “new atheists” and, indeed, in the apologetic writings of some conservative Christians. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg contends that “much of the weakening of religious certitude in the Christian West can be laid at the door of science.”5 The Cambridge theoretical physicist and popular science writer Stephen Hawking has declared that in the death-struggle between science and religion, “Science will win because it works”. This, we are informed, is because “there is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason.” 6 E. O. Wilson, the distinguished Harvard biologist and father of sociobiology has contended that science offers us “an alternative mythology that until now has always point for point in zones of conflict, defeated traditional religion.” For 3 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 211. 4 Nigel Barber, Why Atheism will Replace Religion (Amazon Digital Services, 2012); cf. “Is Religion on the Way Out?“, Huffington Post, accessed 2.Sept. 2013. Admittedly, Barber does not think that science will be the sole cause of this development, and he has since resiled somewhat from his original timetable. 5 Steven Weinberg, “A Deadly Certitude”, Times Literary Supplement, Jan 17, 2007. 6 “Stephen Hawking on Religion: Science will Win”. http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Technology/stephenhawking-religion-science-win/story?id=10830164&page=1. See also Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 5. 2 Wilson, it is the evolutionary story that will provide the purpose and meaning once offered by religion, and of all the sciences it is biology that can “explain the nature of mind and reality and the meaning of life.” 7 Oxford neuroscientist and public intellectual Colin Blakemore agrees that science is “the biggest challenge Christianity has ever had to face”, concluding that “it will eventually make religion unnecessary.”8 The idea that science and religion are direct competitors is also an article of faith amongst the so-called new atheists, whose most prominent representatives are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. Sam Harris thus suggests that science and religion compete for the same explanatory territory, and that there can be only one winner: “the conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.” Science, he concludes with characteristic forthrightness, “must destroy religion”. Philosopher Daniel Dennett offers a slightly different take on this narrative, offering a prediction about the future: “In about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe that it does today.”9 In what is shaping up to be a spectacular failure of prescience, Dennett went on to attribute this future change to the “spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television).”10 He thus echoes the views of Barber, for whom science-based technologies are drivers of religious change. I have referred to the contemporary conviction that science will bring about an inevitable decline in religion as “the popular narrative” for a reason. While it has a superficial plausibility and is relatively common in the blogsphere, television documentaries, and popular science books, it is now encountered less frequently in the contemporary scholarly literature of the humanities or social sciences. Moreover, given the polemical contexts in which it now so often appears, it might seem better simply to pass over this version of events in silence. Yet, if this view has now fallen from favour amongst scholars, for all that, it still commands attention from some sociologists.11 But more importantly for our purposes, these sentiments represent a 7 E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1978), 192, 201; The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York: Norton, 2006), 104-5. 8 Colin Blakemore, “God and the Scientists”, Christianity: A History, Channel 4 Documentary, Episode 7. 9 Sam Harris, “Science must destroy Religion” The Huffington Post, January 2, 2006, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/science-must-destroy-reli_b_13153.html, dowloaded 11 January, 2009. Cf. “Science is science because it represents our most committed effort to verify that our statements about the world are true (or at least not false).” Harris, The End of Faith (New York: Norton, 2005), 75-6. 10 The Edge, http://www.edge.org/response-detail/10090, accessed 12 March, 2013. The prediction was made in 2007. 11 Liliane Voyé and Karen Dobbelaere argue that because “science offers a thoroughly secular perspective on the world” its presence in our educational systems necessarily means “desacralising the content of learning and the world view of students”. This accounts for “the long term decline of religious practices”. L. Voyé and Karel Dobbelaere “Roman Catholicism: Universalism at Stake”, in 3 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization rehearsal of a long-standing view about the inverse relationship between science and religion—one that appears at the same time as modern science itself and which is worth exploring further. Further, while the “science causes secularization” thesis has recently been subjected to searching criticism, it contains a kernel of truth. The motif of an enlightened science displacing a superstitious religion first appears in post-reformation Protestant critiques of Catholicism. English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon attributed to divine providence the fact that the reformation of religion was accompanied by a renewal of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: And we see before our eyes, that in the age of ourselves and our fathers, when it pleased God to call the church of Rome to account for their degenerate manners and ceremonies, and sundry doctrines obnoxious and framed to uphold the same abuses; at one and the same time it was ordained by the Divine Providence, that there should attend withal a renovation and a new spring of all other knowledges.12 The idea that modern science could dispel the darkness and superstition associated with medieval (Catholic) religion was not uncommon in early modern Protestant interpretations of history.13 However, this was a thesis that could be applied with less discrimination. A number of philosophes of Enlightenment France would accordingly broaden this reading of history and argue that all revealed religion had at one time impeded the growth of knowledge, and that it in turn would fall victim to an advancing science. In a clandestine manuscript composed around 1705 César Chesneau Du Marsais maintained that Christianity “hampers progress of human knowledge and the sciences”.14 By the end of the century such sentiments were openly expressed. Nicolas de Condorcet announced in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit (1795) that “the triumph of Christianity was the signal for the complete decadence of philosophy and the sciences”. The converse was also held to be true—that in a new era of unfettered scientific achievement, religion would fall into decline and society would continue to advance. Condorcet believed that history could be divided into ten successive epochs, the last of which would see the disappearance of the religion that for so long had imprisoned human reason “in hopeless bondage, in eternal infancy”.15 Religions sans Frontières, ed. R. Cipriani (Rome: Dipartimento per L’Informazione e Editoria, 1994), 83-113. 12 Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, I.vi.15, in The Works of Francis Bacon. 14 vols. Edited by James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath London: Longman, 1857–74, vol. 3, 300. 13 Thomas Sprat History of the Royal Society (London, 1666), 371; Cotton Mather, American Tears upon the Ruines of the Greek Churches (Boston, 1701), 42-3. See also Thomas Culpeper Morall Discourses and Essayes (London, 1655), 63; Samuel Hartlib Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers XLVIII 17, reproduced in Charles Webster The Great Instauration (London: Duckworth, 1976), Appendix 1, 524-28; Noah Biggs Mataetechnia Medicinae Praxeos. The Vanity of the Craft of Physick (London, 1651), To the Parliament. 14 César Chesneau Du Marsais, Examen, BL MS Landsdowne 414, 98-9, qu. in Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 693. 15 Nicolas de Condorcet, Condorcet: Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 51, 129. 4 Enlightenment philosophes self-consciously moulded this view of things into a broad theory of historical progress. As Dan Edelstein has recently suggested, the achievement of these writers lay not in their contribution to philosophy or natural science, but in their fabrication of a particular view of history: The key contribution made by these French scholars, writing between 1680 and 1720, was less epistemological than narratological. In other words, they did not propose a new method of reasoning or advocate a new philosophical understanding of the world. Rather they offered a seductive account of the events and discoveries of the past century, in conjunction with a more overarching history of human civilization.... More generally, they argued, changes in science had led to changes in society. This idea was to become inextricable from the idea of “the Enlightenment” itself. In Edelstein’s words: “The narrative that lay at the heart of what we now know as the Enlightenment was more than just a story: it was and remains a “master narrative” of modernity, even a myth.”16 This particular narrative of secularization was to be incorporated into a number of subsequent theories of historical progress, and indeed informs accounts of “the Enlightenment” down to the present.17 Perhaps the best-known general theory of human progress in the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment is that of positivist philosopher Auguste Comte (1798—1857). Comte, who popularised the new term “sociology” (sociologie) and is often credited with establishing the discipline, sought both to analyze society and to reconstruct it on rational foundations analogous to those employed in the natural sciences.18 His goal was to devise a “physics of society” [physique sociale]. For Comte, this amounted to an explicit attempt to supplant European Christianity with a new scientific and secular ideology. He thus combined the analytic and descriptive elements of the discipline with his own normative goals, and did so quite self-consciously. The idea that science would displace religion was thus both a foundational aspiration of the discipline of sociology—at least insofar as it has its origins in Comte’s thought—and a prediction of the future direction of society, based on Comte’s well-known three-stage theory of history according to which societies progress from a theological stage, through a metaphysical stage, to a scientific or “positive” stage.19 16 Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 2-3, 116. 17 See, e.g., Jonathan Israel’s trilogy, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Enlightenment Contested (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), Democratic Enlightenment (2011); and, more recently, Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 18 Comte is often credited with coining the word, but it seems to have been used some 50 years earlier by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès. See Jacques Guilhaumou, “Sieyès et le non-dit de la sociologie: du mot à la chose”, Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines 15 (2006): 117-34. 19 Gertrude Lenzer (ed.), Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 71-86. 5 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization This version of history—at once descriptive, normative, and predictive—became commonplace in early twentieth-century works of sociology. As Christian Smith has recently shown, it was common for sociology texts of 1880s-1920s to teach this version of events: “All . . . phenomena are now satisfactorily explained on strictly natural principles. Among people acquainted with science, all . . . supernatural beings have been dispensed with, and the belief in them is declared to be wholly false and to have always been false.” We find in another textbook the suggestion that religion is the “anthropomorphic projection of savages”, and that this projection constitutes “the basis of all religious ideas.”20 To a degree, classical secularization theory in the discipline of sociology remains indebted to the ideological commitments of its progenitors. According to Philip Rieff, not only did sociology begin as “a deathwork against European Catholic social order”, but “that deathwork is enacted every day in the halls of our institutions of higher illiteracy.”21 This is disguised somewhat by the fact that over the course of the twentieth century sociologists sought to emulate another aspiration of practitioners of the natural sciences—ideological neutrality. This neutrality is often equated to a commitment to secularism but it is in tension with an inherited secularization theory that was never intended to be ideologically neutral. The progressivist views implicit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociology may also be found in pioneering efforts in the anthropology of religion, which began in the nineteenth century. E. B. Tylor (1832-1917), the father of British anthropology, held that myth (which he considered to be a central feature of religion) is a form of primitive science which seeks to account for the operations of nature. Scientific and mythological explanations are necessarily incompatible and hence the mythological elements of religion are destined to be superseded by science. For Tylor this would not necessarily lead to the total demise of religion in the modern age, for religion could retreat into the realm of the moral and metaphysical where it could survive as an important source of moral values (once it relinquished its pretensions to offer explanations of natural phenomena). As successive stages in cultural development, they are incompatible.22 Science succeeds because it does a better job of explaining natural phenomena than religion. J. G. Frazer (1854-1941), author of the seminal anthropological text The Golden Bough (1890), set out a similar trajectory in which religion surrenders its primitive explanatory ambitions to the natural sciences. If for Tylor religion is a primitive 20 Christian Smith, “Secularizing American Higher Education: The Case of Early American Sociology,” The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. Christian Smith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 111, 119. See also John Evans, “Sociology”, in Harrison and Roberts (eds), Science without God? Forthcoming. 21 Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 16. Cf. Rodney Stark, “Putting an End to Ancestor Worship”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43 (2004): 465–75. 22 Robert A. Segal, “Myth as Primitive Philosophy”, in Kevin Schilbrack (ed.), Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2002), 18-45. 6 science which seeks to explain the world, for Frazer religion functions as a primitive technology which aims to manipulate the world. In Frazer’s scheme of things religion is thus destined to disappear without remainder, since science can assume both its explanatory and operative functions. Frazer’s developmental ideas exercised a considerable influence over anthropology for the next decades. Just after the turn of the century, anthropologist Ernest Crawley, taking note of the current antipathy between science and religion, characterised the general mood of the period in this fashion: “The opinion is everywhere gaining ground that religion is a mere survival from a primitive and mythopaeic age, and its extinction only a matter of time.”23 The science of anthropology, in his view, was to deliver the killer blow: Religion is apparently a growth which cannot survive examination, and withers at the touch of criticism. When the study of it becomes comparative and is guided by anthropology back to the sources, its case seems to be finally dismissed; previous criticism apparently proved it to be an illusion; anthropology shows the illusion in its origin and growth.24 We hear distant echoes of this view in the prediction of the distinguished anthropologist Anthony Wallace, who in the 1960’s declared that “belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge.”25 This announcement of the impending and universal collapse of religion under the irresistible weight of accumulated scientific truths is a rehearsal of one of the founding myths of the discipline, and still gives voice to its original, although now much more implicit, normative agenda. Science-causes-secularization was thus a fundamental assumption of many sociological account of the process.26 The progressivist framework of the social scientists was given more detailed substance by two influential histories of science—those of John Draper and A. D. White—which sought to offer historical evidence for the incompatibility of science and religion, and for the stultifying affects of religion on human progress. These names are legendary amongst the present generation of historians of science, albeit for the wrong reasons. John Draper was a chemist, pioneering photographer, and amateur historian. He attended the famous 1860 Huxley-Wilberforce debate at the British Association meeting in Oxford where he read a long paper entitled “On the Intellectual Development of Europe, considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin and others, that the progression of organisms is determined by law.” It is not insignificant that this was an attempt to apply evolutionary principles to social 23 Alfred Ernest Crawley, The Tree of Life (London: Hutchison and Co., 1905), 8. Ibid., 45. 25 Anthony F. C. Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View (New York: Random House, 1966), 265. Cf. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: The Free Press, 1958). 26 Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000), 61; Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 107. 24 7 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization development. (Joseph Hooker subsequently reported the episode in a letter to Darwin, relating that a “yankee donkey called Draper” had read a boring paper filled with flatulent stuff that was a cocktail of [Herbert] Spencer and [Henry Thomas] Buckle.)27 In 1874, Draper produced The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in which he declared that: “Whoever has had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the mental condition of the intelligent classes in Europe and America, must have perceived that there is a rapidly-increasing departure from the public religious faith...” This retreat from religion was attributed to the successive victories of science. The history of science, he concluded “is no mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers”. The book then offers a catalogue of historical instances that were intended to establish its central thesis. Draper’s book was followed by a succession of lectures and publications on the same theme by Andrew Dickson White. As first president of Cornell, White had been frustrated in his attempts to establish a private university independent of religious institutions and in which the natural sciences would have an important place. White’s historical labours on this topic culminated in the publication of History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). The idée fixe of the work was “the conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought—the theological and the scientific.” Like Draper, White also depicted history in terms of two fundamental successive periods. The reification of “science” is a significant feature of both works, since it was only over the course of the nineteenth century that “science” as we presently understand it came into being, and was distinguished from natural philosophy. Along with it came neologisms such as “scientist” and “scientific method”.28 Despite this, science was imagined to be an activity with a long history and was characterized at least partly in terms of an essential opposition to religion. At the same time it was regarded as an epoch in human thought that was only now coming to full fruition. This historical narrative informed the fledgling discipline of the history of science, and its imprint can be found in the work of influential figures such as George Sarton and Karl Popper. There is one further element in the creation of an overall 19th-century narrative. It would be remiss to say nothing about the significance of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. The theory itself fed neatly into Victorian conceptions of human progress (although advocates of the modern evolutionary synthesis tend now to eschew any notion that evolution is going anywhere). The book generated theological controversy, but it should be remembered that it had both religious supporters and scientific detractors.29 It is also important to recall that conservative 27 Hooker to Darwin, 2 July 1860. Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2852, accessed 13 March, 2013. 28 Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), ch. 6. 29 David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders (Vancouver: Regent College, 1984); James Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 8 Christian reactions against it, and in particular the insistence on a literal 6-day creation some 6,000 years ago, is a largely twentieth-century phenomenon.30 That said, the theory did have its uses for those seeking to secularise science itself. Moreover, a secularized science might subsequently be promoted as an agent for the more general secularization of society. This was the mission of the “scientific naturalists” of late nineteenth century England—Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndal, Francis Galton, and others.31 At the time of the publication of Darwin’s origin, leading scientists of the period such as William Whewell, John Herschel, and Adam Sedgwick subscribed to the view that scientific knowledge was to be understood within a more general framework of natural theology. These “men of science” were typically Oxbridge-educated and often in holy orders. Huxley’s mission was to secularise science and forge a distinct vocational identity for its practitioners. To this end, in 1864 he formed the “X-club”, which was both a supporters’ group for the Darwinian theory of evolution and a society whose members were devoted to the promotion of a science untainted by religion.32 Huxley’s goals were essentially social and political. He sought to reduce the clerical influence over scientific posts in universities and the civil service, to establish a genuinely professional and secular science, and to elevate the status of science and its practitioners.33 While many of his weapons were those of the political lobbyist, the Darwinian theory of evolution served as a useful ideological ally. In his 1860 review of the Origin, Huxley memorably wrote: “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if no annihilated; scotched, if not slain.”34 It is a measure of the success of his secularizing mission that there is now a widespread belief in a Victorian “crisis of faith” attributable to the inception of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. This is the perspective encapsulated in the tale of the Harrow schoolboy. Summing up these strands, there is a popular narrative that suggests science has been, and will continue to be, a major contributor to secularization. An inchoate version of this narrative is already present in the Protestant accounts of the new learning of the seventeenth century, while a broader version was articulated by the first formulators of the Enlightenment story. But it was the nineteenth century that saw the consolidation of the narrative in a number of ways. First, fledgling social scientists 30 Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists, expanded edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 2006). See Bernard Lightman, “The History of Victorian Scientific Naturalism”, forthcoming. 32 J. Vernon Jenson, “The X-Club: Fraternity of Victorian Scientists, British Journal for the History of Science 5 (1970), 63-72; Ruth Barton, “‘An Influential Set of Chaps’: The X-Club and Royal Society Politics, 1864-85”, British Journal for the History of Science 23 (1990): 53-81. 33 Barton, “‘An Influential Set of Chaps’”; T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 87. 34 T. H. Huxley, Review of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Westminster Review, 1860, in T. H. Huxley, Darwiniana (New York: Appleton, 1897), 52. 31 9 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization spoke of an inevitable progression in human societies from a religious stage to a scientific stage. Second, some historians sought to give substance to this story by identifying historical points of tension in what they imagined was a protracted transition from one stage to another. Science and religion, which represent what ought to be successive stages in human development, are caught in a perennial battle—a battle in which science will eventually be the inevitable victor. The history of science is thus understood as the history of human progress, and as a struggle against the regressive forces of religion. Third, individuals such T. H. Huxley attempted with considerable success to utilize science, and evolutionary theory in particular, to promote a particular social or secularist agenda. These pre-twentieth century endeavours provide virtually all of the storylines now recounted in popular narratives of secularization. 2. The Narrative Challenged Critics of the science and secularization thesis have pointed to three major shortcomings: first, the extent of secularization predicted by the thesis is not supported by the evidence, and thus there is no historical inevitability to the decline of religion; second, to the extent that secularization has occurred—and much here turns on what counts as secularization—the advance of science is not a significant causal factor; third, the thesis assumes that religion is primarily a belief system, and secularization takes place when religious beliefs are increasingly rendered implausible by the march of science. The most conspicuous weakness of the science and secularization thesis lies in its iterated predictive failures. The timetable for the demise of religion at the hands of science has been successively postponed. As a predictive, “scientific” thesis, the hypothesis that science causes secularization seems to have been falsified. Sociologist Rodney Stark, while perhaps not the most impartial of witnesses, thinks this sufficient to consign the secularization doctrine to “the graveyard of failed theories”.35 More generally, most social scientists now reject the idea of progressive or directional social change, and for their part, few historians now subscribe to the idea that history moves through fixed stages or epochs.36 History does not seem predictable in that kind of way, and the idea of laws of human progress are no longer regarded as tenable.37 35 Rodney Stark, “Secularization, R.I.P.,” Sociology of Religion 60 (1999): 249-73 (269). In the 1980s Stark and Bainbridge proposed a cyclical, as opposed to a linear view of secularization: “Our model is a cycle of secularization, revival, and religious innovation.... Science accelerates the process of secularization, thus speeding the decline of established religious traditions. But this does not lead to the end of religion in general.” “New Religions, Science, and Secularization”, Religion and the Social Order, 3A (1993): 277-292. Cf. R. Stark and W.S. Bainbridge, The Future of Religion. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 37 Occasional anomalies like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), notwithstanding. 36 10 The empirical data seem also to throw up challenges to the idea of an inevitable and universal trend towards loss of religion. Sociologist Peter Berger has declared that “The world today is massively religious, is anything but the secularised world that had been predicted (whether joyfully or despondently) by so many analysts of modernity.”38 This represents a remarkable volte-face by Berger, who in the 1960’s announced that by the twenty-first century “religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.”39 This was a view he shared with most sociologists at the time, based on data that seemed to indicate a precipitous decline in participation in formal religious observance in Northern Europe.40 David Martin, another leading theorist of secularization, agrees that the predictions of the geographical shrinkage of religions were misplaced. Part of the point that both Berger and Martin wish to make is that the apparent patterns of religious belief and practice in northern European may not be typical, and they note the vast expansion of Pentecostal Protestant Christianity in Africa and South America. Martin has estimated that there are at a minimum 250 million Pentecostals in the world today, 50 million of whom are in Latin America. Peter Berger himself has remarked that Max Weber is alive and well and living in Guatemala—regarding that country as a new test case for the Weber’s Protestantism and capitalism thesis. In the 1990s, Andrew Greely offered a similar assessment of the religious situation in Russia, reporting that “St. Vladimir has routed Karl Marx”. Perhaps best attested of all is the case for the vitality of Islam, although this may not be welcome news to all.41 If the scope and degree of secularization are deemed to have been exaggerated, so too the role of science. In terms of the relevant historical details, historians of science 38 Peter Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview”, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L. Berger, (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999), 1-18 (9). For studies supporting this thesis see, e.g., Andrew Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2003); Scott M. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Jane Garnett et al. (eds.), Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives (London: SCM, 2007); Thomas Banchoff (ed.), Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). For a recent summary of the desecularization arguments see Vyacheslav Karpov, “Desecularization: A Conceptual Framework”, Journal of Church and State 52 (2010): 232-70. 39 The New York Times, April 25, 1968. 40 Callum Brown, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750-2000 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2003), 29; cf. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800-2000 (London: Routledge, 2001); Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 41 David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Berger, Desecularization of the World, 16; Andrew Greely, “A Religious Revival in Russia?”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 33 (1994): 253-72 (272); cf. John Garrard and Carol Garrard, Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Elena Lisovskaya and Vyacheslav Karpov, “Orthodoxy, Islam, and Desecularization of Russia's State Schools”, Politics and Religion 3 (2010): 276–302. On Islam see Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Phillip W. Sutton and Stephen Vertigans, Resurgent Islam: A Sociological Approach (Malden: Polity, 2005). 11 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization have spent the past thirty years dismantling what is commonly referred to as “the conflict myth”. “Draper-and-White” is now code for a discredited model, and the most common position amongst historians of science is that there is no single, overarching narrative about historical relations between science and religion. This is partly because “science” and “religion” are themselves historical constructions that emerge relatively late in the history of the modern West. It is also widely recognized that modern science did not emerge in opposition to religion and that, if anything, while the relevant relations are complex (what counts as “science” and as “religion” is again a relevant consideration), religion contributed positively to the emergence and persistence of “science”. As for the specific episodes such as the “Victorian crisis of faith” supposedly precipitated by the advancement of science, this crisis seems to have been largely illusory. 42 Insofar as there was a group of self-identifying secularists in the late nineteenth century, as Susan Budd’s pioneering studies in the 1960s and 70s demonstrate, moral issues played a far more prominent role in loss of belief than more recondite scientific and theological issues. Budd concludes that “loss of faith for Freethinkers was not an intellectual but a moral matter.”43 Dominic Erdozain has made a related, if more general argument, about the moral sources of religious skepticism in the modern West.44 Some sociologists have recently reached a similar conclusion about the minimal role played by science in promoting religious doubt. David Martin wrote in 2007 that: “There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.”45 Moreover, as John Brooke has suggested, where such relations can be detected, it is more likely that the secularization of society leads to the secularization of science, rather than the reverse.46 A third difficulty with this science and secularization story is that it tends to operate with a particular, and problematic, conception of religion. Religion is understood as entailing beliefs about the natural world that operate on the same explanatory level as scientific theories. If this were so, it might explain an inevitable retreat of religion in the face of well-grounded scientific claims about the physical world. However, if religion were more concerned with morality, specific practices, or social relations, it is difficult to see how science might play a direct role. British anthropologist Mary Douglas has accordingly proposed that religion concerns social relations rather than theories about nature, and that given this it is difficult to see how science would 42 See Timothy Larsen, Crisis of Doubt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Susan Budd, “The Loss of Faith: Reasons for Unbelief among Members of the Secular Movement in England, 1850-1950”, Past and Present 36 (1967): 106-125 (125). Cf. Id. Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society, 1850-1960 (London: Heinemann, 1977). 44 Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Also see he contribution to this special issue. 45 David Martin, “Does the advance of science mean secularisation?, “Science and Christian Belief 19 (2007): 3-14 (9). 46 John Brooke, “That Modern Science has Secularized Western Culture”, in Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), Galileo goes to Jail and other myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 224-232. Frank James “Science in a Secular Age”, London Library Magazine 16-18. “Science became secular because society became secular, not the other way around.” (18). 43 12 impact negatively on religion.47 Charles Taylor’s understanding of secularization is also a relevant consideration here. He proposes a focus on the conditions of belief rather than the content of belief, and suggests that the shift to secularity be understood as a move from a society in which belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic, to one in which as one in which it is one option amongst others.48 Secularity thus suggests a particular framework for the holding of beliefs, rather than a situation in which supernatural beliefs have been replaced by scientific ones. All that said, it seems undeniable that certain parts of the world have seen a decline in religious belief and practice, in so far as these are susceptible to measurement. Even if this does not amount to a wholesale and universal disappearance of the sacred, would it not count as an instance of secularization? In this context Peter Berger has identified two exceptions to his thesis of a world desecularization. In Western Europe, he concedes, “the old secularization thesis would seem to hold.” The other exception is not geographically determined and consists rather of those individuals, wherever they are encountered, “with Western-type higher education, especially in the humanities and social sciences.”49 On the basis of these exceptions, Berger, Martin, and Grace Davie have proposed that the standard secularization thesis be reversed. Religious cultures are not the last redoubts against the inevitable victory of the forces of the forces of secularization. Rather it is Western Europe and a secular globalized elite that represent the exception to the general rule.50 This reversed version of the thesis leaves things to be explained. Why is it that we encounter secularization in these places and peoples and, given that the relevant places are scientifically and technologically advanced and the relevant people highly educated, might not science and scientific literacy play a role? 3. Science and Secularization Revisited In this section I want to suggest that science is involved in secularization—in these three senses of the term: decline in religious belief and practice, increasing differentiation of social institutions, and privatization of religion. In what follows I will offer a brief sketch of this involvement, proposing that to the extent that secularization has taken place in the West, this initially arose out of congenial interactions between religion and science, rather than a growing separation and opposition. That is to say, secularization does not arise out of a simple opposition 47 Mary Douglas, “The Effects of Modernization on Religious Change”, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 111 (1982): 1-19, cited in John Hedley Brooke, “Science and Secularization” in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, ed. Peter Harrison, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 103-123. 48 Taylor, A Secular Age, 1-14. 49 Berger, “Desecularization of the World”, 9-11. 50 Peter Berger, A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (New York: Doubleday, 1992), David Martin, “The Secularization Issue: Prospect and Retrospect”, British Journal of Sociology 42 (1991): 465-74; Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002). 13 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization between scientific and religious beliefs, but is rather the indirect result of the conditions of belief that attend the successes of modern science. There are three elements to this story. The first is to do with the rethinking of natural and supernatural causality. In the early modern period three of Aristotle’s four causes were expelled from the natural world, leaving only a single plane of efficient causes on which both divine and natural causation were thought to operate. Second, was the “secularization” of theology, in the sense that theological speculation became a legitimate pursuit for non-theologians and specifically for natural philosophers. Theology was conducted in the world, and by worldly persons. Again, this was related to a rejection of Aristotelianism, in this instance involving a breakdown of the boundaries between the speculative sciences of natural philosophy and theology. Protestant conceptions of vocation also played an important role. Third, and following on from this, was a new alliance between natural philosophy and theology which promoted a new understanding of religion as essentially to do with beliefs for which it was appropriate to seek scientific support. The new science was thus accompanied by a new conception of religion which developed in tandem with a conception of the secular. Over the past twenty years a number of accounts of the emergence of secular modernity attribute to late medieval conceptions of “univocity of being” a key role.51 The story goes that while in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas had insisted that divine predicates (God is good, God is wise, etc.) are to be understood analogically, his scholastic successor John Duns Scotus maintained that they must be understood univocally. For Aquinas, when we predicate goodness of God, we mean “goodness” in a way that is analogous to human conceptions of goodness. For Duns Scotus, however, in order for such claims to be meaningful, the predicate “goodness” must have the same sense in both cases. That is, it must be deployed univocally rather than analogously. Similarly, if we were to say that God causes something to take place, we must be using “cause” in the same sense that applies when we speak of natural causation. The consequence of this development is that God came to be thought of as the highest of beings, and that his causal activity was seen as operating on the same level as creaturely or natural causation. When God’s causal activity subsequently came to be seen unnecessary for the explanation of natural phenomena, there were increasingly few places for him to be active in the world. This gave rise to a naturalistic reading of nature which found no place for the divine.52 51 See, e.g., Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 25-73; Michael Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason 2nd edn., (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 302-6; Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 52 Another part of this story concerns divine voluntarism and the medieval power distinction (between Dei potentia absoluta and Dei potentia ordinata). I have reservations about this story, too. See Harrison, “Voluntarism and Early Modern Science”, History of Science 40 (2002): 63-89. “Was Newton a Voluntarist?”, in James E. Force and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), pp39-64; “Voluntarism and the Origins of Modern Science: A Reply to John Henry”, History of Science 47 (2009): 223-31. 14 This analysis is on the right track in so far as it identifies as a key moment of transition a flattening of causation in the early modern period, so that divine and natural causality are seen as operating on the same level. However, the proposed genealogy is problematic. For a start, there has been some discussion about whether Duns Scotus was in fact the originator of the doctrine of univocity.53 But whatever the origins of the notion, early modern natural philosophy (i.e “science”) is the key driver of the conception, for it incorporated it into a view of causation that underpinned the modern understanding of the operations of the natural world. This, in turn, seems to be less a development of Scotist philosophy or its philosophical descendants than a way of integrating a new corpuscular matter theory into natural philosophy. The scientific explanations characteristic of medieval Aristotelianism accounted for change in the world in terms of the intrinsic powers and virtues of natural things. God is involved in these events because he is the causal source of everything in the natural world. When God acts in nature, he does not do so immediately but acts through the powers of the creatures. Thus, for Aquinas, each natural event is wholly the effect of God and of the natural agent.54 Miraculous events, by way of contrast, are wholly the work of God. While some fourteenth- and fifteenth-century thinkers had expressed reservations about this Aristotelian view of natural change, it was the adoption of Epicurean matter theory by early modern natural philosophers in the seventeenth century that necessitated a complete rethinking of causation, particularly in relation to what virtues and powers might continue to reside in matter.55 The major Protestant reformers had successfully challenged the key elements of the Aristotelian approach to moral philosophy, denying that the moral status of human beings was related to virtues that directing them towards particular ends. Luther and Calvin both held this approach to be inconsistent with what they considered to be the biblical view of justification: Individuals did not become righteous because of their own inherent qualities, but because God had willed to impute righteousness to them. Moral worth was to be understood relationally, rather than ontologically. The adoption of a corpuscular matter theory in natural philosophy led to a parallel view of nature’s operations, now accounted for not in terms of inherent powers or virtues directing them to particular 53 Richard Cross, “Duns Scotus and Suárez at the Origins of Modernity”, in Wayne J. Hankey and Douglas Hedley (eds.), Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy: Postmodern Theology, Rhetoric and Truth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 65-80; Michael J. Dodds, Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 52. 54 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, 3.66, 3.70, 3.77. Francisco Suárez, On Efficient Causation, tr. Alfred Freddoso (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 18. 1 (14). Cf. Peter Lombard, Sentences 2.18.5. 55 Nicholas of Autrecourt (1300—c. 1350) was sceptical about Aristotelian causation as was Gabriel Biel (c. 1425-1495). Alfred Freddoso, “Medieval Aristotelianism and the Case against Secondary Causation in Nature,” in Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism, ed. Thomas V. Morris, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For a possible connection to the occasionalism of Islamic thinkers see Harry Wolfson, “Nicolaus of Autrecourt and Ghazali’s Argument Against Causality”, Speculum, 44 (1969): 234–38. 15 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization ends, but again because of externally imposed divine volitions. Natural explanations, henceforth, will be understood in terms of divinely promulgated laws of nature rather than inherent powers. In a way, God’s operations in the realms of both grace and nature are now understood in terms of relations rather than the imbuing of intrinsic qualities.56 In the Principles of Philosophy (1644), Descartes explains that the laws of nature are nothing other than God’s continuous willing of certain regular states of affairs: “God imparted various motions to the parts of matter when he first created them, and he now preserves all this matter in the same way, and by the same process by which he originally created it”.57 These laws are immutable because the divine nature from which they issue is immutable. For Descartes, God acts constantly and consistently to uphold the laws of nature. These reside not in the essences of natural things, but in God’s constant willing.58 The Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche took these assumptions to their logical conclusion by asserting that there are no genuine efficient causes in nature. Natural events are simply the occasion on which God acts. Efficient causes are thus the last of Aristotle’s causes to be banished from the natural world. Their role is taken over by the new idea of laws of nature.59 While the Newtonians were to take issue with elements of the Cartesian programme, they nonetheless adopted the vocabulary of laws of nature, along with the idea of the primacy of divine causation in these laws.60 Newton himself held that gravity was not an essential property inherent in matter, and while was he reluctant to identify gravity with divine activity his followers were less so. William Whiston, Newton’s successor in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, announced that the effect of nature were nothing other than divine power “acting according to fixt and 56 For a more detailed account of these transitions see Harrison, Territories of Science and Religion. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, § 61, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 2 vols. Translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), vol. 1, 240. 58 Descartes, The World, in Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, 93, 96; Principles of Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, 240. Whether Descartes believed in the existence of secondary causes remains a contested issue. 59 Nicholas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, ed. Nicholas Jolley and David Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), intro. by Nicholas Jolley, xxii. cf. xxvii. From an extensive secondary literature on the early modern conception of laws of nature see John Henry, “Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science: Descartes and the Importance of Laws of Nature”, Early Science and Medicine, 9 (2004): 73-114; J. R. Milton, “Laws of Nature”, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols., ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 1, 680-701; Peter Harrison, “Laws of Nature in SeventeenthCentury England: From Cambridge Platonism to Newtonianism”, in The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives, ed. Eric Watkins, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 127-48, and Peter Harrison, “Voluntarism and Early Modern Science”, History of Science 40 (2002): 63-89. 60 In a letter to Richard Bentley, Newton wrote: “You sometimes speak of Gravity as essential and inherent to Matter. Pray do not ascribe that Notion to me; for the Cause of Gravity is what I do not pretend to know, and therefore would take more Time to consider it.” B Cohen (ed.), Isaac Newton's Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1978), 279-312 (298). 57 16 certain laws”.61 Indeed, all “natural” change came to be understood simply as unmediated divine activity. The philosopher-theologian Samuel Clarke—Newton’s spokesman in the protracted controversy with German philosopher G. W. Leibniz— was even more direct. The course of nature, he contended “is nothing else but the will of God producing certain effects in a continued, regular, constant, and uniform manner; which course or manner of acting, being in every moment perfectly arbitrary, is as easy to be altered at any time as to be preserved.”62 The distinction between natural and supernatural, so carefully articulated by Aquinas, was now dispensed with, leaving all events equally natural or supernatural. 63 Clarke states this unambiguously: ...absolutely speaking, in This strict and Philosophical Sense; either nothing is miraculous, namely, if we have respect to the Power of God; or, if we regard our own Power and Understanding, then almost every thing, as well what we call natural, as what we call supernatural, is in this Sense really miraculous; and 'tis only usualness or Unusualness that makes the distinction.64 This unitary conception of causation does not seem to have been indebted to the philosophy of Duns Scotus. Rather it resulted from specific theological and metaphysical problems associated with the new corpuscular theory, and with pious natural philosophers’ attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of corpuscular matter theory with Christian theism. The Newtonians would doubtless be discomforted by the comparison, but this conception of nature is not so far removed from Spinoza’s monistic Deus sive natura (God-or-nature). Because there was a single layer of efficient causation, laws describing regularities in nature admitted of two descriptions, being both laws of God and laws of nature. And these could easily become simply laws of nature without remainder. This move is foreshadowed in Laplace’s celebrated remark that he had no need of the God hypothesis to account for the regular motions of the cosmos. These developments are consistent with a more general theory of secularization according to which the Protestant reformers’ attempt to make the theological domain allencompassing ultimately gives rise to a naturalistic re-description of that theological totality. There is much more that could be said here. In addition to possible connections between Protestant critiques of Aristotelian teleology in the moral sphere and challenges to final causation in the sphere of nature, other features of Reformation 61 William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth (London, 1696), 6, 211. Samuel Clarke, The Works of Samuel Clarke, D.D. 2 vols., (London, 1738), vol. 2, 697-8. 63 Aquinas is one of the first to make an explicit distinction between natural and supernatural. “Supernatural” [supernaturalis] becomes a common expression only in the thirteenth century. See Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 9-12. Talal Asad get this wrong way round when he asserts that an early modern distinction between natural and supernatural is the premise for the construction of a “secular space.” Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 27. 64 Clarke, Works, vol. 2, 698. 62 17 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization thought and practice informed early modern natural philosophy. I have suggested elsewhere that Protestant approaches to the book of scripture (along with their view of the sacraments) promoted the demise of sacramental understanding of the world, and making room for “scientific” readings of the book of nature.65 Brad Gregory has similarly suggested that Protestantism challenged a prevailing sacramental view of nature in a way that was conducive to alternative scientific interpretations. 66 Protestant conceptions of divine omnipotence and providence, albeit in indirect ways, were also significant in these transitions.67 A second way of linking science and secularization is to do with the secularization of theology, by which I mean simply a democratization of theological reflection, which allowed natural philosophers to put forward theological speculations. This process was a prerequisite for the desacralization of nature described above. Aristotle had identified three speculative sciences— natural philosophy (or physics), mathematics, and theology —and had distinguished them by their respective subject matters. Natural philosophy dealt with what was material, temporal, and mutable; theology, with what was immaterial, eternal and immutable; mathematics with what lay between. One feature of the new seventeenth century approaches to natural philosophy was the transgression of the boundaries between these disciplines. Historians of science have attended most to the new combinations natural philosophy and mathematics which culminated in Newton’s magnum opus, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). But with the appearance of the new hybrid discipline of “physico-mathematics” come another new combination of natural philosophy/physics and theology—physicotheology. Following Kant’s classification of arguments for the existence of God, it has become customary to think of physico-theology as an inelegant synonym for the argument from design. But originally it was a new combined disciplinary field akin to physico-mathematics.68 And its practice gave rise to a new situation in which natural philosophers assumed authority in the sphere of theology. Aristotle’s insistence on the relative independence of natural philosophy and theology had been reflected in the institutional structures of the medieval universities. Those universities that had a “higher” Faculty of Theology—and not all did—observed a clear demarcation between the subject matter of natural philosophy and theology. 65 Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’ Re-assessed”, The Historical Journal 51 (2008): 497-528, esp. 505-7. Edward Muir, Ritual in early modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 5; Brian A. Gerrish, “Sign and reality: the Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Confessions”, in Gerrish, The old Protestantism and the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 66 Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 40-3. 67 Keith Hutchison, “Supernaturalism and the Mechanical Philosophy”, History of Science 21 (1983): 297-333; Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 41. 68 See Harrison, “Physico-theology and the Mixed Sciences: The Role of Theology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy”, in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter Anstey and John Schuster, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 165-183. 18 The former was taught in the Faculty of Arts, the latter in the Faculty of Theology. A 1272 statute of Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris thus stipulated that “no bachelor or master of our faculty should presume to determine or even to dispute any purely theological question”. 69 (The subsequent Condemnation of 1277, which prohibited discussion of some 219 philosophical and theological theses in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris, represents a policing of this boundary.) It is characteristic of the seventeenth-century natural philosophy, however, that its practitioners assumed a license to engage in theological discussions. Amos Funkenstein has spoken in this context of the emergence of “secular theologians”.70 A conspicuous instance of this was Galileo’s ill-fated foray into biblical hermeneutics. In the “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” (1615), Galileo set out principles of biblical interpretation, drawing upon Augustine, in order to support his version of the Copernican hypothesis. As is well known, Catholic authorities took a dim view of this incursion, endorsing the Tridentine principle that biblical exegesis was the business of the Church, and not individual philosophers. René Descartes, mindful of Galileo’s fate, exercised considerable caution in theological matters, often disclaiming that he would leave theology to the theologians. This notwithstanding, his radical thesis concerning the creation of eternal truths and his new theological conception of the laws of nature represent the articulation of quite distinctive theological positions, linked to his natural philosophical project. Protestants had even fewer reservations about making theological claims. Francis Bacon suggested that natural philosophy was a redemptive exercise, aimed at partially restoring the earth to its prelapsarian perfection.71 Johannes Kepler proposed that astronomy be regarded as a theological activity: “I wished to be a theologian; for a long time I was troubled, but now see how God is also praised through my work in astronomy.” Astronomers, he believed, were “priests of the most high God, with respect to the book of nature.”72 Robert Boyle used the same metaphor, and suggested that natural philosophy ought to be regarded as “reasonable worship of God.” 73 Isaac Newton insisted, in direct opposition to the Aristotelian division of intellectual labour, that “to treat of God from the phenomena is certainly a part of natural philosophy”.74 These were not simply pious glosses but, as we have already seen, involve specific conceptions of divine 69 Edward Grant, ed., A Source Book in Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 45. 70 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 4-10. 71 Francis Bacon, Novum organum, Bk. 2, §52, Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 4, 247 72 Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke (Munich, 1937-45) XIII, 40. For Kepler’s own account, Johannes Kepler, Selbstzeugnisse, ed. Franz Hammer, tr. Esther Hammer (Stuttgart-Bad Constatt, 1971), 61-5. Werke VII (1953), 25. Cf. Kepler, Letter to Herwath von Hohenburg, March 26, 1598, Werke XIII (1945), 193. 73 Boyle, Some Considerations, in Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 6 vols. Edited by Thomas Birch, (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966) vol. 2, 32, 29, 63, 62; Cf. vol. 3, 627, vol. 4, 401. “Reasonable worship” is biblical phrase (Romans 1.12). Also see H. Fisch, “The Scientist as Priest: A Note on Robert Boyle’s Natural Theology”, Isis 44 (1953): 252-65. 74 Isaac Newton, “General Scholium”, in Isaac Newton: The Principia, tr. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 943. 19 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization activity that provided crucial presuppositions to the science they underpinned. Neither did natural philosophers restrict themselves to the more general field of natural theology. A number of writers speculated about the physical causes of the beginning and end of the world. Among Robert Boyle’s voluminous theological writings was the intriguing Physico-theological considerations about the possibility of the Resurrection (1675). Boyle also suggested that natural philosophers should adjudicate on whether certain events were miraculous. Newton wrote much more on theology than science, and covered topics ranging over biblical interpretation, chronology and eschatology, and the nature of the Trinity. One factor in the rise of “secular theology” was the new Protestant notion of vocation with its associated critique of hierarchical medieval “estates”. The clergy had represented one of three estates, the other two being the aristocracy and the laity. The sacrament of Holy Orders was thought to confer on the priesthood a distinct ontological status.75 The Protestant reformers had challenged the idea of the unique status of the clergy, with Luther, for example, maintaining that all Christians “are of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except that of office.”76 This idea of “the priesthood of all believers” gave sanction to the theological speculations of natural philosophers. The possibly of secular theology—that is, theology practiced by the laity—was thus a consequence of secularization inasmuch as it called for the extension of the sanctity of the priestly vocation into worldly pursuits, including natural philosophy. Relating this to the most basic understanding of “secularization” we might say that this resulted from the conversion of ecclesiastical intellectual property to secular use. The implications of this were far reaching, because with the growth in the social status of natural philosophy and natural philosophers, theological pronouncements bearing the imprimatur of science came eventually to be accorded considerable weight. Thus, as we have seen, the success of Newtonianism promoted an either-or understanding of causality, paving the way for a thoroughgoing naturalism. The practice of physico-theology brings us to the third way in which science is implicated in secularization. Physico-theology was not simply the apologetic defense of religion by natural philosophy: it was at least as much about the apologetic defense of a new experimental natural philosophy by a more socially secure theology.77 The 75 Council of Trent, Session 23, ch. 4. On estates, see Rosemary O’Day, “The Clergy of the Church of England”, in The Professions in Early Modern England, ed. Wilfred Prest (London: Routledge, 1987), 25-63. 76 Martin Luther, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), in Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 12. Cf. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Henry Beveridge. 2 vols. (London: James Clarke, 1962), vol. 1, 502; vol. 2, 1473. 77 Thus Stephen Gaukroger: “… a good part of the distinctive success at the level of legitimation and consolidation of the scientific enterprise in the early-modern West, derives not from any separation of religion and natural philosophy, but rather from the fact that natural philosophy could be accommodated to projects in natural theology.” Emergence of a Scientific Culture (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2009), 23. Cf. Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 347. 20 baptism of Epicureanism is a case in point. One reason that natural philosophers stressed the essential inertness of matter was in order to provide a role for God in a worldview traditionally associated with atheism. The success of Epicurean matter theory thus crucially depended upon its capacity to be Christianised. In a sense this proved to be less problematic than it might at first seem, since unlike the competing Peripatetic, Platonic, and Stoic systems, there was no indigenous theology to displace. It is important to understand that the adoption of Epicurean matter theory did not come about through its displacement of some religious conception of nature, but because it came to be regarded as potentially more compatible with theological orthodoxy than its competitors.78 More importantly though, the physico-theological union of natural philosophy and Christianity had a significant impact on how Christianity itself came to be conceptualised. Increasingly, it was understood to be based on propositions that stood in need of rational (or natural philosophical) support—because this was the form that best suited the physico-theological model. The early modern rapprochement between “science” and “religion” thus brought about an adjustment in the prevailing understanding of what counted as “religion”. This is not the context in which to set out in detail how our modern conception of religion emerged in the early modern period. There is a significant literature devoted to this.79 Suffice it to say that before the seventeenth century, religious identity in the West was not understood in terms of commitment to a “religion”, constituted by a discrete set of beliefs and practices. “Religio”, in fact, was one of the moral virtues and the little used term “religions” (religiones) referred to different monastic orders. Following the Reformation however, “religion” was increasingly understood in terms of beliefs and practices, and the plural religions came into being as mutually exclusive instantiations of a generic “religion”. The reformers’ insistence on the primacy of explicit belief was also a key factor in this development, as was the process of formally defining religious differences that arose out of the settlements of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648). The co-incidence of the voyages of discovery and the 78 Descartes, admittedly, needed to work rather hard to render corpuscular matter theory compatible with transubstantiation. But this same difficulty rendered it more attractive to Protestants. On this general point it might also be said that even making allowances for its genre, Stephen Greenblatt’s recent attempt to place a revived Epicureanism at the heart of modernity [The Swerve: How the World became Modern (New York: Norton, 2012)] gets even the basics wrong. It overlooks the existence of Carolingian MSS of De rerum natura, rehearses the humanists’ myths about their own place in history, and almost completely ignores the role of natural philosophers in the revival and baptism of Epicureanism. 79 See, e.g., Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion [1962] (London: SPCK, 1978); Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michel Despland, La religion en occident: évolution des idées et du vécu. (Montréal: Fides, 1979); Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Guy Stroumsa, A New Science; The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: The History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 21 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization emergence of religious pluralism in Europe gave rise to the invention of world religions. The result was the modern problem of competing religious truth claims, and the need to adjudicate between the rival claims of the religions was acutely felt. The standard solution was to speak of “evidences”, “proofs” and “impartial comparisons.”80 It was at this point that the new natural philosophy could offer its services. Physico-theology established the general truth of monotheistic religion, while natural philosophical treatment of miracles and prophecies helped distinguish among competing monotheistic creeds. This involvement of natural philosophy thus helped reinforce the new idea of “religion”, while at the same time establishing its own status as a socially useful activity. To this extent, science might thus be said to be implicated in secularization, since as Talal Asad and others have rightly argued, the formation of the category “religion” is the precondition or, perhaps more accurately, the necessary concomitant, of an idea of the secular.81 Conclusion Accounts of the role of science in the processes of secularization have tended to one of two extremes. On a common view, science is the main driver of secularization, since it has continually thrown up challenges to key religious beliefs and offers us an alternative, rational way of looking at the world. This view has typically been underpinned with a commitment to the idea that history progresses through stages, leading to an inevitable displacement of religious conceptions by scientific ones. At the other extreme are relatively sophisticated understandings of secularization that propose that science plays little or no role in the process, and which give more weight to factors such as historical criticism, the emergence of historical consciousness, to late medieval nominalism and conceptions of univocity, or to less direct causes such as social differentiation, the existence of a plurality of beliefs, or material prosperity and personal security. I have offered a broad sketch of a position that seeks to reinstate science as a significant factor in the emergence of secular modernity. At an intellectual level, science, or natural philosophy as it then was, was the predominant vector for a conception of causation that made it difficult to speak about divine action in nature or history. This, in turn, was related to the changing status of natural philosophy and its practitioners, such that the latter were able to make authoritative pronouncements on theological matters. This authority has been retained right up to the present, as the first section of this paper amply demonstrates, even if the commitment now tends towards a thoroughgoing naturalism and negation of theology. Finally, the intimate relationship between natural philosophy and theology that characterized the seventeenth century was one factor that promoted a modern, propositional understanding of religion, and this was itself a necessary condition for the coming into being of “the secular”. 80 81 See Harrison, “Religion” and the religions, 19-28. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993). 22 There are two deep ironies in all of this. First is that the popular narrative, with its teleological development toward the purely secular condition, bears a significant resemblance to forms of sacred history. There is a direct development from Protestant providential history of the kind represented by Francis Bacon to the perspective of the philosophes who turned Protestant history into a story about enlightenment liberation from religious superstition. This suggests a lineage of what Ian Hunter has referred to as secularization “combat concepts” that begins well before the nineteenth century. The stadial histories of the Enlightenment have an even longer pedigree, mapping more or less directly onto medieval millenarian divisions of time. Comte’s “three stages” are the secular version of the trinitarian structuring of history developed by thirteenth century Franciscan mystic Joachim of Fiore. Joachim’s third “age of the Spirit” would see the reign of universal love and peace in which ecclesiastical rule would become redundant. In Comte’s case, it is the redemptive transformative power that Bacon attributed to science that would usher in the kingdom of reason. Furthermore, as Norman Cohn demonstrated in his much lauded study of chiliastic expectation in the middle ages, millenarian hope is highest in times of social stress, actual or imagined.82 It is possible to identify such specific triggers for Comtean, Hegelian and Marxist eschatologies.83 The most recent outbreaks of the science-willcause-secularization style eschatology, articulated by the new atheists, were precipitated by the events of September 11 and what was thought to be the global menace of Islamic fundamentalism.84 The second irony, to which John Brooke and Michael Buckley have previously drawn attention, concerns that fact that it was religiously committed natural philosophers who did most to establish the conditions for a secular understanding of the operations of nature.85 This was accomplished not primarily through the influence of Scotist thinking per se, but by the theologically inspired embodiment in early modern natural philosophy of univocal understanding of causation, along with a non-symbolic ordering of the natural world. This led to a wholly unintended desacralization of the natural order. It is interesting in this context that it was sociologist Robert K. Merton, author of a thesis that linked puritanism with the efflorescence of scientific activity in seventeenth-century England, who developed and drew attention to the notion of “unintended consequences” in sociological theory.86 Of more direct relevance to our present subject, this analysis lends credence to elements of the argument set out in 82 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Paladin, 1970), 281-6. See Andrew Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 5. 84 Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004), 157-8; Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: Norton, 2005), 333; Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great (New York: Twelve, 2009), 31. 85 Brooke, “Science and Secularization” and Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism, 322-63. Also see Dominic Erdozain’s more recent The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 86 R. K. Merton, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action”, American Sociological Review 1 (1936), 894-904. 83 23 Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017), Special Issue: Narratives of Secularization Gregory’s Unintended Reformation, which similarly directs our attention to the paradoxical consequences of the religious reformations of the early modern period. 24