Conversations on the Plurality of World-views: A Response to Peter Harrison’s Some New World
Philip Ball on Peter Harrison's Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age
Read as a PDF with footnotes.
Peter Harrison’s Some New World makes a compelling case that the modern framing of the notions of natural and supernatural is a recent construct that do not reflect the historical ways in which such distinctions were understood. He points out that this new framing has served the rhetorical function of distancing modern science from the theological considerations that informed the work of most if not all natural philosophers at least until the middle of the nineteenth century. In other words, the notion of the supernatural that has become widespread today, especially within discussions about the role of science as an account of the world, is a “modernity story” with an agenda. Harrison raises the provocative question of whether, in constructing this story about a “refinement of our ways of understanding the world… something might have been forfeited in the process.”
Mythical Histories
I anticipate that the picture Harrison presents will not be congenial to some, perhaps to many, scientists. As he points out, the kind of “dubious historical narratives” that he identifies continue to be propagated in popular culture and educational institutions. Nobody relishes being told they have got it wrong, but it seems unlikely that some of those who have advertised this ahistorical narrative will accept without protest that rigorous scholarship has exposed their errors. Harrison has commented previously on the unfortunate antipathy that exists between scientists and historians of science, with the latter providing accounts and conclusions that the former do not find congenial. This will surely not be the first time that some of those popularizers mentioned by Harrison will have had it brought to their attention that their accounts of the history of science do not accord with what specialists in that discipline have shown to be the case, and yet this rarely seems to instigate any change in the stories they tell. Some, such as Steven Weinberg, have even implied, when informed that historians of science differ from him in their interpretation, that historians of science are simply getting it wrong (perhaps because they do not know enough science).
This is the first issue I would like to explore in relation to Harrison’s work. At face value it seems hard to understand why scientists, who place such emphasis on evidence over opinion, and on expertise over dilettantism, in their own work, sometimes seem so resistant to accepting that same valuing of authority when it comes to the history of their trade. Why have the “men of science,” both in the past and today, wished to construct and defend essentially mythical versions of history?
That question needs more systematic study, and I can offer nothing more than anecdotal speculation. Hobsbawm has pointed out the role of fictitious “foundational mythology” in the development of ideas of nationhood, as well as in the traditional lore of trades and guilds. The notion that science has steadily liberated humankind from ignorance and superstition has long had a strong motivational value within the natural sciences—linked, as Harrison discusses, to the wider attitude of positivism within the sciences. It makes scientists feel good about their profession, and so, in fairness, it should: advances in knowledge about the physical world have been accompanied by huge advances in human health and prosperity, however patchily distributed across the globe.
But there is more than this to the attachment scientists feel to the often largely mythical historical narratives of their disciplines. These stories create a sense of community: they are not unlike the folktales that, by constant repetition around the hearth, produce a set of shared values and traditions. Harrison refers specifically to the way students of anthropology are inducted into the “founding myths” of the discipline.
The problem is that typically scientists are unaware that these stories are inventions. Even now, for example, they will recount how Giordano Bruno was a martyr to science or how Galileo was tortured by the Inquisition. Even now they shake their heads with bewilderment at how Isaac Newton could invent the calculus and a theory of gravitation while at the same time believing the most absurd hocus-pocus about alchemy and theology. But occasionally scientists have an inkling that these tales are not true. In Richard Feynman’s account of quantum theory, QED, he writes:
By the way, what I have just outlined is what I call a ‘physicist’s history of physics’, which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development, which I do not really know!”
That is a remarkable passage. One can imagine Feynman’s response if a historian were to admit that they were offering the reader a historian’s conventional myth of physics, which was not related to actual physics, which the historian did not know. (And moreover, if they were to emphasize that last confession with an exclamation mark, as if a comical wink: “Imagine that!”) This is not even a story told as a placeholder while the real story remains unknown; Feynman is implying that it is fine to repeat a false history rather than to go to the Caltech library and learn the real one. At face value this is sheer anti-intellectualism, redolent of (say) a scientist’s insistence that they do not need to have read any theology or philosophy to dismiss or ridicule it. As Harrison indicates, the attitude suggests a “lack of intellectual curiosity and historical empathy.”
But I think that Feynman is in fact saying (if unintentionally) something a little more nuanced: that the myth-story he tells about quantum mechanics has a pedagogical value in helping the student appreciate the shift in thinking that the theory demands. The goal is rather like that served by the conventional (but wrong) story that Max Planck introduced the quantum hypothesis to solve the problem of "an ultraviolet catastrophe”—a breakdown of the classical theory at short wavelengths—in the physics of blackbody radiation.That problem supplies a crisis motivating Planck’s remarkable and otherwise apparently baffling (or even desperate) leap of reasoning. Scientific thought of course in fact rarely advances this way. More often it involves tentative steps both forward and back, guesses and fixes lacking any real theoretical basis but which might be given retrospective justification, and so forth. History does not typically reveal a smooth and transparent flow of reasoning, and so it may merely confuse the student of science.
Much the same can be said for the conventional idea that both Copernicus and Darwin encountered strong religious opposition to their ideas. The theories put forward by both men undoubtedly led, once assimilated and understood, to a profound shift in our sense of our place in the universe. But those shifts, those shocks, were not felt when the Copernican cosmos and Darwinian evolution were first mooted. Like many if not most big scientific advances (and this is seldom stressed enough), they aroused rather little excitement, passion, or in some respects even interest at the time. Scientists are inherently wary of profound novelty, and for good reason. The story of clerical outrage at Darwin’s ideas thus serves to flag to the reader or the student: here was something we now understand to be truly important.
Beyond such pedagogical motives, however, lies a broader agenda that situates science in relation to the contemporary construction of the supernatural. For real history lacks the rhetorical value of these falsified histories in achieving that goal. “It was the task of late nineteenth-century champions of naturalism”, Harrison writes, “to over-write inconvenient historical realities with their own version of history, introducing at the same time a modified conception of science that retrospectively constructed it as perennially naturalistic.”
When these myth-stories are challenged by historical research, then, it might seem as though the ideas themselves are being somehow diminished, along too with what one might (provocatively) call the belief system of the community telling them. Harrison and Daston have rightly pointed out that historians should be sensitive to that, and need not add insult to injury.
Peter Harrison. Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age, Cambridge University Press, 2024. pp. 488. $49 (hardcover)
Escaping Relativism
My suspicion is that the response of some scientists to Harrison’s thesis about the “natural history of the supernatural” (were they to be bold or curious enough to read his book) would be along the lines of “Well, so what if the history is different from what I’d imagined? The fact remains that today the supernatural refers to supposed things and events outside of physical law, and therefore in conflict with science.” Can there be any argument with that?
Underlying these considerations is the difficult question: Who, then, is right? Whatever the historical picture, does it give us any reason to doubt the validity of what science is saying? Sure, we can accept that scientific knowledge is contingent, and that history must lead us to expect that much of what we believe will look quaint, foolish, or bizarre in retrospect. All the same, are we not justified and indeed obligated to recognize that science furnishes us with the current best guess about how the physical world is constituted? If we believe that scientific understanding genuinely advances in a cumulative way, and that our ideas and theories genuinely get better rather than simply changing in the manner of artistic styles (I put that provocatively on purpose), surely the fact that natural philosophers and scientists from Aristotle to Newton to Darwin and even Schrödinger had some manner of religious faith does not compel us to accept that they were justified in those beliefs? Surely science is not validated by majority vote but by what observation and experiment seem to demand—and we have no good evidence today that religious belief is necessary for explaining the physical world?
Harrison rightly points out that such a position would force us to argue that the secular description of the physical world favoured by industrialized societies is more valid—is, as Harrison puts it, a better “language of description” – than that offered in, say, Australian Aboriginal tradition. To some, that assertion sits uncomfortably with anxieties about the history of Western exploitation and dominance of other cultures; to others, there is nothing to be gained from a politically expedient capitulation to relativism of belief in the face of evidence that science has greater predictive power than non-scientific modes of conceptualizing the world. There is indeed currently a somewhat impassioned debate within the scientific community about the status and respect that should be afforded to indigenous knowledge systems, (a debate now suppressed by governmental fiat within the United States).
Harrison makes a brave attempt to tackle this contentious issue, and I believe he alights on the key central question: is there a risk, in accepting what might be regarded as the materialistic and mechanistic schema that physical science presents, that we lose as well as gain?
One response might be along the lines offered by Feynman: that in understanding how aspects of the world (a flower, say) work in scientific terms, there is only gain: we can still appreciate the flower’s beauty, and indeed appreciate it all the more deeply when we think about the exquisite molecular machinery of photosynthesis or the symbiotic relationship between plant and pollinator. This is reasonable—but is it really what happens? It is not hard to find examples of how a determination to reduce descriptions of the world to what seem like its most fundamental material components can distort and diminish our sense of what is really there.
For example, a description of the living world that insists on all organisms being conceptualized as passive vehicles for genes has been said to lead to the “paradox of the organism,” whereby it becomes a puzzle why individual organisms exist at all. There are certainly interesting questions to be asked about the tensions between the interests of genetic elements and those of the organism, but these do not make the organism at all paradoxical or problematic. It appears so only if we adopt a mistakenly agential view of genes themselves. For all its value in understanding evolutionary processes, an excessively gene-centric view of life obscures the explicandum itself – and in doing so, risks devaluing the marvels of organismic biology. Here Harrison’s remark seems highly pertinent: “Methodological naturalism might afford us the capacity to manipulate the natural world precisely because it offers a limited perspective.” A gene-centred model of evolutionary genetics allows us to make predictions and explanations of phenomena relevant to that model precisely because it does not need to include the complication of organisms. To suppose that the success of those models in that specific regard means that organisms “should not exist” is to mistake the map for the territory.
Similarly, a fear of acknowledging the purposive nature of organisms (however obvious this should be to our senses, and indeed to our experiments), out of a misplaced perception that this is somehow a capitulation to cosmic teleology (or a Trojan horse for faith-based descriptions of the world), blinds us to the agency that operates within biology. And the notion of free will has been assailed by a host of bad arguments, based on simplistic neuroscience or muddled physicalism, again because of a conviction that something “supernatural” (in the modern sense) lurks within.
There is a sorry history of cosmological claims to explain “why there is something and not nothing” that demonstrates merely the philosophical poverty of that endeavor—to put it baldly, one generally finds that the argument assumes something like quantum field theory as a prior, thereby begging the question. As Harrison explains, mathematical truths and the constancy of laws of nature were long deemed to depend on the will of God. If this is discarded as a hypothesis (to put it in modern secular terms), it is not clear that science has, or even can have, any replacement to offer. Any hopes that the physical laws and fundamental constants might emerge as a unique logical necessity have evaporated before a widespread view among physicists that what we observe seems irreducibly arbitrary in the space of possibilities, prompting anthropic arguments and multiverse cosmologies that many regard as sophistic or at any rate intellectually unsatisfying: if we can’t explain why things are the way they are, we have to admit all the (unobservable) alternatives and merely rationalize why one of them contains us. This is not to imply that God is a better hypothesis after all—from a secular perspective that is simply to paper over a gap with a name. But then the honest response is to admit that a deep question has not so much been answered by science as to have been declared inadmissible (or equivalently, as some might say, metaphysical). As Harrison says, “Whereas the sciences are sometimes said to be based in curiosity, from the mid-twentieth century that curiosity rarely extended to fundamental questions about the metaphysical foundations of science, or of the intelligibility of the natural world… This soporific effect [of science] applies especially to curiosity about where laws of nature come from.”
Perhaps the most disturbing and dangerous fruit of a determination to appear hyper-rationalistic and materialistic is evident in pronouncements from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about the future of humanity, the prospects for transhumanism, and the machine nature of mind. These are beliefs sometimes so saturated with religious symbolism and tropes that it can be hard to imagine they are not parodic. The picture of human cognition offered by the information technology industry in order to support some of the more extreme claims made for artificial intelligence is a travesty of what specialists working on cognition know. And so on.
There is a long history of instances showing that, far from banishing the supernatural and transcendental from our world-views, advances in science and technology tend to create new places for them to reside, from radio waves and the ether to quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. “Every new medium,” says John Durham Peters, “is a machine for the production of ghosts.” One message I take from Some New World is that, if we tell ourselves false stories about how the natural and supernatural have been conceptualized in the past, we leave ourselves more vulnerable to such elisions in the future.
Another way to protect faith-based frameworks from that of modern science is that advocated by Stephen Jay Gould: to regard them as “non-overlapping magisteria,” designed to address quite different questions. This picture has its attractions, but Nick Spencer has argued in his book, Magisteria, in my view persuasively, that it will not suffice. The domains of faith and of science do overlap, although the extent of that superposition is dependent on one’s conception of faith (the extreme and most problematic example of which is scriptural literalism). The common refrain is that science deals with facts, and religion with values—a distinction problematized by efforts to naturalize religious belief or to account for moral judgements in evolutionary terms. But what Harrison shows so clearly is that at root the question is a philosophical one: not whether, say, miraculous phenomena occur that defy the known laws of physics, but whether naturalism is philosophically self-contained. I know of no good argument that it is; for most of history, scientists and natural philosophers felt it had no reason to aspire to be. Scientists today have every right to choose to ignore that question in their daily work, and indeed arguably benefit from doing so. But that is not the same as pretending that a reframing of “naturalism” has somehow evaporated it.
Not Knowing, and Pluralism of Knowing
In navigating the tensions that Harrison examines, I suggest we be mindful of three considerations. First, science itself reserves a space for ideas beyond the current sphere of the “natural”—which is to say, outside of known physical laws or of accessible experience. That is where dark matter and dark energy reside: hypotheses motivated by observation but still lacking in any justification based on known theory. It is the space where we find the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics advocated by Hugh Everett in 1956—not, as some would have it, “simply what quantum mechanics tells us”, but a baroque (as well as inventive and even productive) speculation that poses massive (and largely ignored) philosophical conundrums while being by definition immune to experiential verification. The cosmological multiverse, spawned by some interpretations of the inflationary universe, is another of these fantastical realms currently beyond the reach of observation. A fifth force of nature is a long-standing hypothesis outside the Standard Model of fundamental physics. None of this is in any way to science’s discredit—these are not arbitrary ideas, after all, and are certainly no license for deciding that “anything goes”—but rather, demonstrates the necessity, for rational thought, of being able to suppose beyond the hard evidence.
Second, it is proper to debate how much weight can be afforded to human testimony when it takes us to places we cannot easily rationalize. This is the territory explored recently by Jeffrey Kripal in his book How to Think the Impossible. Even acknowledging the capacity of humans to fool ourselves, to mistake the mundane for the marvellous, to fabulate and hallucinate (it’s what our minds do), there is nothing particularly rational about leaping to some “It must just be X” story to explain away every peculiar phenomenon and experience. At some stage, a casual acceptance of some contrived pseudo-rational explanation for a puzzling experience is scarcely any better than of an appeal to hackneyed supernatural agencies. There is no harm in even the most materialistic atheist being prepared occasionally to say simply “I can’t account for that.” An over-hasty grasping for explanation can blight science just as much as it can engender public credulity about the paranormal. Sometimes, merely sitting and marvelling is an apt and indeed a very human response.
Third, Harrison’s discussions prompt me to revisit the case for pluralism in science. He suggests that what we believe to be true may be contingent on our frames of reference: our language, traditions, culture, and also our judgements about sources of authority. That could of course lead us into the kind of relativism that scientists, for good reason, deplore. But perhaps the most important criterion by which we assess an answer to a question about the world is our sense of what kind of answer counts—which in turn will depend on the nature of the question asked.
For example, science tends to deliver its answers as causative stories: this happened because of that interaction, or because of those physical laws acting within the system. But causative stories have a characteristic scale. It is enough to know that there are, say, physicists who will suggest that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is ultimately the result of conditions during the Big Bang to appreciate how much confusion tends to arise here. Free will again: to suggest (as some do) that there can be no free will because there is no such thing operating among fundamental particles is once more to beg the question.
Confusion about causal stories, and about the criteria that qualify an answer, is also common in biology. Genes are very rarely causal of phenotypes in the proper sense (even if that word is misapplied in some gene-association studies). In seeking scientific explanations of, say, organismal development or behaviour, Evelyn Fox Keller has pointed out that the issue of what counts as an answer continues to provoke dispute within subdisciplines of biology.
Perhaps it is not too controversial to suggest that science requires a nested hierarchy of explanatory frameworks—that we should not, for example, seek sociological insights from quantum field theory. What is less obvious is whether we must demand consistency between the explanatory levels, so that one should not contradict another. Niels Bohr famously saw no such requirement, indeed suggesting that contradictions are an inherent feature of how the world works: he posited instead that explanatory schema should be complementary, such that making use of one necessarily invalidates the other. That might sometimes work for understanding quantum physics, but it is far too neat as a wider principle—not least because it is not always clear what counts as a contradiction. Science might be better regarded as a patchwork of overlapping schema (magisteria?), among which the degree of consistency and alignment is in fact remarkably good but need not be perfect. Conflicts can in fact be tremendously fertile, alerting us to areas where more work is needed—famously, in the apparent inconsistency between quantum mechanics and general relativity. The assumption is that such conflicts can always be resolved by a deeper, better theory—but there is not to my knowledge any philosophical justification for that idea, which seems to rest on the notion that our theories have ontological and not just epistemological content. In any event, we know what Emerson said about consistency and tiny minds, and can probably afford to be more comfortable about making use of productively predictive theories and models without agonizing about friction at their edges.
And if we can do that within science, perhaps we can apply the same notion at its own edges too.
Philip Ball is a scientist, writer, and a former editor at the journal Nature. He has won numerous awards and has published more than twenty-five books, most recently How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology; The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, From Animals to Aliens; and The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination. He writes on science for many magazines and journals internationally and is the Marginalia Review of Books' contributing editor for Science. Follow @philipcball.bsky.social
