Materialism vs. Supernaturalism? “Scientific Naturalism” in Context

In my last article on William James’ heretical science I mentioned that among the many opponents of his studies of alleged psychic phenomena were representatives of “scientific naturalism”, which I stated was

“not the same as ontological materialism, of which major science ‘naturalizers’ such as Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall in Britain, and Emil du Bois-Reymond and Hermann Helmholtz in Germany, were just as critical as subsequent psychological opponents of James’ psychical research”.

This prompted a question by Will Pooley at Bristol University, who asked me in a comment to say more on the distinction between scientific naturalism and materialism as he teaches “a class on ‘Science and the Supernatural’ in the long 19th century, and it occurs to me that I don’t distinguish between the two v[ery] clearly with my students!”.

So before I get back to James, let me try to respond to Will’s query. His question is important because I think it’s fair to say that a strict adherence to ‘naturalism’ is perhaps the most basic principle the humanities share with the sciences. The term is sometimes adorned with the prefix ‘scientific’ – usually to imply that ‘naturalism’ is a certain view of the universe vouched for by the growth of scientific knowledge itself, often believed to be echoed in Max Weber’s famous and often misunderstood phrase of the ‘disenchantment’ of nature.

Philosophers tend to stress the need to differentiate between naturalism as an ontological or metaphysical position (which has tended to include physicalism or materialism) and a methodological naturalism, i.e. an ultimately unprovable but necessary assumption which categorically rules out ‘supernatural’ explanations – gods, spirits, magic, teleological principles, etc. – to make rational inquiry possible in the first place.

Yet, given the practically axiomatic insistence on ‘naturalistic’ explanations in modern academic discourse, a watertight definition of any meaning of ‘naturalism’ turns out to be surprisingly tricky. In fact, minimal definitions of any standard notion of naturalism appear to be defined negatively, that is by mere contrast with ‘supernaturalism’.

It therefore seems that conceptual progress in this rather fundamental regard has remained in the state in which Thomas H. Huxley had left it in 1892, when he introduced ‘scientific naturalism’ into the English language roughly in the sense in which most philosophers use it today.

T. H. Huxley’s ‘scientific naturalism’

The term ‘scientific naturalism’ has appeared on and off in the literature since at least the 1850s. However, in contrast to its modern meaning it was usually deployed by religious writers with the intent to castigate the supposed materialism of (predominantly German) intellectuals who argued science had done away with the supernatural and thus with theology. The first use of ‘scientific naturalism’ by Huxley in the sense of a programmatic agnosticism (Huxley invented the words ‘agnosticism’ and ‘agnostic’ in 1869, see below), which he and others argued was the only legitimate position on religious matters to be held not only by scientists, occurred in the Prologue to his Essays upon Some Controverted Questions. This was a collation of articles previously published in reviews and magazines and had the central aim to oppose ‘supernaturalism’, which for Huxley was the very basis for theological dogmatism claiming infallibility and declaring the Bible as the literal word of God.

Huxley himself characterized his anti-supernaturalism essays as essentially polemical, and their reappearance in book form was his response to a recent declaration in the London Times signed by 38 Anglican clergymen. This statement essentially reasserted the kinds of bigoted claims to infallibility which Huxley and his circle of agnostic friends (including John Tyndall, W. F. Clifford, Herbert Spencer, Leslie Stephen and others in Britain, and Hermann Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond in Germany) had battled so passionately throughout their careers: The signatories solemnly declared that the Bible was a historical document affirming traditional Christian accounts of creation and the reality of miracles, and that to question their verdict was a mortal sin which reserved the doubter a cosy place in hell.

This clerical assertion of divinely inspired infallibility had in turn been prompted by growing doubts among other Anglican theologians, who freely admitted the validity if not necessity of a ‘naturalistic’ reading of the Bible.

However, the argument that biblical miracles were myths and had at best symbolic value was not delivered by representatives of secular science. Beginning in the 1830s, politically radical German theologians had offered historical reconstructions of Scripture without miracles as a central move to undermine the corrupt political power of the Catholic Church. Bloody turmoil over the unholy alliance of altar and throne in the long aftermath of the French Revolution had spilled over the borders into Germany in continuity with a prominent Enlightenment theme: belief in immaterial souls and magic was a requirement for a theocratic despotism which nourished and exploited fears of hellfire to maintain political power.

And it was only after this first step towards a ‘naturalistic’ religion by theologians and historians that political radical men of science in Germany followed suit by launching the famous Materialismusstreit (‘Controversy over Materialism’) in 1853. The debate, which again took aim at the political abuse of beliefs in magic and a Christian afterlife, would divide scientific communities not only in Germany for decades to come.

I will get back to the Materialismusstreit and related major political events which more than shaped the way in which modern sciences became ‘secular’ and ‘naturalistic’ through the professionalization of scientific disciplines at another point. In the meantime, it is crucial to state that responses to certain developments in Germany (including the March Revolution of 1848 and Bismarck’s war on the Catholic Church throughout the 1870s) served as important templates in the secularization of modern sciences in countries like Britain and the US, where comparable revolts were absent. And as we will see, this is hardly an insignificant point, even though it is routinely skipped by certain modern science popularizers and even by some historians.

Scientific Naturalism as Anti-Materialism

A major response to the dispute over science and the soul not only in Germany was a revival of Kantian epistemology. The Enlightenment war on ‘supernaturalism’ as a shorthand for Catholicism is now often falsely equated with the ontological materialism of French philosophers like La Mettrie and d’Holbach. But Kant as the leading Enlightenment philosopher in Germany is just one among many important reminders that materialism, and even science, were not particularly responsible for the supposed ‘decline of magic’ during the Enlightenment.

In fact, an appreciation of prominent anti-materialist philosophies and ‘rationalist’ brands of Christianity such as Deism, which postulated the existence of God but denied the possibility of ‘miracles’, is essential for an understanding of the complementary Enlightenment bogeys of ‘superstition’ and ‘materialism’, which continued to plague Western intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century. Kant himself had stressed that insurmountable limits inherent in the conditions of knowledge would bar true knowledge about the nature of God and the soul’s immortality, but at the same time demanded axiomatic belief in both.

From the second half of the nineteenth century, prominent Neo-Kantians in Germany began to secularize science through professionalization. Leading among those was Huxley’s friend Hermann Helmholtz, who was just one of several representatives of science who aggressively implanted a methodological reductionism in the curricula of fledgling life sciences, while attacking both ontological materialism and ‘supernaturalism’. Essential in these attacks were revised Kantian epistemological arguments regarding the absolute unknowability of final or metaphysical questions concerning the nature of the mind and the existence of God. Unlike Kant, however, Neo-Kantians like Helmholtz now refused to postulate God and immortality.

Closely related philosophical considerations also informed Huxley’s coinage of ‘Agnosticism’ in 1869. And though it’s still fashionable to refer to Helmholtz, Huxley and fellow agnostics as ‘materialists’, only a most superficial reading of their writings can miss their vocal condemnations of ontological materialism, whose representatives Huxley accused of committing the same sin as bigoted theologians, i.e. to declare their personal metaphysical dogmatism as absolute truths.

Granted, ontological materialism and atheism (terms which history again teaches us not to simply use interchangeably – we will come to that later) were still rather risky positions to maintain in public. So the question naturally rears its head: Was Huxley’s agnosticism not just a rhetorical device to avoid attacks by the Anglican establishment?

The suspicion that Victorian agnosticism was little more than closet materialism is instantly frustrated in the face of private journal entries and letters by Huxley and members of his network. What’s more, Bernard Lightman (the current president of the History of Science Society) has shown in the standard work on the subject, The Origins of Agnosticism, that far from being inherently anti-religious, Victorian agnosticism had a substantial positive religious dimension. Rather than merely deconstructing traditional ‘supernaturalist’ Christianity for its own sake, members of Huxley’s network considered their attack on theological orthodoxy as a necessary precondition to prepare the coming of a supposed ‘religion of the future’. Herbert Spencer’s philosophy of evolution, for example, centred around the ‘Unknowable’, which was much more than just a placeholder for a divine entity whose greatness Spencer and his followers believed would forever evade human understanding. Spencer was sincere in his worship of that Unknowable god, and Huxley’s private position was not too far from Spencer’s.

Yet, Huxley introduced ‘scientific naturalism’ in 1892 to replace his previous coinage ‘agnosticism’ in a move to publicly demarcate his agnosticism from the quasi-theistic connotations of the same term in the philosophical system of his friend Spencer. Huxley’s worship of the unknown god continued in private, but he was deeply concerned that Spencer’s postulation of the Unknowable deity would subject him to the same critiques that were levelled against Spencer and his followers: Rather than battle theological dogmatism, several critics maintained, Spencerian agnostics simply replaced one form of religious orthodoxy with another.

And efforts by disciples of Spencer in 1885 to build an Agnostic Temple in London would appear to rather justify Huxley’s concerns.

So what is ‘Supernaturalism’?

Huxley’s notion of ‘supernaturalism’ as the anti-figure to his agnostic ‘scientific naturalism’ was a mix of certain theological and popular notions of revelation as infallible divine inspiration on the one hand, and miracles as phenomena that constituted violations of natural law by gods and other ‘supernatural’ beings on the other. At the very basis of the agnostics’ ‘scientific naturalism’ was of course the uniformity of natural law throughout nature, and thus a categorical rejection of the possibility that ‘miracles’ – phenomena that were already predefined as violations of natural law – could ever become legitimate subjects of scientific study.

But Huxley’s own theoretical and practical treatments of miracles and the ‘supernatural’ were remarkably evasive and inconsistent, and his rejection of ‘supernaturalism’ never amounted to anything like a clear definition of that term.

We will come back to this when we will take a look at the history of conceptions of ‘miracles’ and ‘natural magic’ in early modern to Enlightenment science, and try to come to grips with the question “What is a supernatural phenomenon?” in one of the next articles. I also hope to say something about Huxley’s engagement with David Hume’s famous essay on miracles, at around the same time when Huxley saw himself confronted by several eminent scientific colleagues and friends such as ‘the other Darwin’, Alfred Russel Wallace, who publicly confessed that their investigations of spiritualist mediums had convinced them of the reality of supposedly ‘supernatural’ phenomena.

Meanwhile, let me conclude this note on a cliff-hanger and just say that axiomatic ‘naturalistic’ assumptions of the uniformity of nature as the very precondition of science were expressly shared by most adherents of spiritualism – a new grassroots religion which was to a considerable degree born out of similar frustrations over clerical bigotry as the agnostics’ religion of the Unknowable god.

And it will get even more complicated when we look at other elite scientists who unlike Huxley and Wallace were card-carrying materialists, but still came to believe in the reality of some of the hotly contested phenomena – without, however, converting to the new spiritualist religion.

© Andreas Sommer

Recommended Literature
(Disclaimer: Purchases made on this site might generate small commissions, at no extra cost for you.)

Barton, Ruth. 1987. “John Tyndall, pantheist. A rereading of the Belfast Address.” Osiris 3:111-134.

Gregory, Frederick. 1977. Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Studies in the History of Modern Science, 1). Dordrecht: Springer [Buy on Amazon] [Abebooks].

Lightman, Bernard. 1987. The Origins of Agnosticism. Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge. Baltimore, ML: Johns Hopkins University Press [Buy on Amazon] [Abebooks].

Lightman, Bernard. 2002. “Huxley and scientific agnosticism: The strange history of a failed rhetorical strategy.” British Journal for the History of Science 35:271-289

Turner, Frank M. 1974. Between Science and Religion. The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press [Buy on Amazon] [Search on Abebooks].

[Update, 25 January 2019: read part 2 of this article here]