Explanation before Science and Religion

Peter N. Jordan

doi:10.1017/9781009211970.003

Chapter 1 - Explanation before Science and Religion

from Part I - Setting the Scene

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2022

Peter N. Jordan

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Peter N. Jordan: Affiliation:
University of Oxford

Book contents

Summary

This chapter introduces the concept of providential naturalism by way of discussion of contemporary perceptions about “scientific” and “religious” explanations of phenomena in nature. It also introduces the specific historical and geographical context -- early modern England -- on which the book focuses.

Keywords

Naturalism providence causality theology science

Type: Chapter
Information: Naturalism in the Christian Imagination
Providence and Causality in Early Modern England
, pp. 3 - 17

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009211970.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

Religion and Explanation

What bearing should religious convictions have on how phenomena in nature are understood and explained?

The answer one receives to this question depends a great deal on whom one is asking. To those for whom the answer is ‘none whatsoever’, their reasons for keeping religion out of the mix often line up with one of two common ways in which religion is construed in relation to science. For holders of the first of these, known as the ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ view, religions simply are not explanatory entities. Responsibility for explaining phenomena in nature belongs to science, they say, while religion reigns over the domain of meaning. As palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould puts it, ‘Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values – subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve’.Footnote ¹ Science alone, for followers of Gould, is responsible for explaining what happens in nature, and so religion and science do not directly compete with each other.Footnote ²

For adherents of the second view, religions are direct but deficient explanatory competitors to science.Footnote ³ Martin Kettle’s Guardian column immediately following the horrific 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami exemplifies this competitive logic.Footnote ⁴ Kettle asserts the existence of two possible answers to the question of why such a catastrophic event might have occurred: ‘As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest one poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an entirely natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind’. The ‘natural’ one he has in mind is the one put forward by scientists – in this case, seismologists. The ‘other kind’ refers to explanations derived from a ‘non-scientific belief system’, and whose coherence Kettle sincerely doubts. Undergirding this competitive view is the idea that scientific and religious explanations are separable according to the causes to which they appeal. Science explains what happens in nature naturalistically – that is, by appealing to natural causality – while religious persons (so the argument goes) expect supernatural causes to be present and therefore propose explanations that appeal to supernatural agencies and causes.

Despite religion’s best efforts, holders of this second view say, the historical record clearly evidences science’s explanatory superiority. Triumphalist historical narratives, such as those purveyed by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, purportedly demonstrate that in episode after episode science has uncovered the correct explanation for countless phenomena that had once been explained – erroneously – by religion:

Science nibbles at religion ... relentlessly consuming divine explanations and replacing them with material ones. Evolution took a huge bite a while back, and recent work on the brain has shown no evidence for souls, spirits, or any part of our personality or behavior distinct from the lump of jelly in our head. We now know that the universe did not require a creator. Science is even studying the origin of morality.Footnote ⁵

History thus reveals what religions really are: failed sciences.Footnote ⁶ If the past is anything to go by, we can expect explanations infused with the supernatural to continue ‘retreat[ing] into the ever-shrinking gaps not yet filled by science’ until every one of them has been identified and eliminated.Footnote ⁷ Religions should therefore steer well clear of explanation.Footnote ⁸

For holders of either of these views, religious beliefs should have nothing to do with explanations of phenomena in nature, and naturalistic explanation is unimaginable as a constitutive part of a religious outlook or something that religious people might make use of. For those who see the world through religious eyes, however, neither of these approaches typically is acceptable. Many religious persons believe that their religious convictions are relevant to how they explain what happens in nature, and think that their explanations should take account of those convictions. At the same time, the historical record includes countless religious persons who have found their traditions to be hospitable (to a greater or lesser extent) to naturalistic forms of explanation.Footnote ⁹ In their efforts to let the full range of their commitments bear on their understanding of nature, religious persons frequently defy the clean separation of religion and science that those wanting to keep religious elements out of the study of nature seek to maintain.Footnote ¹⁰

Providential Naturalism

Among those Christians who think that their religious commitments matter to how they understand and explain phenomena in nature, one doctrinal locus that has long been thought germane to the topic is the doctrine of providence. No single view of providence has prevailed within the Christian tradition, but throughout history Christians generally have understood it to mean that God creates, upholds, and provides for the entire created order. That provision is diverse: ‘Everywhere the Bible speaks of God as one who creates, preserves, upholds, wills, acts, governs, foredains, elects, calls, predestines, judges, redeems, forgives, reconciles, provides for, protects, heals, and loves’.Footnote ¹¹ As the early modern authors we look at in the following chapters attest, providence is especially relevant to explanations of occurrences in nature because it has a direct bearing on how Christians think about natural causality.

In recent times, Christians have often adopted one of three views of the relations between providence and natural causality. According to the first, God governs the world in such a way that natural causality can explain every single occurrence in nature. Certain Victorian-era Christians such as James Clerk Maxwell, for example, believed that God providentially governs nature, but thought that God’s provision manifests not through both natural and miraculous occurrences but through natural occurrences alone. God, Maxwell thought, governs through natural laws that are completely uniform in operation. All phenomena in nature are thus generated by the temporal unfolding of natural causality, and explanations of phenomena need appeal only to natural causes.Footnote ¹²

To holders of the second view, God’s providential oversight of nature means that nature possesses significant, but not total, orderliness and predictability.Footnote ¹³ Created entities are brought into being and sustained in their operation at all times by God, and for some percentage of all phenomena in history nature’s causal activity is sufficiently regular that it is not necessary to invoke the action of the transcendent cause (i.e., the vertical plane) that holds them in being and energises their activity when explaining their causal interactions with each other on the horizontal plane.Footnote ¹⁴ Natural causality cannot, however, account for the remaining phenomena, because those occurrences are miraculous. God’s providential guidance of the created order thus means that their explanations will at times be naturalistic, and at other times not. To assume that a naturalistic explanation can be provided for every single phenomenon in nature is to misunderstand how God works in the world.

For holders of either the first or second views, the extent to which natural causality can explain occurrences in nature flows from the underlying picture of providence. For those who subscribe to the third view, providence is bracketed out and a fully naturalistic methodology is instead embraced. Among Christian professional scientists, for example, any personal convictions they may have about providence are set aside once they walk into the laboratory and follow science’s fully naturalistic methodology. Outside the lab they might understand providence to mean that certain occurrences are miraculous and thus beyond the explanatory scope of natural causality. Inside the lab, however, they follow the norms of the scientific community and submit to its explanatory constraints, one of which is that phenomena in nature are explicable through natural causality alone. By methodologically limiting their explanations to natural causes, their beliefs about God’s providential government of the created order and the possibility of supernatural causality in history are rendered immaterial.Footnote ¹⁵

Exponents of the first and second views deploy holistic explanatory frameworks that emerge from how they understand providence. In both cases their view of nature reflects an integral approach that draws on the full range of their commitments.Footnote ¹⁶ In this book we call these integrated providence and natural causality frameworks providential naturalisms, and refer to those who employ such frameworks to understand and explain phenomena as providential naturalists. From a causal perspective, providential naturalisms constitute a spectrum of possible positions. At one end are those (like Maxwell) who adopt the first, fully naturalistic view described above. They are committed to a providential outlook, but their understanding of providence leads them to think that 100 per cent of phenomena throughout history are generated by natural causality.Footnote ¹⁷ We call those persons providential full naturalists, or full naturalists for short. For those who adopt the second view described above, the proportion of phenomena generated by natural causality is less than 100 per cent. We call them providential partial naturalists, or partial naturalists for short. Holders of the third view are already widely known as methodological naturalists.Footnote ¹⁸

These three views indicate that the relations between providence and natural causality among Christians have historically been quite varied. Behind all three, however, is the idea that one can be religious and at the same time study and explain phenomena in nature in ways that rely heavily on natural causality and naturalistic explanation. The first and second naturalism-within-religion approaches also challenge the idea that natural causality belongs solely to science, call into question any notion that religions are interested only (or even primarily) in supernatural causality, and suggest that segregating natural causality and theological convictions into separate categories like ‘science’ and ‘religion’ is not the only way to carve up the explanatory territory.Footnote ¹⁹

Providential Naturalisms in Early Modern England

For those Christians who think that the doctrine of providence should bear on how they understand and explain occurrences in nature, what does providential naturalism look like in practice? This book answers that question by looking at a handful of figures from the past who fleshed out and implemented specific variants of providential naturalism in specific contexts. Their writings allow us to see what providential naturalisms have looked like in action. By identifying the presenting issues with which these figures dealt, the goals they had in mind when tackling those issues, and the categories and distinctions they developed and relied upon, we can get a feel for what it is like to be a providential naturalist. Equally importantly, their writings also point to the complexities and difficulties involved when God is brought to bear on the task of explanation. Even though their theological convictions about providence make room for natural causality and naturalistic forms of explanation, their writings expose some of the perennial difficulties facing Christians who want to bring their beliefs about God to the study of nature.

The authors we look at come from early modern England, and deploy that era’s Protestant theological language and conceptuality. Two features of post-Reformation England’s intellectual and religious landscape made providential naturalism a pre-eminent framework for understanding nature at the time, and therefore make it an ideal period to study. First, nature’s causal processes and mechanisms were receiving a great deal of attention because of the revolutions in natural philosophy then underway.Footnote ²⁰ As recent surveys of the (so-called) scientific revolution attest, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was a hotbed for new ideas about nature’s causal activity: novel approaches in anatomy were being conceived; new ideas about human physiology were being developed; bold arguments suggesting that the sun is stationary and the earth is orbiting around it were being put forth; mathematics and natural philosophy were being brought together in unprecedented ways; and mechanical and other philosophies of nature were being formulated and discussed.Footnote ²¹ In England in particular, Francis Bacon was seeking to reform natural philosophy quite drastically, emphasising its utility for relieving the human condition. Later in the century a critical mass of eclectic scholars came together to form the Royal Society in London, an institution that nurtured the study of nature at the time, and which continues to do so to this day. Early modern England also featured natural philosophers of the stature of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, both of whom are pivotal figures in the history of science.Footnote ²²

This widespread interest in natural causality occurred in a milieu, second, in which the influence of the Christian doctrine of providence was widespread.Footnote ²³ Especially among Protestants in early modern England, belief in God’s provision was taken to be an indispensable commitment of the faith. People from all walks of life saw God in the midst of everything, and tried to understand what was taking place in their own lives, and in the world at large, in terms of God’s provision.Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, their near obsession with providence, says historian Alexandra Walsham, led people at the time to talk, preach, and write about the topic ‘in exhaustive detail and with wearisome frequency’.Footnote ²⁵ While intellectuals generally saw natural causality as having a vital role in God’s providential oversight of the created order, others often emphasised God’s supernatural activity in nature. For these ‘hotter sort’ of providentialists,Footnote ²⁶ God was believed to act within the created order with considerable frequency, and unusual occurrences were thought to convey messages to humanity directly from the deity.

Providence and natural causality may later have become estranged from one another, with the former associated primarily with the category of ‘religion’ and the latter with ‘science’.Footnote ²⁷ Among the early modern English intellectuals we look at in this book, however, providence and natural causality together in the form of providential naturalism constituted a complete picture of the world. This integrated picture was a common way of looking at nature at the time.Footnote ²⁸ Providential naturalism’s flexibility in accommodating different views about the proportion of phenomena produced by natural causality meant that providential naturalists of a more supernatural temperament could dial down the extent of naturalism as desired, whereas those who saw nature as more regular or mechanical could move closer to the fully naturalistic end of the spectrum. Different versions of providential naturalism could also be informed by quite different underlying metaphysical commitments. While it may have been operationalised in a range of different ways depending on the convictions of those involved, early modern providential naturalism reflected long-held Christian views about the divine origins of nature and its corresponding orderliness. As a popular and flexible framework for understanding nature and explaining occurrences within it, providential naturalism informed discussions of a range of contemporary issues, and shaped debates in crucial ways.

The writings of the early modern intellectuals whom we look at address many different aspects of providential naturalism. Thanks to their thoroughness, we will see both that a consistent set of convictions lies at the heart of providential naturalisms, and that a range of complex and difficult theological issues lurks just beneath the surface. In the following chapters we focus on three challenging areas – ones that each figure, to a greater or lesser extent, grappled with in their writings – that emerge when trying to explain phenomena in the light of God’s government of the created order. The first pertains to the boundary between the natural and the miraculous. The questions here are legion: Do miracles occur? Do they still occur? Under what conditions might one expect miracles to occur? What are the criteria for judging whether any given occurrence is genuinely miraculous or not? Does God create causally efficacious entities that are (to some extent) causally autonomous, or is God causally responsible for all things in nature? The second concerns nature’s communicative aspect, an area that similarly raises a host of questions: To what extent, and by what means, does nature reveal God? Does nature communicate God’s purposes for human beings? What is the relationship between natural causality and the communicativity of nature? The third pertains to the relationship between what happens in nature, how we explain those phenomena, and how we should live. Although not all of the authors we look at treated these issues in equal depth, their writings indicate them to be pressing concerns that they simply could not avoid addressing, and suggest that they are ones which any prospective providential naturalist will eventually confront.

The case studies examined here enable discernment of both the possibilities and the challenges – or the challenges latent within the possibilities – of providential naturalism as an approach to understanding and explaining what happens in nature. Even though these intellectuals come from what may seem to be a completely different world from our own, understanding how they implemented providential naturalism, and identifying the struggles they experienced along the way, illuminates the challenges that anyone employing a similar approach in other places and times will likely encounter. For anyone today for whom providential naturalism is a live option, that is, understanding the assumptions and judgements these past providential naturalists had to make, and the challenges they faced, reveals some of the complications today’s providential naturalists may encounter. At the same time, for those who are sceptical of religiously inflected explanations of phenomena in nature, or who prefer non-religious forms of naturalism for any reason, a close look at how past intellectuals thought about phenomena in nature from within a providential vision of the world will sharpen the sceptic’s questions about, and criticisms of, comparable explanatory efforts in other historical circumstances.

Contents of the Book

The doctrine of providence traditionally has shaped how Christians view nature. In early modern English Protestant thought the doctrine enveloped natural causality and deployed it in a variety of ways, with God’s government of the created order often believed to occur through the operation of natural causes. To grasp how natural causality was perceived at the time we must therefore appreciate the broader providential context within which naturally caused phenomena were located. Chapter 2 looks at how English Protestants understood some of the main categories used to expound providence: creation, conservation, concurrence, government, ordinary and special providence, and others. These categories appear in one form or another in the texts discussed in later chapters. Understanding their meaning and purpose here makes it easier to appreciate their significance in those contexts.

Christians have long made use of naturalistic forms of explanation to explain phenomena in nature. At times, they have even wielded it against fellow Christians in the hope of replacing excessively miraculous explanations with more naturalistic ones, or of exchanging what are thought to be defective expressions of Christian piety with more acceptable ones. Chapters 3 and 4 examine specific instances of this kind of naturalistic critique amidst competing partially naturalistic explanations of the same phenomena.

Chapter 3 looks at chance-based gambling activities like dice and lots. Early modern Protestants thought gambling through such instruments was a big societal problem. This chapter analyses competing partially naturalistic accounts of how these activities were understood. It focusses on clergyman Thomas Gataker’s deployment of a more naturalistic approach, as an alternative to the more supernaturalistic approaches that some of his fellow Protestants, such as James Balmford, were using to fight back against the problem. At first glance these activities may not seem like the other kinds of phenomena in nature studied elsewhere in the book, but to early modern thinkers they involved very similar causal mechanisms to many other kinds of occurrences in nature. They therefore shed considerable light on how Christians at the time thought about and explained many kinds of phenomena in nature.

Chapter 4 turns to prodigies, unusual or unexpected phenomena thought to be personally or communally meaningful. Prodigies were widely thought to be an integral feature of a providentially governed world, and many different occurrences were taken to be communicative signs of God’s disposition toward, or impending judgement of, humanity. Some saw these strange occurrences as miracles and hence instances of divine action, but others dismissed such views as superstitious and misinformed, and conceived of ways to correct them. Following the lead of Francis Bacon, the English scholar John Spencer was convinced that the explanation of these unusual occurrences should be reformed, and made the case for placing them under the purview of natural philosophy and explaining them naturalistically. This chapter looks at the occurrences that Spencer labelled as prodigies, his strategies for understanding them, the consequences of providing naturalistic explanations of prodigies for the perceived communicative capacities of nature, and the afterlife of Spencer’s analysis among members of the Royal Society.

Chapters 5 and 6 examine how partially naturalistic explanation proceeded within the context of selected new philosophies of nature that emerged during the seventeenth century. Historians often see these new philosophies as part of an early modern shift toward a more regular, mechanical, or deterministic cosmos than was typically assumed by the broadly Aristotelian natural philosophies which they were intended to replace. As such, they generally expanded the number of phenomena in nature that were simply assumed to be explicable naturalistically compared to the number that were assumed to be in the philosophies that came before them.Footnote ²⁹ These two chapters look at specific instances of these new philosophies, and examine how they were operationalised by intellectuals who nevertheless insisted that God providentially governs the cosmos. So while Chapters 3 and 4 look at figures who wanted to expand the remit of natural causality and naturalistic explanation in the midst of providential theologies that tended to emphasise the supernatural end of the providential naturalism spectrum, Chapters 5 and 6 discuss figures who faced quite a different challenge: meaningfully maintaining God’s providential oversight of a cosmos amidst new philosophies which potentially could conceive of that cosmos as entirely orderly and regular in its operation.

Chapter 5 looks at Epicurean atomism as it was articulated by the physician and natural philosopher Walter Charleton. Charleton was among the first in England to advocate for a Christianised version of Epicureanism, a philosophy long considered suspicious because of its purportedly atheistic implications. Charleton countered these concerns by situating Epicurean atomism within a providential picture of the world. This chapter examines the main elements of Charleton’s partially naturalistic worldview, the influence of atomism on his providential naturalism, and his understanding of the affective consequences of invoking natural causality in a providentially governed world.

Chapter 6 delves into early modern theories about a key scriptural story, that of Noah’s flood, and the theological implications of explaining the flood in a largely naturalistic manner through appeal to laws of nature. Seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes used laws of nature as the basis for a naturalistic account of the creation of the world, and others quickly followed suit. This chapter analyses two accounts of the world’s creation and subsequent dissolution in the flood written in England in the closing decades of the seventeenth century that drew on laws of nature: Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, and William Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth. In their respective treatises, Burnet and Whiston explore how those early events in the earth’s history might be accounted for through natural processes, making their treatises among the earliest explicit attempts in England to explain key scriptural events chiefly in terms of natural causality. This chapter focusses on how each nevertheless retained a partially naturalistic approach to their naturalistic explanatory endeavours.

Chapters 3 to 6 display what selected early modern providential naturalisms looked like in action. Each chapter concludes with some observations about the providential naturalism framework analysed in that chapter, and some questions about implementing those frameworks more generally, that arise from these scenarios. Those observations and questions are ones that emerged either directly (through an author’s explicit discussion of them), or indirectly (because an author’s treatment of an issue prompts them). The concluding chapter of the book (Chapter 7) draws these together to better understand what might be involved in being a providential naturalist today. It identifies some of the key theological ideas, assumptions, and judgements involved in providential naturalisms, and some significant challenges and complexities that providential naturalists in any time and place will likely need to navigate. In terms of the latter, it draws attention specifically to the three areas of concern – the boundary between the natural and the miraculous; the communicative qualities of nature; and the implications of naturalistic explanation for how to live one’s life – described above.

Footnotes

¹ Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 4.

² Participants in contemporary science and religion conversations who want to emphasise the absence of conflict between the two sometimes appear to follow a version of Gould’s approach. See, for example, John Polkinghorne, Science and Religion in Quest of Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 21; Alister McGrath, Science and Religion: A New Introduction (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 15.

³ ‘As broad explanatory systems, religion and science each provide answers to a wide array of fundamental questions and concerns, and so each have strong explanatory value. However, these belief systems often provide different explanations for the same phenomena, and this competition for explanatory space can trigger conflict’. Jesse Preston and Nicholas Epley, ‘Science and God: An Automatic Opposition between Ultimate Explanations’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009), 238–241. For some of the history of this competition view, see Robert A. Segal, ‘Myth as Primitive Philosophy: The Case of E.B. Tylor’, in Kevin Schilbrack (ed.), Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2002), 18–45; Christian Smith, ‘Secularizing American Higher Education: The Case of Early American Sociology’, in Christian Smith (ed.), The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 97–159; Peter Harrison, ‘Science and Secularization’, Intellectual History Review 27 (2017): 47–70. If recent textbooks are any indication, it remains prevalent in contemporary anthropology, among other places. See Thomas Aechtner, ‘Galileo Still Goes to Jail: Conflict Model Persistence within Introductory Anthropology Materials’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 50 (2015), 209–226.

⁴ Martin Kettle, ‘How Can Religious People Explain Something Like This?’ The Guardian, 28 December 2004. Available at www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/dec/28/religion.comment.

⁵ Jerry Coyne, ‘Science and Religion Aren’t Friends’, USA Today, 11 October 2010. Available at https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010-10-11-column11_ST_N.htm. Chemist Peter Atkins espouses a similar view. P. W. Atkins, ‘The Limitless Power of Science’, in John Cornwell (ed.), Nature’s Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 122–132.

⁶ Sam Harris, ‘Religions Are Failed Sciences’, Big Think. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQgI4bHpAlA.

⁷ Coyne, ‘Science and Religion Aren’t Friends’. A more ambitious version of this view increases the scope of naturalistic explanation even further, applying it not only to phenomena outside the human person, but to human phenomena – most notably, human religiosity – as well. In recent years naturalistic explanations of religious belief have coalesced around cognitive explanations, such as one finds in the cognitive science of religion, and evolutionary explanations. In their more aggressive forms these approaches seek to explain religion in terms of something else, or to reduce religion to something else. The historical origins of this impulse are often located in the nineteenth century, in the work of figures such as Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.

⁸ Jerry Coyne, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (New York: Viking, 2016), xvi. Sam Harris, ‘Science Must Destroy Religion’, Edge. Available at www.edge.org/response-detail/11122. Peter Harrison has challenged those who use the historical success of methodologically naturalistic science to make ontological claims about the nature of reality: Peter Harrison, ‘Naturalism and the Success of Science’, Religious Studies 56 (2020), 274–291.

⁹ For some helpful insights about selected persons and periods, see William J. Courtenay, ‘The Critique of Natural Causality in the Mutakallimun and Nominalism’, Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973), 77–94; Richard C. Dales, ‘A Twelfth-Century Concept of the Natural Order’, Viator 9 (1978), 179–192; William J. Courtenay, Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought: Studies in Philosophy, Theology and Economic Practice (London: Variorum, 1984), III, 1–26; Lorraine Daston, ‘Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe’, Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 93–124; Edward Grant, ‘Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme on Natural Knowledge’, Vivarium 31 (1993), 84–105; Laura Smoller, ‘Defining the Boundaries of the Natural in Fifteenth-Century Brittany: The Inquest into the Miracles of Saint Vincent Ferrar (d. 1419)’, Viator 28 (1997), 333–360; Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ernan McMullin, ‘Darwin and the Other Christian Tradition’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 46 (2011), 291–316; Michael J. Dodds, Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2012); Peter Harrison, ‘Religion, Scientific Naturalism, and Historical Progress’, in Donald A. Yerxa (ed.), Religion and Innovation: Antagonists or Partners? (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 87–99; Peter Harrison and Jon H. Roberts (eds.), Science Without God: Rethinking the History of Scientific Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

¹⁰ On the historical emergence of the categories ‘science’ and ‘religion’, see Peter Harrison, ‘“Science” and “Religion”: Constructing the Boundaries’, Journal of Religion 86 (2006), 81–106; Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Those wanting to keep religion out of science often subscribe to the conflict thesis, which assumes that science and religion have in the past been, and will always in the future be, at odds with one another. John Hedley Brooke is one of the historians who has emphasised instead the vast complexity of their relations throughout history; see, for example, John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Considerations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a recent assessment of Brooke’s ideas about complexity, see the essays in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Rethinking History, Science, and Religion: An Exploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). On the historical origins of the conflict thesis, see James C. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).

¹¹ Benjamin Wirt Farley, The Providence of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1988), 17. For recent discussions of the doctrine, see Charles Wood, The Question of Providence (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008); Francesca Murphy and Philip Ziegler (eds.), The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium (London: T&T Clark, 2009); Mark W. Elliott, The Heart of Biblical Theology: Providence Experienced (New York: Routledge, 2012); Karl Giberson (ed.), Abraham’s Dice: Chance and Providence in the Monotheistic Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

¹² This portrayal is based on the work of Matthew Stanley. See Matthew Stanley, ‘The Uniformity of Natural Laws in Victorian Britain: Naturalism, Theism, and Scientific Practice’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 46 (2011), 536–560; Matthew Stanley, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Also of interest here are the English deists, recent work on whom has highlighted the providential aspects of their thought. See, for example, Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, ‘A Sheep in the Midst of Wolves: Reassessing Newton and English Deists’, Enlightenment and Dissent 25 (2009), 260–286; Stephen D. Snobelen, ‘The Myth of the Clockwork Universe: Newton, Newtonianism, and the Enlightenment’, in Chris L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs (eds.), Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 149–184; Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, ‘“God Always Acts Suitable to His Character, as a Wise and Good Being”: Thomas Chubb and Thomas Morgan on Miracles and Providence’, in Wayne Hudson, Diego Lucci, and Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth (eds.), Atheism and Deism Revalued: Heterodox Religious Identities in Britain, 1650–1800 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 157–172; Diego Lucci and Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, ‘“God Does Not Act Arbitrarily, or Interpose Unnecessarily”: Providential Deism and the Denial of Miracles in Wollaston, Tindal, Chubb, and Morgan’, Intellectual History Review 25 (2015), 167–189.

¹³ This kind of regularity is generally understood to be made possible by, and undergirded at every moment by, God. In other words, it is framed by the doctrine of creation, and is therefore not a form of deism. Among those for whom creation is the starting point like this, God’s action is a ‘reality to be acknowledged’, and is the ‘very foundation of whatever we can say about the world’. Lydia Jaeger, ‘Against Physicalism-plus-God: How Creation Accounts for Divine Action in Nature’s World’, Faith and Philosophy 29 (2012), 295–312, 304.

¹⁴ This is the case even though God makes all causal interaction among created entities on the horizontal plane possible. For the horizontal–vertical picture, see Kathryn Tanner, ‘Is God in Charge?’ in William C. Placher (ed.), Essentials of Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 116–131, 129.

¹⁵ Historical precedent among Christians for the methodological deployment of full naturalism, even before the advent of modern science, is not difficult to find. Twelfth-century scholar William of Conches, for example, insisted that natural philosophers should push natural causes to their explanatory limit, and criticised those who inappropriately sought miraculous explanations. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 200. Faculties of arts in medieval universities also featured strongly naturalistic cultures. Michael H. Shank, ‘Naturalist Tendencies in Medieval Science’, in Peter Harrison and Jon H. Roberts (eds.), Science Without God? Rethinking the History of Scientific Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 37–57. Early modern natural philosophers arguably saw their discipline in more explicitly theological terms than their medieval counterparts, yet they too invoked natural causality to explain occurrences whenever possible: ‘Pious [early modern] natural philosophers’, Peter Harrison has noted, ‘were happy to push “naturalistic” explanation as far as they could’. Peter Harrison, ‘Laws of God or Laws of Nature? Natural Order in the Early Modern Period’, in Peter Harrison and Jon H. Roberts (eds.), Science Without God? Rethinking the History of Scientific Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 71. This insistence upon naturalistic explanations of phenomena in nature has led Ron Numbers to propose that scientific naturalism was ‘largely made in Christendom by pious Christians’. Ronald L. Numbers, ‘Science Without God: Natural Laws and Christian Beliefs’, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.), When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 284. For a recent debate about the appropriateness of methodological naturalism among Christians, see Andrew B. Torrance, ‘Should a Christian Adopt Methodological Naturalism?’ Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 52 (2017), 691–725; John Perry and Sarah Lane Ritchie, ‘Magnets, Magic, and Other Anomalies: In Defense of Methodological Naturalism’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 53 (2018), 1064–1093; Andrew B. Torrance, ‘The Possibility of a Theology‐Engaged Science: A Response to Perry and Lane Ritchie’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 53 (2018), 1094–1105.

¹⁶ On the notion of an integral approach as opposed to a narrowly scientific one, see Jessica Riskin, ‘Just Use Your Thinking Pump!’ New York Review of Books, 2 July 2020. Available at www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/07/02/just-use-your-thinking-pump/.

¹⁷ As Matthew Stanley has argued, Maxwell’s religiously framed naturalism (or what we might here call his providential full naturalism) could easily be construed in non-religious ways, as it was by people like Thomas Henry Huxley, who wanted to rid science of its theistic elements and to make it a profession in which Christian clergy would not find a home. Nineteenth-century Christians such as Maxwell thus inadvertently laid the foundations for modern religion-free naturalistic science. Stanley, ‘Uniformity of Natural Laws in Victorian Britain’; Stanley, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon.

¹⁸ This is not intended to exhaust all possible Christian views of God’s relationship to nature and corresponding approaches to explanation. Religious naturalists, for example, constitute yet another set of views about these issues. See, for example, Willem Drees, ‘Religious Naturalists and Science’, in Philip Clayton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 108–123. The three options listed here do nevertheless represent a common set of alternatives. Recent theological explorations of naturalism include Arthur R. Peacocke, All That Is: A Naturalistic Faith for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007) and Sarah Lane Ritchie, Divine Action and the Human Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

¹⁹ On the possibility of going back before the categories ‘science’ and ‘religion’, and of moving beyond them or pursuing opportunities after them, see Peter Harrison, John Milbank, and Paul Tyson (eds.), After Science and Religion: Fresh Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

²⁰ For a helpful overview of some of the key features of early modern natural philosophies, see John A. Schuster, ‘The Scientific Revolution’, in R. C. Olby and J. R. R. Christie (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990), 217–242.

²¹ Helpful overviews of these developments are Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions 1500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); John Henry, A Short History of Scientific Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Margaret J. Osler, Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God, and Human Understanding from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Lawrence M. Principe, The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (London: Penguin, 2016).

²² John Henry, ‘The Scientific Revolution in England’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds.), The Scientific Revolution in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 178–209.

²³ Historians have investigated various aspects of the providential thinking of several more well-known early modern figures. On Francis Bacon, see Sidney Warhaft, ‘The Providential Order in Bacon’s New Philosophy’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 4 (1971), 49–64. On Robert Boyle, see J. E. McGuire, ‘Boyle’s Conception of Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972), 523–542; Timothy Shanahan, ‘God and Nature in the Thought of Robert Boyle’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988), 547–569; Peter Anstey, ‘Boyle on Occasionalism: An Unexamined Source’, Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999), 57–81; J. J. MacIntosh, ‘Locke and Boyle on Miracles and God’s Existence’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Robert Boyle Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 193–214. On Isaac Newton, see David Kubrin, ‘Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos: Providence and the Mechanical Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967), 325–346; Henry Guerlac and M. C. Jacob, ‘Bentley, Newton, and Providence (The Boyle Lectures Once More)’, Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969), 307–318; I. Bernard Cohen, ‘Isaac Newton’s Principia, the Scriptures, and the Divine Providence’, in Sidney Morgenbesser, Patrick Suppes, and Morton White (eds.), Philosophy, Science, and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), 523–548; M. A. Hoskin, ‘Newton, Providence and the Universe of Stars’, Journal of the History of Astronomy 8 (1977), 77–101; Snobelen, ‘The Myth of the Clockwork Universe’; John Henry, ‘Primary and Secondary Causation in Samuel Clarke’s and Isaac Newton’s Theories of Gravity’, Isis 111 (2020), 542–561. Other relevant studies include Margaret J. Osler, ‘Descartes and Charleton on Nature and God’, Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979), 445–456; Margaret J. Osler, ‘Providence and Divine Will in Gassendi’s Views on Scientific Knowledge’, Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983), 549–560; Margaret J. Osler, ‘Eternal Truths and the Laws of Nature: The Theological Foundations of Descartes’ Philosophy of Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985), 349–362; John Henry, ‘Henry More versus Robert Boyle: The Spirit of Nature and the Nature of Providence’, in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary Studies (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 55–76; Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Margaret J. Osler, ‘Triangulating Divine Will: Henry More, Robert Boyle, and Réne Descartes on God’s Relationship to the Creation’, in Marialuisa Baldi (ed.), Mind Senior to the World: Stoicismo e Origenismo nella Filosofia Platonica del Seicento Inglese (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1996), 75–87.

²⁴ According to Alexandra Walsham, providence ‘was not a marginal feature of the religious culture of early modern England, but part of the mainstream, a cluster of presuppositions which enjoyed near-universal acceptance. It was a set of ideological spectacles through which individuals of all social levels and from all positions on the confessional spectrum were apt to view their universe, an invisible prism which helped them to focus the refractory meanings of both petty and perplexing events’. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2–3.

²⁵ Walsham, Providence, 9.

²⁶ Ibid., 2. For Walsham this label refers to Puritans, whereas here it is being used in a narrower sense.

²⁷ The category ‘religion’ took on its modern meaning in the seventeenth century, while the category ‘science’ emerged only in the nineteenth century. See Harrison, Territories, for more on this history. For a historical narrative which (problematically) contrasts providence and naturalism to tell a story of a ‘programmatic shift from Christian Providentialism to more secular, scientific world views’, see Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000), 13, 229.

²⁸ R. M. Burns has referred to the ‘integrated religioscientific philosophical outlook’ of the period, while James Force has noted how by Newton’s time members of the Royal Society had developed a ‘comprehensive scientific theism’ that combined elements of Christianity and natural philosophy. R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981), 12; James E. Force, ‘The Breakdown of the Newtonian Synthesis of Science and Religion: Hume, Newton, and the Royal Society’, in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (eds.), Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 143–163, 143. Relatedly, Andrew Cunningham has claimed that early modern natural philosophy was ultimately ‘about God and about God’s universe’. Andrew Cunningham, ‘How the Principia Got Its Name: Or, Taking Natural Philosophy Seriously’, History of Science 29 (1991), 377–392, 381; see also Andrew Cunningham, ‘Getting the Game Right: Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Natural Philosophy’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19 (1988), 365–389. Cunningham’s view of natural philosophy sparked a spirited debate with Edward Grant. See Edward Grant, ‘God, Science, and Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages’, in Lodi Nauta and Arjo Vanderjagt (eds.), Between Demonstration and Imagination: Essays in the History of Science and Philosophy Presented to John D. North (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 243–267; Andrew Cunningham, ‘The Identity of Natural Philosophy: A Response to Edward Grant’, Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000), 259–278; Edward Grant, ‘God and Natural Philosophy: The Late Middle Ages and Isaac Newton’, Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000), 279–298; Andrew Cunningham, ‘A Last Word’, Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000), 299–300. See also Peter Dear, ‘Religion, Science and Natural Philosophy: Thoughts on Cunningham’s Thesis’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32 (2001), 377–386; Andrew Cunningham, ‘A Reply to Peter Dear’s “Religion, Science and Natural Philosophy: Thoughts on Cunningham’s Thesis”’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32 (2001), 387–391; Peter Dear, ‘Reply to Andrew Cunningham’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32 (2001), 393–395. Also illuminating on the religious nature of early modern natural philosophy is Margaret J. Osler, ‘Mixing Metaphors: Science and Religion or Natural Philosophy and Theology in Early Modern Europe’, History of Science 35 (1997), 91–113; Harrison, ‘“Science” and “Religion”: Constructing the Boundaries’; Harrison, ‘Laws of God or Laws of Nature?’ 58–76.

²⁹ That is, they are generally understood to represent a shift toward the full naturalism end of the providential naturalism spectrum compared to the natural philosophies that came before them.