Daily Read 28 Feb.

 By any conceivable metric, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century constituted an epochal shift in the ontological and epistemological foundations that would eventually underpin the emergence of the modern secular paradigm. This momentous historical juncture is frequently construed as a decisive emancipation of scientific inquiry from the theological dominion of medieval scholasticism, an unfettering that purportedly enabled the pursuit of a purely naturalistic comprehension of reality, one extricated from supernatural postulations. However, this reductionist narrative is, at best, an incomplete account.

Medieval scientific discourse, predominantly Aristotelian in orientation, was predicated upon the notion that natural phenomena could be explicated through their inherent causal properties. While divine agency was not entirely effaced—God was still conceived as the ultimate bestower of these intrinsic properties and as one who ‘concurred’ with the normal operations of nature—the material realm was nevertheless posited as possessing an autonomous ontological status. However, the seventeenth-century intellectual upheaval spearheaded by René Descartes and his contemporaries effectuated a paradigmatic departure from this framework. Theories of intrinsic powers and essentialist virtues were summarily jettisoned, supplanted by a mechanistic worldview in which all motion and transformation were ascribed to immutable natural laws.

Yet, despite the revolutionary nature of their contributions, Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton were not the progenitors of contemporary secular thought. Their conceptions of natural law diverged significantly from the positivist interpretations prevalent in modern discourse. To trace the genealogy of scientific naturalism as it is currently understood, one must advance chronologically to the late nineteenth century, wherein the substantive formulation of naturalistic doctrine began to coalesce into its modern configuration. The theoretical physicist Sean Carroll encapsulates this position succinctly in The Big Picture (2016), wherein he postulates that the cosmos is wholly naturalistic, governed by discernible patterns termed the ‘laws of nature,’ devoid of any supernatural substratum, teleological orientation, or transcendent intentionality.

A comparable assertion is promulgated by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006), wherein he avers that nothing exists beyond the physical world—no supernal creative intelligence surreptitiously orchestrating the observable universe. Such a stance is not merely a scientific postulate but an ontological axiom that pervades the humanities, philosophy, and the broader intellectual milieu. Philosopher David Papineau observes that among contemporary philosophical circles, there exists an overwhelming consensus repudiating supernatural entities, a rare point of concord amidst an otherwise fractious domain.

The coinage of the term ‘scientific naturalism’ in its modern incarnation is attributable to Thomas Henry Huxley, an indefatigable nineteenth-century biologist often epitomized as ‘Darwin’s bulldog.’ Huxley’s intellectual enterprise was inextricably linked to his apprehension of ecclesiastical hegemony over scientific institutions, a concern accentuated by the pervasive influence of Anglican clerics within the Royal Society and academic establishments. Collaborating with figures such as John Tyndall, Huxley sought to extricate scientific inquiry from theological oversight, promulgating an antithesis between naturalism and supernaturalism—a conceptual binary he appropriated from German biblical criticism.

Nonetheless, Huxley’s historiographical delineation of naturalism as an uninterrupted continuum stretching back to the Pre-Socratic philosophers is fundamentally tendentious. The luminaries of the scientific revolution—Kepler, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton—were all deeply religious and perceived their theological convictions as integral to their scientific endeavors. Even within Huxley’s contemporaneity, figures such as Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin espoused profound religious commitments, further problematizing his proposed historical dichotomy.

The ascendancy of Huxley’s ‘scientific naturalism’ was bolstered by the nascent social sciences, which, emerging in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, endeavored to furnish ostensibly ‘scientific’ explanations of historical progress. Auguste Comte’s tripartite model of intellectual evolution—progressing from theological to metaphysical to scientific modes of thought—embodied this ethos, as did James George Frazer’s seminal anthropological treatise, The Golden Bough (1890), which posited an inexorable transition from magical and religious belief systems to empirical rationality.

Such teleological historiographies undergirded the ‘conflict thesis,’ a doctrine epitomized by John Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). These works construed intellectual history as a protracted antagonism between scientific rationality and theological dogma, a dialectic in which the triumph of naturalism was posited as a measure of civilizational advancement. Draper, for instance, juxtaposed Newton as the apotheosis of human intellectual ascent with so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, whom he relegated to the nadir of developmental progression.

Although contemporary scholars largely repudiate these deterministic schemata, vestiges of their underlying assumptions persist. The residual influence of Western exceptionalism is discernible in the tacit marginalization of non-Western epistemologies and in the disingenuous relegation of pre-modern belief systems to the status of historical curiosities. In essence, while overt declarations of civilizational superiority have become unfashionable, their ideological substratum continues to inform our conceptual frameworks, rendering the historiography of scientific naturalism as much an artifact of cultural hegemony as it is an account of intellectual progress.

Word Count: 598
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 18

Definitions:

• Epochal: Extremely significant or influential in terms of history.

• Ontological: Related to the nature of being or existence.

• Epistemological: Related to the study of knowledge and its limits.

• Scholasticism: Medieval theological and philosophical school of thought.

• Paradigmatic: Serving as an example or model.

• Teleological: Related to the explanation of phenomena by their purpose or final causes.

• Positivist: A philosophical system recognizing only empirical facts and scientific methods.

• Hegemony: Dominance of one group over others.

• Historiography: The study of historical writing and methods.

• Dialectic: A discourse or debate involving opposing ideas.

• Teleological historiographies: Historical narratives that assume a predetermined direction or purpose.

• Cultural hegemony: The dominance of a particular cultural worldview over others.

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