Religious Studies (2020) 56, 274–291 © Cambridge University Press 2018

doi:10.1017/S0034412518000574

Naturalism and the success of science

PETER HARRISON
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, St Lucia,
4072, Australia
e-mail: iash.ea@uq.edu.au

Abstract: Methodological naturalism is usually regarded as compatible with a

range of religious commitments on the part of scientific practitioners and it is
typically assumed that methodological naturalism does not imply metaphysical
naturalism. Against this, it has been argued that the cumulative success of the
sciences, conducted in conformity with the principle of methodological naturalism,
actually provides compelling evidence for the truth of metaphysical naturalism. In
this article I assess the argument for naturalism from the history of science and
suggest that it is deficient in a number of ways. There may be reasons for adopting
naturalism, but the history of science is not the place to look for them.

Introduction

Naturalism, in its most general sense, is the denial that there are any spir-
itual or supernatural entities. There may be reasons for adopting naturalism, and
presumably this is why it has become the default position in much contemporary
analytic philosophy. But suggestions that there might be evidence for it seem to run
contrary to the general principle that absence of evidence does not constitute evi-
dence of absence. Against this, some have argued that there is a good argument for
naturalism based on evidence provided by the history of science. A common
version of the argument goes like this: () Science proceeds on the basis of meth-
odological naturalism, understood as a provisional bracketing out of supernatur-
alistic explanations; () science conducted according to this strategy is highly
successful; therefore, () the original assumption (methodological naturalism)
must be correct (ontological naturalism). Boudry et al. (, ) have set out
the argument this way: methodological naturalism is ‘a provisory and empirically
grounded attitude of scientists which is justified in virtue of the consistent success
of naturalistic explanations and the lack of success of supernaturalistic explana-
tions in the history of science. . . . Science does have a bearing on the supernatural
hypothesis, and its verdict is uniformly negative.’


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 Naturalism and the success of science 

Similar arguments have been articulated by a number of contemporary philoso-

phers. Barbara Forrest (, ) contends that ‘since philosophical naturalism is
an outgrowth of methodological naturalism, and methodological naturalism has
been validated by its epistemological and technological success, then every expan-
sion in scientific understanding lends it further confirmation’. Paul Draper (,
) maintains, similarly: ‘The success of science . . . strongly supports metaphys-
ical naturalism over both supernaturalism in general and theism in particular.’
According to Alexander Rosenberg (, ), ‘we have confidence to assert that
by now in the development of science, absence of evidence is prima facie good
grounds for evidence of absence. This goes for God and a great deal else.’
Finally, Brian L. Keeley (, ) asks: ‘Why bet on naturalism? One reason
comes from a look at the past. The history of science exhibits the ongoing
march of naturalism . . .’ In short, a number of advocates of naturalism have
appealed to the history of science for evidence of the truth of their position, under-
stood as a rejection of the reality of the supernatural.
If valid, this general argument would prompt a major revision of a common
understanding of the relationship between methodological and ontological natur-
alism. This is because methodological naturalism is usually regarded as compat-
ible with a range of commitments on the part of scientific practitioners,
spanning conservative forms of theism to atheism and anywhere in between. It
is significant, in this connection, that the expression ‘methodological naturalism’
was coined and popularized by theistic philosophers. If it turns out that the
history of science counts decisively against theism, then the happy coexistence
of science and religion in the minds of religiously committed scientists will
be under serious threat, and more general claims about the compatibility of
science and religion will need to be revised. At the same time, if the history
of science does provide a vindication of ontological naturalism, this will also
go some way towards addressing the complaint that the commitment to
naturalism that characterizes much of modern philosophy is largely just an
unsupported prejudice. Accordingly, much hangs on whether this argument is
successful.
In this article I suggest that the argument does not work, and for two main
reasons. First, an appeal to the history of science in support of the putative failures
of supernaturalistic explanation implies that an unproblematic distinction can be
drawn between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, and that this distinction was routinely
operative in the history of science. This turns out to be mistaken. Second, notwith-
standing the difficulties of applying our present natural–supernatural disjunction
to the past, there are in fact prominent historical instances of ‘successful’ scientific
theories that have invoked the supernatural – as an indispensable explanatory
device, as a key presupposition for scientific investigation, or as a fruitful heuristic.
Together, these considerations show that the historical argument for ontological
naturalism, or at least this common version of it, fails.

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  PETER HARRISON

Before developing these two arguments I will briefly consider three other pos-
sible avenues of criticism. In a final section I will address a likely objection to
my argument.

Three preliminary objections

A prima facie objection to an argument that proceeds from methodological

naturalism to ontological naturalism would be that such a move seems patently
question-begging: we rule out any consideration of supernatural activity as a start-
ing assumption, and subsequently make this starting assumption the conclusion of
our investigations. But the argument can be constructed in a way that could render
it defensible against this critique. We might imagine it to be an inductive argument
that takes naturalism to be a kind of provisional hypothesis, as Boudry et al.
suggest, rather than a heuristic stance. That provisional assumption, while it
may not be the primary hypothesis being tested in specific cases of scientific inves-
tigation, would nonetheless be a kind of accompanying hypothesis that in a sense
is at issue in every scientific trial. A history of scientific successes in which this
assumption was operative, then, might be thought to provide an indirect confirma-
tion of its truth. Since the argument is an inductive one, a long history of scientific
successes might be seen as constituting evidence in its favour.
A second possible objection concerns what counts as ‘success’ and what, pre-
cisely, can be inferred from it. There is no doubt that our best scientific theories
have been remarkably successful, if we take success to refer to their capacity to
provide a basis for retrodictions, novel predictions, and the enabling of working
technologies. But is there a clear path from these successes to truths about how
the world really is? If not, an argument from the success of science cannot help
adjudicate the truth or otherwise of naturalism as an ontological commitment.
Hilary Putnam famously argued that it would be miraculous if successful theories
were not true (Putnam (), ; cf. Psillos (), Lyons (), Busch () ).
But the direct inference from success to truth faces equally well-known challenges.
The history of science bears witness to countless discarded theories which in their
day were successful, enabling novel predictions, the manipulation of nature, and
design of specific technologies. Yet this succession of theories does not converge
on a single picture of reality (Hesse (), Laudan (), Dear (), –,
Vickers (); cf. Poincaré (), f.). A straightforward inductive argument
from the history of science would thus suggest that our present successful theories
will similarly be discarded in time, along with their ontological furniture. Joining
this ‘pessimistic induction (or metainduction)’ argument is the problem of under-
determination, according to which every theory has empirically equivalent alter-
natives that account for the same observations but posit different underlying
realities (van Fraassen (), ; Bonk (); Stanford (); Idem () ).
Van Fraassen (, –; cf. Wray (), Idem () ) has also proposed that
there is nothing especially miraculous about the success of scientific theories,

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 Naturalism and the success of science 

since from an evolutionary perspective only successful theories survive. They may
do so by latching onto regularities in nature, but it does not follow that we have
access to the ontological realities that underpin that regularity.
Defenders of realism have offered robust responses to each of these objections
(Laudan (); Psillos (), chs –; Fahrbach (); Park (); Mizrahi
(); Lyons (); cf. Vickers () ), and there are, of course, different ver-
sions of realism and varying accounts of success. I will not argue for a definitive
position on these issues in this article (although we will return to the issue of
selective realism in the final section). Suffice it to say for now that the historical
argument for naturalism based on the success of science would seem to require
commitment to some version of scientific realism, a doctrine that is far from com-
manding universal acceptance.
A third misgiving about the historical argument for naturalism concerns the fact
that a wide a range of commitments have been associated with the label ‘natural-
ism’, and versions of it are held by individuals with divergent and sometimes confl-
icting philosophical positions (Stich (), ; Stroud () ). As van Fraassen
(), Rea (, ), and Halvorson () have pointed out, it follows that if
‘metaphysical naturalism’ cannot be identified with any precision then it is difficult
to regard it as a unitary hypothesis for which we might gather supporting evidence.
In the specific argument being critiqued here, however, the ‘naturalism’ under dis-
cussion seems to involve a simple opposition between ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernat-
uralism’. For the purposes of the present exercise, then, we can simply stipulate
that ‘naturalism’ in the relevant sense means a rejection of the existence of super-
natural or spiritual entities.
These objections, and the second in particular, already raise significant difficul-
ties for the historical argument for naturalism. In each case, moreover, we encoun-
ter something of an equivocation between naturalism as a successful explanatory
strategy and naturalism as an ontological commitment. But assuming for now that
the argument can surmount these preliminary hurdles, what can be said about the
more general witness of the history of science to which the argument appeals?

Natural versus supernatural?

Boudry et al. () suggest that when we survey the history of science,
what we see is ‘the consistent success of naturalistic explanations and the lack
of success of supernaturalistic explanations’ (ibid., ). This argument not only
takes it for granted that there is an exclusive disjunction between naturalistic
and supernaturalistic explanations, but also assumes that it makes sense to
apply this dichotomy to the past. However, when we look to the history of
science it quickly becomes apparent that conceptions of how natural and super-
natural were related is much more complicated than this.
The natural science of Aristotle, for example, enjoyed a tenure that lasted into
the seventeenth century (albeit with some modifications). As is well known, the

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  PETER HARRISON

Greek philosopher’s explanations of change in nature invoke four causes: material,

formal, efficient, and final. In this scheme of things, God is involved at the level of
final cause. As the unmoved mover, God is the ultimate source of all motion in the
cosmos, since he is the end to which all things are naturally directed (Metaphysics
a–; De caelo a–). Is Aristotle’s explanation of motion naturalistic
or supernaturalistic? The simple answer is that the question is misconceived, since
Aristotle does not entertain any sense of naturalistic explanations that compete
with supernaturalistic ones, and this is because he is not operating with anything
like a sense of nature that opposes it to the supernatural. Given his understanding
of nature (physis) as ‘what happens always or for the most part’, the relevant con-
trast cases for Aristotle are not ‘the supernatural’ but rather ‘chance’ or ‘the acci-
dental’ (Physics a–, b, –). It is these that threaten the regularity of
nature’s operations and thus represent a challenge to the possibility of scientific
explanation. If anything, and in what will become a fairly consistent pattern in
the history of science, God here looks more like a source of the regularity (and
hence intelligibility) of nature’s operations than an unhelpfully disruptive
influence that will make scientific explanation impossible.
It is worth mentioning two other oppositions that are important for Aristotle:
natural versus violent, and natural versus artificial. These distinctions also turn
out to be important in the history of science, since on Aristotle’s version of
events any human interference in natural processes renders them unnatural and
‘violent’. This accounts for the resistance of early modern Aristotelian natural phi-
losophers to the new idea that experiments could reveal anything about nature. By
definition it was thought that any interference with nature would change the object
of investigation. Similarly, the natural–artificial distinction seems to rule out the
possibility of mechanics serving as a model for natural processes, since mechanics
involves artificial human creations. All of this is consistent with the fact that
Aristotle’s deity is not a creative agent, since this would make nature an artefact
and hence something ‘unnatural’. Again, this conception of the natural was chal-
lenged by Jewish and Christian thinkers for whom the world was created by God,
and hence was in some sense an artefact. Indeed, ‘natural’ for these thinkers (and
directly contrary to Aristotle’s understanding) meant ‘created by God’. Arguably,
the idea that the world was a product of a divine creative act assisted early
modern thinkers to make the case that mechanics could be combined with a genu-
inely realist account of natural motions. Our second historical counterexample to a
simple opposition between naturalist and supernaturalist involves a similar point.
In late antiquity, the Christian philosopher John Philoponus (c.–c.)
argued against a number of prevailing scientific doctrines, rejecting Aristotelian
dynamics and proposing in its place a theory of impetus that resembles the
modern theory of inertia. Directly relevant to the present discussion about natur-
alistic explanation, he contended that because the world had been created by a
single deity – the Christian God – stellar bodies were not divine and, further,
that the heavens and the earth must have similar properties and principles of

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 Naturalism and the success of science 

motion. Combined with his theory of impetus, the first contention thus represents
a theological, yet naturalistic, account of the motions of the stars. The second – a
unified theory of dynamics – was similarly informed by his assumption of a ‘super-
natural’ creation of the heavens and the earth as a single act (Lindberg (), ;
Sorabji () ). These ideas played a role in the later Renaissance rejection of
Aristotelian ideas of motion and offer some vindication of historian Pierre
Duhem’s claim that Philoponus should be regarded as ‘one of the main precursors
of modern science’ (Duhem (), ). In sum, the monotheistic commitments
of Philoponus led him to offer both a ‘naturalistic’ account of heavenly motions
(the stars are not self-moving celestial intelligences) and a unified dynamics (the
same principles of motion obtain on the earth and in the heavens). Again, in
this instance, it makes little sense to speak of competition between naturalistic
and supernaturalistic explanations, with the former being ‘successful’. To a
degree, there are competing theological conceptions at play, with the idea of
single, creative Deity providing the foundation for a more naturalistic explanation
of celestial mechanics.
Our third example involves the emergence, for the first time, of a formal, termino-
logical distinction between natural and supernatural. As we have seen, Aristotle had
contrasted the natural with the accidental, the artificial, the violent, and the conven-
tional. Earlier Christian writers had understood an alternative distinction between
created (natural) and uncreated. But the specific terminology of a natural–super-
natural distinction did not become common until the high Middle Ages. Peter
Lombard (–), explained that some events come about through the joint
operation of divine causes and causes inherent in things. These events are said to
come about ‘naturally’. Other events, however, are brought about by God alone,
and these are said to be ‘beside’ or ‘above’ nature. These latter events are ‘praeter-
natural’ or ‘supernatural’. Crucially, though, God was still causally implicated in
natural events, which could not take place without his ongoing conservation of
natural agents, or his concurrence in the exercise of their causal powers. On this
view, then, God’s ongoing creative agency was always operative in natural events.
The distinction between natural and supernatural became widespread from the
thirteenth century onwards and this is reflected in the changing frequency of
relevant terminology (de Lubac (), Bartlett () ).
Interestingly, this new distinction afforded scholastic philosophers the oppor-
tunity to adopt an approach that resembles, from our modern perspective, a nat-
uralistic approach to scientific investigation. Albert the Great (c.–), for
example, declared in connection with his discussion of scientific topics that
‘since I will discuss natural things, I am not concerned about the miracles of
God’ (Albertus Magnus (), ). Siger of Brabant (c.–) advocated a
similar approach to natural philosophy: ‘But the miracles of God do not now
concern us, since we will discuss natural things naturalistically.’ This looks very
much like our present methodological naturalism but, again, with the proviso
that this ‘naturalistic’ explanation assumed an indispensable divine involvement.

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  PETER HARRISON

A fourth and final example of why a simple natural/supernatural distinction

does not map well onto the past concerns the modern development of the idea
of laws of nature. The idea that nature is governed by universal, mathematical
laws first appears in the seventeenth century, displacing the older Aristotelian con-
ception of a nature ordered by the inherent virtues or powers of natural objects
which direct them towards particular ends (Milton (), Henry (),
Harrison () ). Descartes made the key move, insisting that natural philosophy
dispense with final causes and focus instead on efficient causes. If, for Aristotle,
God had been the source of all cosmic motion as an ultimate final cause, for
Descartes, God was the cause of motion as an immediate efficient cause. This
did not result in a chaotically unpredictable world since divine immutability guar-
anteed both the immutability of the laws and the reliability of inductions
(Descartes (), I, ). Indeed, if anything, the world becomes more predictable
since the Aristotelian allowance for exceptions, based on his ‘for the most part’
condition, is now dispensed with. The laws of motion, says Descartes, ‘follow
manifestly from the mere fact that God is immutable and that, acting always in
the same way, he always produces the same effect’ (ibid., –, –; cf. –
).
English natural philosophers also adopted the idea that the regularities of nature
were divine decrees (although they differed from Descartes on the issue of how the
laws were to be derived). Robert Boyle maintained that at the moment of creation
God established the laws of nature and continues to uphold them at every moment
(Boyle (), ; Idem (), ; Anstey () ). Newton, and the Newtonian
natural philosophers who came after him, adopted a similar understanding.
Gravity could be understood as ‘the immediate fiat and finger of God, and the exe-
cution of divine law’ (Bentley (), –; Newton (), –). The effects
of nature, on this understanding, were nothing other than divine power ‘acting
according to fixt and certain laws’ (Whiston (), , ). Samuel Clarke,
Newton’s spokesman in the Leibniz–Clarke controversies, wrote similarly that:
The course of nature, truly and properly speaking, is nothing else but the will of God producing
certain effects in a continued, regular, constant, and uniform manner; which course or manner
of acting, being in every moment perfectly arbitrary, is as easy to be altered at any time as to be
preserved.

Clarke insisted that there was really no such thing as ‘the course of nature’ or ‘the
power of nature’. Rather, ‘nature’ as commonly conceived, was an imprecise
shorthand or, to use Robert Boyle’s descriptor, a ‘vulgar’ notion (Clarke (),
II, –). In our own terms, ‘nature’ was an illicit reification or a deliverance
of folk metaphysics. For these seventeenth-century thinkers, ‘nature’ was an idle
conception that added nothing to an understanding of the regularities of the
world upon which science was predicated. This view of laws of nature persisted
into the nineteenth century, and was defended by leading scientific figures such
as John Herschel (, ) and William Whewell (, ).

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 Naturalism and the success of science 

Two features of this new conception of laws of nature are worth noting. First, the
laws of nature derive their necessity from the fact that it is an immutable God who
wills them into existence. At the same time they are also in a sense contingent,
since the specific laws were chosen arbitrarily by God. The first condition provides
a divine guarantee of the regularity of nature’s operations; the second provides a
motivation for experimentation since only by experience can we discover what
laws God has chosen (Newton [] (), ). The second noteworthy
feature of this new approach is its susceptibility to redescription in purely natur-
alistic terms. This occurs when the seventeenth century’s ‘laws of nature’, which
are in effect regular divine volitions, become, over the course of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, brute and inherent features of nature itself. Somewhat
ironically, the possibility of describing the totality of nature’s operations as
‘natural’ is predicated upon this early modern flattening of all causation into a
single layer of supernaturally originating efficient causes. What for Boyle was a
vulgar error was subsequently to become an almost universal presupposition of
modern scientific investigation.
More could be said about the examples set out above. But one thing should be
clear: there is no simple story, drawn from the history of science, of an enduring
and consistent pattern in which ‘successful’ naturalistic explanations compete
with and displace ‘unsuccessful’ supernaturalistic explanations.

Science and supernatural explanation

In view of the preceding discussion, talk of supernaturalistic explanation in

past historical contexts is problematic, since the historical actors did not recognize
the natural–supernatural distinction in the way we presently do. Yet it is still worth
attempting to resolve the question of whether there is anything in the history of
science that might point to either successes or consistent failures of something
like ‘supernaturalistic explanations’. One way around the difficulty of anachronis-
tic uses of ‘supernatural’ would be to speak instead of how in the history of science
theological conceptions involving divine activity might have featured in particular
explanations of natural phenomena. Broadly speaking then, we might ask if ‘legit-
imate’ or ‘successful’ science even involved the invocation of God’s activity. As we
have already seen, virtually all natural philosophical enterprises up to the nine-
teenth century relied upon theological assumptions or presuppositions, which in
turn made possible certain kinds of scientific explanations. The notion of laws of
nature is an obvious example. A subsequent, and related, instance was the
shared conviction of James Joule, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and
Lord Kelvin that God’s creative activity underpinned the principle of the conserva-
tion of energy (Wilson (), ). In this section I want to propose two other
ways in which theological considerations contributed positively to scientific inves-
tigation. First, theological ideas could provide a heuristic which could facilitate
new avenues of theorizing and investigation. Second, on some occasions, God

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  PETER HARRISON

was invoked as the direct explanation of some natural phenomenon, and in what
look like scientifically reputable contexts.
First, to theological heuristics. In , Stephen Tempier, the Bishop of Paris,
issued a condemnation prohibiting the teaching of  propositions that had
been topics of discussion at the University’s Faculty of Arts. The condemnations
pick out a variety of targets, but there is an interesting set of propositions that
concern divine omnipotence and what God counterfactually might will if he so
chose. One such proposition (these are propositions that are being condemned)
reads: ‘That God could not move the heaven in a straight line, the reason being
that He would then leave a vacuum’ (Grant (), ). The article references
the traditional conception of the horror vacui – nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum –
and the possibility of the motions of the heavens as a whole, both of which
contravened Aristotelian physics. It has been argued that prohibitions such as
this liberated scholastic thinkers from an undue deference to Aristotle, which
enabled them to entertain theoretical possibilities that were either counterfactual
or at odds with the prevailing scientific views. It was on this basis that Pierre
Duhem contended that we see in the Condemnations of  the beginning of
modern science (Duhem (–), I, ; cf. Grant (), ). Employing
the idea of divine omnipotence as a heuristic could, in this way, promote scientific
advance.
More generally, and adverting to the brief discussion in the first section of this
article, the supposition of divine omnipotence also underpinned late medieval
conceptions of what we now call the underdetermination of hypotheses by data.
Aquinas thus remarked in his commentary on Aristotle’s De caelo that astronom-
ical hypotheses might be empirically adequate – which is to say that they fit with
observations – and yet not be true, ‘because the astronomical phenomena can
perhaps be saved in some other way not yet understood by men’ (Aquinas
(), f.). Similarly Galileo’s Simplicio – the character in the Dialogue concern-
ing the two Chief World Systems () who represented conservative
Aristotelianism – notoriously refused to acknowledge that the Copernican hypoth-
esis was ‘true and conclusive’, since ‘God in his infinite power and wisdom’ could
have organized the motions of heavenly bodies ‘in many ways which are unthink-
able to our minds’ (Galileo [] (), ). While Simplicio is rarely regarded
as an icon of scientific sophistication, his stance bears a remarkable similarity to
P. Kyle Stanford’s () recent defence of underdetermination, which is similarly
based upon the possibility of unconceived alternatives to our present scientific
theories. Stanford remarks that we are not ‘cognitive supercreatures who are
adept at conceiving of all possible theoretical explanations for a given set of phe-
nomena’ (ibid., ). For this reason, Stanford maintains, all of our scientific the-
ories are going to be underdetermined. Stanford’s ‘cognitive supercreature’ is not
too far away from Simplicio’s omnipotent and omniscient deity. Whether all of this
counts for or against the use of divine omnipotence as a heuristic may depend on
one’s commitments to scientific realism.

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 Naturalism and the success of science 

A second theological heuristic is design. In a post-Darwinian world, notions of

design have understandably been anathema to evolutionary biologists, and it is
clear that the proponents of Intelligent Design have fallen well short of making a
case for its return as a scientific principle. But given that our interest is the
history of science, rather than the present, it is worth noting how on occasion
the assumption of divine design could promote scientific successes. One instance
is William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. Harvey argued that
from the positions of the valves in the veins, and on the assumption that God
has designed them for a purpose, he was led to hypothesize that blood was sent
from the heart through the arteries and circulated back via the veins. For
Harvey, the assumption of divine design provided a true insight into how blood
circulated through the human body.
Another, less obvious, role for design is the way in which William Paley’s now
notorious arguments for the ‘contrivance’ of living things set up the explanandum
for Darwin’s theory of evolution and provided an analogy for the model of natural
selection. Paley’s watchmaker argument drew a parallel between human and
divine design. Darwin was led to enquire whether nature might ‘select’ particular
creatures on analogy with the way in which human breeders select particular stock
lines (Darwin (), ; Livingstone (), ). There is no doubt that, for
Darwin, God was not directly involved in the design of creatures. But the ubiqui-
tous idea of design formed an important part of the context of the discovery of his
principle of natural selection.
Finally, it is worth making reference to Isaac Newton’s resort to both the prin-
ciple of design and direct divine action. Newton did not think that the specific
arrangement of the planets of the solar system, or the means by which the
matter of the universe forms into the distinct bodies of suns and planetary
masses, was susceptible to explanation ‘by mere natural causes’. He attributes
the causes of these phenomena, respectively, to ‘the counsel and contrivance of
a voluntary Agent’ and ‘an intelligent Agent’. Newton also recognized two poten-
tially fatal threats to the stability of the cosmos on his understandings of the opera-
tions of gravity. One was that, given mutual attractions of the celestial bodies, all of
the masses in the universe would naturally tend to convene at its centre. In order to
overcome this difficulty Newton postulated an infinite universe, with stellar
masses carefully and evenly distributed to ensure no gravitational collapses to a
central point. This required some fairly delicate, divine fine-tuning, with Newton
conceding that ‘this frame of things could not always subsist without a divine
power to conserve it’.
At a local level, Newton was again acutely conscious of the inherent fragility of
our solar system. The stability of planetary orbits was explicable if one assumed
gravitational attraction between two bodies balanced by an equal and opposite
force owing to the curvilinear motion of the planetary body. But the solar
system is much more complicated than this because the sun, planets, moons,
and comets all exert gravitational forces on each other. While most of these

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  PETER HARRISON

forces will be quite small in comparison to the gravitational attraction of the sun,
cumulatively and given enough time, there will be perturbations of planetary
orbits which could ultimately threaten to wreak havoc with the solar system. To
address this problem Newton infamously spoke of the need for a ‘reformation’
of the planetary orbits. This reformation would be brought about by divine
action (Newton (), query ).
This bold step is often read as a blot on Newton’s copybook, an unfortunate
resort to the ‘god of the gaps’ that was scientifically illicit and theologically unhelp-
ful. Leibniz certainly thought so. Significantly, though, Leibniz’s primary objection
was theological not scientific. The usual sequel to the Leibniz–Newton controversy
is the story according to which Pierre-Simon Laplace eventually solved the
problem of the stability of the solar system with his own mathematical modelling.
This was deemed superior on account of its purely naturalistic account of events
and Laplace, like a good naturalist, was famously said to have remarked that he
had no need for the God hypothesis. But in fact Laplace’s touted solution failed
to solve the problem, and his ambitiously deterministic view about the predictabil-
ity of all future events in the universe was mistaken. We now know that the solar
system is a partly chaotic system and that precise prediction of the future orbits of
the planets is in principle impossible. There was a sense in which Newton was
correct to see the problem as insoluble, at least in terms of being able to offer
assurances about the stability of the solar system on the basis of gravitational
theory. (Recent computer simulations reassuringly postpone disastrous planetary
collisions for several billion years, but this only on the basis of probabilistic calcu-
lations (Laughlin (), Tremaine () ).)
Does Newton’s enlisting of God in these cases represent the ‘successful’ use
supernaturalistic explanation in the history of science? Again, it really depends
on what counts as successful. Arguably, it was Newton’s apparently ad hoc invoca-
tion of God on a number of occasions that enabled him to persist with a cosmo-
logical theory which, with the benefit of hindsight, was the most scientifically
sophisticated at the time and which might otherwise have been falsified by funda-
mental and apparently insoluble difficulties. Putting it crudely, reference to the
supernatural worked to support a scientific model that was basically correct – or
certainly more correct than the contemporary alternatives. This strategy would
certainly not do in the present, when the trend is to invoke occult entities such
as ‘dark energy’ and ‘dark matter’ to preserve theories in the face of potentially fal-
sifying anomalies. But like Newtonian divine action, these are ad hoc place-holders
for incomplete, yet otherwise well-attested, theories.

Naturalistic reconstructions and selective realism

Sceptical readers who have persisted to this point will no doubt have sign-
ificant misgivings about some of the directions of my argument – perhaps fore-
most among these a worry that in the historical cases described above the

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 Naturalism and the success of science 

supernaturalistic commitments do not do any of the real work and hence play no
substantive role in the postulated progress of science. The episodes in question
might thus be susceptible to reconstruction in purely naturalistic terms. This
worry is redolent of Imre Lakatos’s contentious notion of ‘rational reconstruc-
tion’ – aptly characterized by Thomas Kuhn as ‘not history at all, but philosophy
fabricating examples’ (Lakatos (); Kuhn (), ). But a charitable way of
articulating the concern might be to draw parallels to the ‘selective realism’
response to pessimistic induction. This response grants that past theories now
regarded as false did in fact provide a basis for successful novel predictions, but
insists that only specific parts of those theories – parts that were true or approxi-
mately true – were responsible for the relevant successes. The success of the the-
ories in question, according to this ‘divide and conquer’ strategy, did not depend
on components of the theory that were false and now abandoned (Kitcher (),
–, Psillos (), –). It could be argued analogously that the supernat-
uralist components of the theories I have described were not the elements that
contributed to their success. We can imagine, for example, laws of nature yielding
true predictions without thinking of them as divine volitions. It might then be
possible for the supernatural to be retrospectively written out of the story of
science’s success.
A direct rejoinder to this objection would involve the identification of specific
instances where the supernaturalistic elements of the theory did in fact seem to
do some of the heavy lifting: Newton’s insistence on absolute space, against the
arguments of Leibniz, might be an example. This counter-response would
mimic responses to selective realism, which carefully rehearse historical case
studies in which it seems clear that the ‘false’ elements of theories (from our
present perspective) contributed to their success (for examples see Lyons
(), Rossetter () ). But my suspicion is that for the already committed nat-
uralist there are neither actual nor even conceivable developments in the history of
science that could not in principle be redescribed in purely naturalistic terms. (If
there are such instances, it would be interesting to see them specified.) If that sus-
picion is well founded, then it is not clear how actual history, as opposed to
‘history’ that never happened, can be relevant to the discussion at all, apart
from offering challenges to the reconstructive ingenuity of contemporary natural-
istic philosophers. The reconstruction move, in short, tells us nothing about the
past (or future) and everything about the present.
To put this another way, like the selective realism response to pessimistic induc-
tion, this strategy begs the question (cf. Stanford (), ). Our choice of which
elements of past theories are successful and which are true is based on our present
understanding of what is true. Yet it is precisely this that the argument from pes-
simistic induction places in doubt, since it suggests these contemporary truth com-
mitments, as represented in our best scientific theories, are likely to be rendered
false in the future, mutatis mutandis for our present commitments to naturalism.

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  PETER HARRISON

Finally, not only does this kind of response beg the question, it misses the point.
The argument we are testing is not whether it is possible to contrive naturalistic
redescriptions of past non-naturalistic science. What is at issue is whether there
has been a long-standing deployment of methodological naturalism, as evidenced
by the history of science, that has led to successful outcomes in a way that alter-
native ‘supernaturalistic’ approaches have not. The historical examples show
that this is not the case.

Conclusion

The history of science is not the place to turn for those seeking an eviden-
tiary basis for ontological naturalism. Scientific practice in the past was not pre-
mised on a sharp distinction between natural and supernatural. Theistic
assumptions and explanations did play a positive role in the development of suc-
cessful theories. And, in any case, success is arguably not an infallible gauge of
truth. Even if we were to attempt the anachronistic task of shoehorning past
methods and explanations into that historically recent natural–supernatural
dichotomy, we would not find the neat correlation between naturalism and
success. Indeed, if we follow the logic of proponents of the historical case for nat-
uralism we may find ourselves committed to supernaturalism (Clarke () ). The
dilemma is that if success is thought to provide a warrant for accepting the onto-
logical presuppositions of the relevant science, this will imply, in the case of
Newtonian science for example, the truth of theism. This conclusion might be
avoided by stipulating that only our current science is successful, and that
Newtonianism is not, but this rules out precisely the kind of appeal to history
that the argument seeks to exploit. In any case, it would still leave the problem
of the implicit theological commitment required for our present understandings
of laws of nature.
There remains a different kind of historical argument, of the kind set out by
David Papineau (), according to whom the history of science bears witness
to a gradual diminution of the range of possible causes, ultimately converging
on the purely natural or physical. This was eventually accomplished in the twen-
tieth century. This argument might need a different response to the one offered in
this article, but briefly I would again propose that the trend identified by Papineau
is better understood both as a process of simple redescription – laws that for
Descartes, Boyle, and Newton were divine volitions were silently redescribed in
the nineteenth century as laws of nature simpliciter – and also as a diminution
of the scope of scientific explanation along with a more ready acceptance to
remain content with whatever it is that physical causes alone can account for.
In other words, what Papineau offers is more an observation about changes to
the way in which science is conducted than about the ultimate nature of reality,
and it reduces to the truism that present science adopts the principle of methodo-
logical naturalism. It is significant that this restriction in the range of what is

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 Naturalism and the success of science 

needed for a scientific explanation is registered in a key change of nomenclature

over the course of the nineteenth century with the term ‘natural science’ gradually
displacing the long-standing, and more comprehensive, ‘natural philosophy’. The
latter was more expansive in its explanatory ambitions.
More generally, it now appears that the framing of the original argument is prob-
lematic. If we dispense with progressivist versions of the past that assume an inev-
itable trajectory from a supernaturalist and religious world-view to a naturalist and
scientific world-view, we find that the historical record simply does not support the
assumption of an ongoing competition between ‘supernaturalistic’ and ‘naturalis-
tic’ explanations, with the latter eventually establishing their superiority. Rather,
what seems to happen for much of the time is that conceptions of supernatural
agency underpin what we would now regard as ‘naturalistic’ approaches. The tran-
sition, then, is not one from a barren, science-stopping supernaturalism to a nat-
uralism that yields all the wonderful applications of modern science. Rather, the
‘supernaturalistic’ assumptions that provided a foundation for seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century science have simply been forgotten or are silently ignored.
The idea of a historical test for the fruitfulness of ‘supernatural causation’ is
thus too crude a hypothesis to assess, since natural causation routinely rested
upon particular assumptions about the reality of the supernatural. Whether the
regularity of the operations of nature itself requires recourse to the supernatural
remains, as it has always been, an open question. As for the witness of the
history of science going back to Aristotle, the usual answer to that question was
in the affirmative. A commitment to naturalism might involve more than mere
flag-waving, and there may well be justifications for adopting it, but appeals to
the history of science should not be among them.

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Notes

. David Papineau (), one of the most articulate defenders of philosophical naturalism, has mounted a
different kind of historical argument for naturalism, briefly addressed in the conclusion.
. The expression was coined by philosopher and theologian Edgar Sheffield Brightman (, ): ‘Such a
universal naturalism – common to idealists and realists, to naturalists and theists alike – may be called
scientific or methodological naturalism. But methodological naturalism is sharply to be distinguished
from metaphysical naturalism.’ It then seems to have been independently reinvented by Paul De Vries
(). On the latter, see Numbers ().
. For the complaint, see, e.g., Burge (, ). For a response, see Papineau (, ).
. Steve Clarke () runs an interesting argument parallel to mine and drawing upon one or two common
historical examples. He maintains, however, that naturalists are not warranted in dismissing the existence
of supernatural entities.
. Laudan’s list included the crystalline spheres of ancient and medieval cosmology, humoral theory,
catastrophist geology (with its commitment to a universal Noachian deluge), the effluvial theory of static
electricity, phlogiston theory, the calorific theory of heat, optical and electromagnetic theories of aether
(–). For further discussions see Dear (), –; Vickers (); cf. Poincaré (), f.
. Frost-Arnold () maintains that there are good reasons for some naturalists not accepting a ‘no
miracles’ account of realism. I do not believe we are at cross-purposes. For an alternative argument
challenging the connection between realism and naturalism see Gasser & Stefan ().
. Peter Lombard (), Sententiarum Quatuor Libri, Lib. , Distinctio XVIII, Cap. VII., Patrologia Latina
, col. .
. There are two ways for God to be causally involved in natural occurrences: in a weaker sense, because God
merely conserves in existence the relevant causal agents (conservationism); in a stronger sense because
God concurs with the causal activity of the natural agents (concurrentism). Most scholastic philosophers
were concurrentists (Freddoso () ). A third option is occasionalism, which collapses the ontological
distinction between natural and supernatural.
. Siger of Brabant, De anima intellectiva, III, quoted in Ludger Honnefelder et al. (). Also see Maclean
().
. Thus John Herschel: the uniformity of the laws is nature depends upon ‘the constant exercise of [God’s]
direct power in maintaining the system of nature’ (Herschel (), ). See Stanley (), –.
. Also see Grant () and Murdoch ().
. Isaac Barrow, Newton’s predecessor in the Lucasian Chair, mounted a similar argument (Barrow (),
).
. Harvey recounted this to Robert Boyle (), –.
. It does not follow, of course, that design will invariably be a useful explanation or provide a helpful
heuristic. Contemporary ‘Intelligent Design’ theory, for example, does not seem to have been successful in
any of the relevant senses.
. Newton to Bentley,  December , Newton Project, <http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/catalogue/
record/THEM> [accessed  April ].

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 Naturalism and the success of science 

. Newton to Bentley,  February /, .R.., ff. –, r., Newton Project, <http://www.newtonproject.
ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM> [accessed  April ].
. Alternatively, we might abandon the idea of laws of nature, on account of their inescapably theological
character. See Cartwright () and ().
. The case considered by Rossetter (), Thomas Hutton’s theory of the earth, represents another
interesting instance of a theistically inspired model that yielded novel and true (from our present per-
spective) predictions.
. This could be avoided by adopting a neo-Aristotelian understanding of natural order as proposed, e.g., by
Cartwright (). Also see Cartwright & Ward ().
. Papineau (, –). The classic exemplification of this tendency in the philosophy of mind is
eliminative materialism, which would rather deny the reality of consciousness than concede that there
might be a phenomenon not easily susceptible to available explanations. A ‘success’ argument also figures
in these discussions, with opponents of eliminativism arguing that the ‘folk psychology’ marked for
elimination is actually a successful theory.
. I am grateful to audiences in Oxford and at IASH, University of Queensland for fruitful discussions of
earlier versions of this article. I must also thank Chris Oldfield and Fred D’Agostino, along with the long-
suffering reader and editor of Religious Studies, for many helpful criticisms and suggestions.

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