Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age > Status Update

"In a sense, naturalistic science is an ersatz theology, a disenchanting Protestantism pushed to the extreme. The natural sciences, as John Milbank has proposed for the social sciences, might be thought of as a Christian heresy. Naturalism is thus a paradoxical amalgam of two contradictory impulses, a theistically grounded assumption of an intelligible world governed by imposed uniformity, combined with a denial of the supernatural. Once we understand it as a totalising crypto-theology, moreover, it becomes clear that it competes directly with alternative ‘theological’ approaches to nature and hence, in reality, leaves no conceptual space for the religious or the ‘poetic’."

"These narratives were originally forged with a view to establishing the social legitimacy of the natural sciences and to secure their independence from undue external interference. And as science continues to be under threat today – from climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, young earth creationists, and others – there is comfort in clinging to the myths that seem to reinforce its legitimacy."

"If there is a clear candidate for a late medieval Trojan horse it is a theological voluntarism that was operationalised in the modern scientific project. This laid the groundwork for the later nineteenth-century redescription of God’s causal activity in a new and naturalistic reading of laws of nature."