DR APR.-4

By any metric, the scientific revolution of the 17th century stands as an indelible landmark in the evolution of our modern secular epoch. This pivotal historical juncture is frequently depicted as the emancipation of science from the doctrinal constraints of medieval religiosity, charting an unprecedented trajectory that renounced theological postulates in favor of an ostensibly disenchanted, mechanistic universe. Yet, such a portrayal, however entrenched, is at best a partial rendering of reality.

Medieval science, in broad strokes, adhered to Aristotelian paradigms, explicating phenomena through the inherent causal properties of natural entities. While divinity remained integral—inasmuch as God was deemed the primal instigator of these properties and continuously ‘concurred’ with their manifestations—the natural world retained an intrinsic agency. However, in the 17th century, luminaries like René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton instigated a radical epistemic shift. The Aristotelian notion of internal powers and virtues was expunged, supplanted by an attribution of all motion and transformation to immutable natural laws.

Despite their revolutionary impact, these intellectual architects were not forerunners of our contemporary secular disposition. They neither subscribed to our present conceptualization of natural phenomena nor envisaged the ‘laws of nature’ in the rigidly mechanistic sense now prevalent. The fully articulated doctrine of scientific naturalism, as conceived today, did not crystallize until the late 19th century. It is this intellectual paradigm that Sean Carroll expounds in The Big Picture (2016): a monistic reality governed by discernible patterns termed ‘laws of nature,’ amenable solely to empirical inquiry, devoid of supernatural substratum, teleological design, or transcendent purpose. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion (2006), espouses a congruent stance, dismissing any semblance of supernatural agency underlying observable reality—a conviction that permeates not merely scientific discourse but also philosophical thought, where the repudiation of supernatural entities commands near-universal consensus.

The terminology ‘scientific naturalism’—along with its connotation of an intrinsically naturalistic scientific methodology—owes its provenance to Thomas Henry Huxley, a 19th-century biologist renowned as ‘Darwin’s bulldog.’ Huxley ardently contested ecclesiastical encroachments upon scientific inquiry, a concern exacerbated by the preponderance of Anglican clergy in England’s academic and scientific institutions. In concert with intellectual allies like John Tyndall, he endeavored to extricate science from theological oversight, delineating it as an inherently naturalistic enterprise in diametric opposition to a supernaturalist theology. Tellingly, his usage of these dichotomous terms originated in German biblical criticism, which had piqued his scholarly interest.

In legitimizing his ‘scientific naturalism,’ Huxley constructed an extensive historical lineage tracing back to the Presocratic philosophers. He contended that ‘supernaturalistic’ interventions had invariably stymied scientific progress. In Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions (1892), he posited a perennial dialectic between naturalism and supernaturalism, casting civilization’s trajectory as a struggle wherein naturalism gradually triumphed. However, his historiographical reconstructions were often tenuous. Notably, Kepler, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, and even contemporaries such as Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin were profoundly religious, considering their faith indispensable to their scientific pursuits. Nevertheless, Huxley’s historical schema resonated, reinforcing an emergent narrative that portrayed Europe as progressively disentangling itself from religious dogma and embracing scientific rationality.

Auguste Comte’s tripartite model of human intellectual progression—the theological, metaphysical, and scientific stages—further reinforced this construct. James George Frazer, in The Golden Bough (1890), advanced a parallel argument, positing an inexorable evolution from magical superstition to religious belief and ultimately to scientific enlightenment. These deterministic paradigms engendered what historians now term the ‘conflict thesis,’ epitomized in 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). Both depicted Western intellectual history as a binary opposition between theological obscurantism and scientific illumination.

Crucially, these models were steeped in Eurocentric triumphalism, construing Western naturalism as a civilizational apex while dismissing non-Western epistemologies as vestiges of primitive thought. Draper, for instance, juxtaposed Newton as the zenith of intellectual refinement against ‘the Australian savage,’ whom he derided as barely distinguishable from beasts. Though few contemporary scholars endorse such crude formulations, implicit vestiges of Western superiority persist, particularly in our dismissive stance towards traditional cultures’ epistemic claims. This extends to our own intellectual heritage, as the natural/supernatural dichotomy, presumed axiomatic by modern Westerners, is largely a recent construct.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), observed that ‘the idea of the supernatural arrived only yesterday.’ Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, in The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (2022), corroborated this, documenting numerous societies where no such bifurcation exists. He denounced the imposition of this dichotomy as an ‘ethnographic original sin,’ emblematic of colonialist myopia. The persistent application of this conceptual framework, even to our own historical analysis, remains deeply problematic. Thus, Huxley’s thesis, positing a timeless antagonism between naturalism and supernaturalism, is fundamentally flawed—not merely because many past civilizations elided this distinction but also because religious presuppositions were instrumental in the emergence of scientific naturalism itself.

Word Count: 600

Difficult Word Meanings:

• Indelible – Impossible to remove or forget

• Epistemic – Relating to knowledge or the study of knowledge

• Teleological – Relating to design or purpose in nature

• Monistic – Believing in a single unified reality

• Obscurantism – Deliberate restriction of knowledge

• Vestige – A trace or remnant of something disappearing

• Bifurcation – Division into two parts

• Myopia – Lack of foresight or insight

Flesch-Kincaid Level: 15

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