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.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
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.