Christian Materialism and the Prospect of Immortality

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at least thirty English writers developed a materialist position that they argued was consistent with their Christian faith. While their heterodox ideas were connected with developments in natural philosophy and medicine, what they found more pressing was arriving at a genuinely biblical view of the person. These writers attempted to recover what they saw as ‘true’ Hebraic anthropology, which understood the soul to be mortal and material, and held that the resurrection of the body, rather than the immortality of the soul, provided assurance of life after death. These writers deployed existing exegetical methods and hoped to defend Christianity by reforming corrupt doctrines. Thus, while Christianity provided many in this period with reasons to attack materialism, it also provided many with motives to be materialists.

God and the Uniformity of Nature

Today the laws of physics are often seen as evidence for a naturalistic worldview. However, historically, physics was usually considered compatible with belief in God. Foundations of physics such as thermodynamics, uniformity of nature, and causality were seen as religiously based by physicists such as James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. These were usually interpreted as evidence of design by a creative deity. In the late nineteenth century, John Tyndall and other scientific naturalists made the argument that these foundations were more sympathetic to a non-religious understanding of the natural world. With the success of this approach, twentieth-century religious physicists tended to stress non-material and experiential connections rather than looking for evidence of design. Later parts of that century saw a revival of natural theological arguments in the form of the anthropic principle and the fine-tuning problem. While modern physics is naturalistic, this was not inevitable and there were several alternative approaches common in earlier times.

Between Isaac Newton and Enlightenment Newtonianism

A pervasive, and still stubbornly persuasive, Enlightenment story holds that Isaac Newton’s 1687 Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica played a decisive role in naturalizing early modern cosmology and physical science. Newton, however, was a committed, if heterodox Christian, and his new physics and astronomy depended crucially on a belief in God’s role as both the architect and ruling Pantokrator of the universe. Enlightenment naturalism, therefore, did not develop directly out of Newton’s Principia even if his new mathematical physics became a vehicle for disseminating it once a naturalist understanding of ‘Newtonianism’ had been forged by others. This chapter traces the genealogies that produced Newton and the cosmology of his Principia, along with the naturalizing alternative that contemporaries misleadingly called Enlightenment ‘Newtonianism’. It shows that while these had become entangled by 1800, their conjunction was a historical creation rather than an outcome determined directly by Newton or his science.

Laws of God or Laws of Nature?

The appeal to laws of nature as an explanatory principle is often regarded as fundamental to naturalism. Yet when the idea that there were immutable, mathematical laws of nature first rose to prominence in the seventeenth century it was deeply connected to a theological understanding of natural order. Descartes thus imagined laws of nature to be divine commands, and attributed their immutability to the immutability of their divine source. For Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, the invariable uniformity of nature was understood as a consequence not of God’s withdrawal from the world, but of his direct and incessant engagement with it. It followed that the world was to be investigated empirically, because this was the only way in which the otherwise inscrutable will of God could be discerned. Over the course of the following centuries, however, laws came to be reimagined as simply observational generalizations, or brute features of the natural world.

Chemistry with and without God

Chemistry has been distinctive in its relations with religious and anti-religious belief. In its alchemical formation it minimally provided analogies for spiritual transformation. By the late-nineteenth century it was a prominent resource for scientific materialism and reductionism. Currently, it underpins ambitious projects for biosynthesis, usurping a vocabulary of ‘creation’. The aim of this chapter is to identify turning points as chemistry became a fully naturalized science. Five theses are introduced: that a simple antithesis between natural science and supernatural religion is inadequate; that chemistry, for much of its history, could be on the side of the angels; that, conversely and in other contexts, it could be corrosive of religious belief; that, as a catalyst for both belief and unbelief, it could be ambiguous in its cultural implications; and that the importance of scientific naturalism as an agent of disbelief is easily exaggerated.

Naturalist Tendencies in Medieval Science

This chapter argues that the masters of arts in the new universities institutionalized approaches akin to methodological naturalism in the populous medieval faculties of arts. Explanations of natural phenomena were to be justified or refuted by reason and sense perception, without appealing to the supernatural. This arts faculty naturalism diffused widely as the universities spread, and deeply shaped the intellectual landscape (e.g. Galileo). The masters of arts’ vision of their methodological autonomy also characterized theologians, many of whom were masters of arts. The Parisian condemnations of 1277 illustrate this outlook’s strength, not its weakness. Leading intellectuals of the era illustrate these naturalistic trends by using natural causes to explain occurrences that their predecessors and contemporaries treated as marvels.

Naturalizing the Bible

The modern development of secular knowledge exerted a powerful influence over the Protestant interpretation and use of the Bible. As German innovations in biblical scholarship spread in the early nineteenth century, scholars and their readership began to scrutinize more closely the historical and empirical accuracy of Scripture. Although these methods first met with widespread resistance in the United States, intellectuals continued to wrestle with the possibility of reconciling natural science and the Bible. Religious professionals attempted to insulate the laity from controversial scientific interpretations of Scripture, but a number of high-profile events such as heresy trials nevertheless attracted broad public attention. A growing schism in American Protestantism was deepened as more orthodox movements renounced the use of naturalism and historical criticism, while a significant number of religious liberals promoted scientific interpretations to keep the Bible relevant to the modern world.

Removing God from Biology

The Scientific Revolution changed the root metaphor of science from that of an organism to that of a machine. Mechanism. This meant the expulsion from science of final-cause thinking. For two hundred years, biology resisted this demand. Adaptations like the hand and the eye must be understood in terms of ends. This led Immanuel Kant to state that ‘there will never be a Newton of the blade of grass’. Biology will forever be different, meaning—since the best explanation seems to be divine intervention—God-infused. Charles Darwin challenged this with his mechanism of natural selection, showing that the hand and the eye can be understood in causes of the same nature as those found in the physical sciences. This does not as such refute the existence of God. Moreover, close inspection shows that today’s evolutionary thinking still owes much to its Christian origins.

The Theology of Victorian Scientific Naturalists

The Victorian scientific naturalists are particularly important for an understanding of the history of naturalism. They were the first group of scientists and intellectuals to adopt secular naturalism to forge an identity aimed at setting themselves apart from colleagues who remained loyal to Christianity. Three of the most important Victorian scientific naturalists, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, the physicist John Tyndall, and the philosopher Herbert Spencer, drew on several concepts closely associated with the Christian theology of their day to articulate, largely in a secularized form, some of their deepest beliefs about nature and the human condition. These beliefs were integral to their science and their vision of scientific progress. They were elements of a ‘theology’ in line with modern science.

Anthropology and Original Sin

The legacies of rejected nineteenth-century models of evolutionary anthropology remain influential. Nineteenth-century founders of the discipline such as E. B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan aspired to study human societies, including morals and religion, as natural phenomena, reflecting a natural order. In the context of shared assumptions about race and empire they postulated a trajectory from primitive society to civilization, identifying ‘primitive’ societies as remnant populations arrested at early stages of evolutionary development—the ‘childhood of the race’. Rejecting the racial and teleological implications of this trajectory, Franz Boas argued that anthropology and other historical sciences differed fundamentally from the nomothetic, law-giving physical sciences. Naturalism has become problematic for some anthropologists—not in the sense that the ‘God hypothesis’ has returned as methodology, but manifested in an uneasiness about definitions of culture and of human nature in naturalistic, deterministic, reductionist, and biological terms.