The view that the findings of science are incompatible with claims of revealed religion per se is widespread—but mistaken.
In the first chapter of The Unintended Reformation I explain why many intellectuals today think that science renders the claims of revealed religion untenable and leads inexorably to atheism. This view derives not from scientific findings per se, but from contingent (and often unknowingly held) metaphysical assumptions with medieval roots.
Into the thirteenth century, traditional Christian metaphysics entailed that nothing could be attributed in the same way to a transcendent creator-God and to creation. Beginning with John Duns Scotus, being itself, understood in its most abstract and general sense, was predicated univocally of both. Medieval nominalists extended this metaphysical univocity by conceiving of God as a highest, singular ens. This move reinforced the grammar of ordinary religious language, which veers by default in a univocal direction, as if “God” denoted a quasi-spatial entity within creation, a “highest being” belonging to the same order of reality as creatures.
Nominalism spread in the many new universities and theology faculties established in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Metaphysical univocity and Occam’s razor spread with it, as did the distinction between natural and supernatural causes conceived in either-or terms. This combination established the preconditions for the domestication of God’s transcendence via the explanatory power of the natural sciences. But these preconditions would become actual conditions only if God’s self-revelation ceased to serve as the framework for shared intellectual life.
Here the Reformation’s role was fundamental, albeit in indirect terms. It is important for the eventual extrusion of God from conceptions of reality via science, but not because Protestant reformers themselves necessarily embraced metaphysical univocity. Protestantism as such did not disenchant the world.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The view that the findings of science are incompatible with claims of revealed religion per se is widespread—but mistaken.
In the first chapter of The Unintended Reformation I explain why many intellectuals today think that science renders the claims of revealed religion untenable and leads inexorably to atheism. This view derives not from scientific findings per se, but from contingent (and often unknowingly held) metaphysical assumptions with medieval roots.
Into the thirteenth century, traditional Christian metaphysics entailed that nothing could be attributed in the same way to a transcendent creator-God and to creation. Beginning with John Duns Scotus, being itself, understood in its most abstract and general sense, was predicated univocally of both. Medieval nominalists extended this metaphysical univocity by conceiving of God as a highest, singular ens. This move reinforced the grammar of ordinary religious language, which veers by default in a univocal direction, as if “God” denoted a quasi-spatial entity within creation, a “highest being” belonging to the same order of reality as creatures.
Nominalism spread in the many new universities and theology faculties established in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Metaphysical univocity and Occam’s razor spread with it, as did the distinction between natural and supernatural causes conceived in either-or terms. This combination established the preconditions for the domestication of God’s transcendence via the explanatory power of the natural sciences. But these preconditions would become actual conditions only if God’s self-revelation ceased to serve as the framework for shared intellectual life.
Here the Reformation’s role was fundamental, albeit in indirect terms. It is important for the eventual extrusion of God from conceptions of reality via science, but not because Protestant reformers themselves necessarily embraced metaphysical univocity. Protestantism as such did not disenchant the world.