Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism: A Modern Construct?

The real history of the paired ideas “belief” and “supernatural” shows them to be part of secularization movements of the modern West: ideas that are important primarily for the self-understanding of contemporary naturalists rather than for religious believers. The legitimacy of these two categories, then, and hence of modern naturalism itself, rests upon the problematic assumption that the contingent history that produced them has been characterized by continuous progress. Instead, Professor Harrison points to a new genealogy of secular modernity, one that challenges common misunderstandings of the past and invites a reappraisal of religious thinking in the present.

Peter Harrison is Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. Previously, he was the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively in intellectual history, focusing on the philosophical, scientific and religious thought of the early modern period, and has written, more generally, on the historical relations between science and religion. His twelve books include The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago, 2015) and most recently, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (Cambridge, 2024).