The Magpie 5: Deep in Some New World

Peter Harrison. Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age. Cambridge University Press, 2024. $39.99. 488 pp.

Deep in Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age, historian Peter Harrison restates his thesis. “Saliency is culturally determined,” he writes. What is “relevant” to a modern mind is not a simple measure of what is likely or true. Rather, what we deem important has already been pre-determined by what we believe is possible. The “predictive mind” that Andy Clark writes about in The Experience Machine (2023) is not the neutral observer of reality that we imagine it to be. Instead, it comes to see what it looks for.

The question of God’s relevance is having a bit of a moment. Tales of enchantment, re-enchantment, and disenchantment bloom like wildflowers in the spring. I suppose we might allow them all to live—let a thousand flowers bloom and so on—and yet many of these accounts are poorly considered. They project onto the world what they already believe to be true and find evidence for what they already think is the case. Consider this: many accounts of “enchantment” or “disenchantment” fail in similar ways.

In the first place, many accounts of disenchantment (or re-enchantment) fail to define their terms. What is “enchantment”? How do we know we have lost it? What would constitute finding it again? The word “disenchantment” usually entails the assumption that the world is reducible to natural processes, whereas “re-enchantment” assumes that the world’s causes and operations are beyond-natural. Both definitions rely on a view of “natural” processes that is itself disenchanted. This will become important.

As a second and related example of the deficiencies of many of these discussions, many accounts seem remarkably uninterested in the terms they do define. Terms like religion, “natural,” and supernatural (as well as “nature” and “science”) are treated as self-evident and trans-historical.

In the same voice, we are told that “Religion” is on the decline. What kinds of religion, though, are we counting—and how is their decline demonstrated? Church attendance is too blunt an instrument to do much work (just ask all of the God-honoring men who have gladly stayed home over the years, worshipping God in their deer stand). The point is this: “religion” is far too thick and subtle a category to be tabulated through counting butts in a pew.

It morphs, too. I have met reverent birdwatchers; pious land-conservationists; brittle, judgmental and hell-fire filled turtle crossing guards (this is a turtle-crossing zone, how dare you!). Just when you think you’ve stomped it out, religion pops up somewhere else, its seeds dropped by last season’s dandelions in this very-same-field. Are these folks not “religious”? Or has their religion—or their enchantment with the world—simply found a new place to land? All of them seem to treat the world as a source of reverence. They live in the world as if contained a beyond-the-world that we need to seek out.

By not clarifying our terms and querying their meaning, we end up with many stories about The State of the World Religious that tell us very little. Peter Harrison has written a much better story.

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Peter Harrison’s Some New World thrilled me. It was exhilarating, and is among the best intellectual histories I have read, ever. Harrison does not accept an easy binary of “religion” against “naturalism.” He interrogates the terms itself. What is “naturalism,” and from where did it come? What is “science,” and how does it relate to religion and nature?

Harrison queries our common parsing of the words “natural” and “supernatural.” Though we often pit the two against each other, he notes that the function of the two as binaries is itself a historical innovation.

The existence of “the supernatural”—and its counterpart, “the natural,” are modern conceits with no analogue in the premodern world. What we know of ancient religion suggests that religion and philosophy were once a unified endeavor, and therefore truths about God and about the natural world were sought together. Aristotle contrasts the “natural” not with the “supernatural” but with the artificial or violent. “Natural” is given, while “artificial” is made or imposed. Augustine’s account of “restless hearts” sought a relief that was natural and divine. For premodern people, truths about God and nature were sought at the same time, in the same way, and for the same reasons. Their pursuit was an attempt to gain knowledge of the world and how to live in it.

The language of the “supernatural” only came into use in the 13^th century when the recognition of miracles within the Roman Catholic Church began to be formalized. In theological terms, a miracle is a place where only God is working—unlike in nature, where God is always working, alongside other natural causes. In parsing out occasions where God works above or beyond natural causes, the concept of a “supernatural” power began to function.

The idea of the “supernatural” never suggests that God’s power only occurs in miraculous events. Rather, it is cordoning off a particular exercise of divine power that operates separate from natural causes. In the case of the conception of a baby, for instance, what we often call “a miracle” is actually natural causes that work according to a divine design. Babies, for this reason, are not miracles—they are ordinary. A healing of a deaf man’s hearing by a mere touch would be working beyond nature, however, so such an exercise of divine power is judged to be miraculous.

This language is not intended to denigrate the pleasure or joyous gift of babies. It simply attempts to attend to the unusual occurrence of divine power in the miraculous. In this case, the opposed terms are not “natural” and “supernatural” but “natural” and “miraculous.” But when the medieval university was formalized, the natural sciences and theology came to inhabit separate disciplines. The seeds were sown for a possible separation of the two.

Similarly, medieval “proofs” for the existence of God were not attempts to speak of God apart from religious terms. Anselm’s Proslogion, Harrison writes, is not an argument or a proof written to convince an atheist, but a religiously motivated vision that seeks to “re-set” our senses. It reminds of the truth about God that should be self-evident.

For earlier people, the reality of God was clear, and belief in him was innate. To not believe was to violate a principle of logic or philosophy. Instead of a live philosophical option, it was a sign of a deficient awareness of the world. Belief in God, Harrison writes, was “not as much a conclusion as a premise.” The idea of a “proof” for the existence of God, or more to the point, an argument against God’s existence, arrives only as God comes to be seen as something beholden to a proof. Such an exercise is a distinctively modern one. But by the 19^th century a “proof” was an argument that was absent of belief, where previously proofs held together both knowledge and belief.

As Harrison sees it, “science” and anti-supernaturalism formed together. Modern “naturalism” allotted to science what had once been the domain of religion; God was siloed into the “supernatural,” away from meddling in the natural world. The “supernatural” was a modern conceit that allowed God to be placed in a corner, subject to the curiosity of specialists alone. And so, the great explainer of the world came to be not religion, but science.

Chief among Harrison’s arguments, and perhaps the bit with the most critical salience, is that a “naturalistic” worldview required religion to be seen as a relic of the past. The “primitive” mind, which saw the world as haunted with the divine, was replaced by the “scientific” mind, which understood natural causes to be the chief explanations of the world’s workings. By projecting religion as a primitive, outdated exercise, societies were judged to advance by moving beyond religion. The savage was religious, but modern man understood that science was his god. Social progress came to be judged as identical with secularization. Science took the place of religion as the great explainer.

Harrison notes that it is not just natural science, but social science too that functions as the modern world’s explainer. By his account, social scientific fields like sociology—particularly in its Darwinist and Marxist iterations—sought to replace religion as the great explainers of the world. They sought, too, to reorganize the world according to their explanations. In this way, they became an eschatology as well as a grand theory of the world.

The goal of history, then, became to organize human life to achieve the goal that the social sciences had set out for it. The embrace of naturalistic, scientific worldviews, therefore, led to a world where science co-signs our world views—and our views on gender, on politics, on economies, and on the natural world. Leaving behind religion and embracing such views, by implication, is how a society progresses.

Harrison’s book is everything you might hope for in the best of academic history. It is restrained and careful, written with a light hand and some humor. As with the best academic topics, its implications are massive and largely left unexplored. At minimum, this is one: if the hope of the future lies in the sciences, as modernity tells us, then science has replaced religion as modernity’s god. It is no wonder that the world was recently plastered with yard signs, stating that “we believe in science.” According to Harrison, modernity’s god is nothing else. To be religious in the modern world is to be primitive and a relic of the past. To resist this assumption requires nothing less than a cultivated resistance to modernity’s totalizing claims.