The Perfume of an Empty Vase: The Rise and Fall of Evidential Religion

If modernity fancies itself the enlightened heir to a benighted past, Peter Harrison, thanks to his Some New World, is the genealogist who uncovers the family secrets. Earlier, we saw how Harrison dismantles the secular mythos of “progress” and “belief,” exposing their theological scaffolding. Now, he trains his sights on modernity’s most cherished illusion: the clean rupture between “natural” and “supernatural.” This division, Harrison argues, is no timeless truth but a theological heirloom—one that has been clumsily repurposed to prop up the disenchanted cosmos of modernity. Like a magician’s sleight-of-hand, the natural/supernatural binary disguises its origins in Christian debates while masquerading as universal reason. What follows is less a history of ideas than an exorcism of the spectral logic that haunts our supposedly secular age.

Harrison argues that modernity’s intellectual frameworks are deeply indebted to theological innovations, even as they secularized and distanced themselves from their origins. We now turn to Harrison’s exploration of the “age of evidences,” a transformative period spanning the late seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Here, Harrison charts the rise of evidential apologetics, a phenomenon both a product of and a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism. This period of intellectual upheaval, characterized by its infatuation with reason and evidence, pressured theologians to justify their faith with tools borrowed from the Enlightenment’s own arsenal: empiricism, historical criticism, and natural theology. If you cannot beat them, the thinking went, at least make your arguments look like theirs.

The dawn of evidential apologetics signaled a seismic shift from the Church’s historic reliance on authority and tradition to a brave new world of individualized verification. Figures like John Locke, with his insistence on rational belief, and William Paley, whose Natural Theology, first published in 1802, brought us the watchmaker analogy, became the poster children of this rational turn. For them, evidence was king, and Christianity, if it were to survive the modern world, must prove itself in the court of empirical reason.

Harrison deftly points out that this evidential turn, while designed to counter skepticism, came with unintended costs. By reducing faith to rational arguments and evidentiary propositions, theologians inadvertently stripped it of its richer, relational, and transformative dimensions. Christianity, Harrison warns, risked becoming an intellectual exercise—a proposition to be proven rather than a life to be lived. The triumph of reason over mystery was no triumph at all; it was a pyrrhic victory that surrendered the soul of faith.

Natural theology took center stage in this era of evidentialism. Harrison revisits the “usual suspects” of this tradition—Paley’s watchmaker, Boyle’s physico-theology, and Samuel Clarke’s demonstrations of God’s attributes. Clarke’s meticulous categorization of atheisms and his targeted refutations of speculative unbelief epitomized the rationalist impulse of the age. Clarke, Harrison argues, stood as a figurehead of an era where theology was increasingly tasked with proving itself on the Enlightenment’s own terms: by aligning itself with empirical and logical rigor.

Harrison’s critique of this rationalist apologetic strikes a chord of irony. In adopting Enlightenment methods, Christian apologists inadvertently echoed the secular critiques they sought to counter. Take, for instance, the consensus gentium—the classical idea that belief in God is a universal human trait. While Church Fathers and early Christian thinkers heralded this principle as proof of humanity’s natural orientation toward the divine, Enlightenment skeptics like David Hume and Thomas Hobbes turned it on its head. For them, consensus gentium revealed not divine fingerprints but the psychology of fear and superstition—a shared human impulse, not a shared truth.

Harrison highlights how Catholic and Protestant theologians grappled differently with consensus gentium’s Enlightenment unraveling. The former, steeped in a longer tradition of natural theology, defended it as a testament to human longing for God. The latter, influenced by Protestant critiques of human depravity, treated it with far more caution. Figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin doubted the universality of belief, viewing it through the lens of original sin. Protestant liberal thinkers like Herbert of Cherbury, however, embraced consensus gentium with rationalist zeal, wielding it as a weapon against traditional doctrines in favor of a deistic, universal religion. For Herbert, consensus gentium was less a testament to divine truth than a declaration of independence from revelation—a rationalist anthem for a post-Reformation world (149).

Harrison artfully traces this thread through the voyages of discovery, which brought reports of animistic and non-theistic belief systems from across the globe. These encounters, far from confirming the universality of God-belief, seemed to undermine it, fueling skeptical critiques (162). But here, Harrison falters slightly. While he correctly identifies these reports as catalysts for Enlightenment doubt, he does not fully interrogate their colonialist and Eurocentric biases. As Edward Said and Claude Lévi-Strauss have argued, these accounts often served Western agendas, interpreting religious “otherness” not as a challenge to consensus gentium but as a justification for imperial conquest and cultural supremacy.[1] These were less dispassionate reports than ideological tools—proofs of Western superiority masquerading as objective observations. In short, many explorers and missionaries who brought back accounts of foreign religions were already predisposed to challenge traditional Christian doctrines, interpreting unfamiliar beliefs as evidence against orthodox theism.

Harrison’s narrative moves effortlessly from this Enlightenment unraveling to the classical proofs for God’s existence, weaving in a fascinating reinterpretation of their purpose. Aquinas’s Five Ways, often caricatured as cold syllogisms for a rationalist God, are here presented as spiritual exercises, aligning human perception with divine reality (183). Anselm’s ontological argument, that perennial favorite of introductory philosophy classes, emerges not as a mere intellectual puzzle but as a meditative path to a deeper understanding of the divine (171). For Harrison, these proofs were never about coercing belief; they were about cultivating reverence—a regimen for seeing the world through the lens of faith.

This theme recurs in Harrison’s discussion of early modern figures like John Ray and William Derham, whose physico-theological works exemplified a time when science and theology still danced in harmony. These texts, as Jonathan Topham has shown, were read not just for intellectual edification but for spiritual nourishment.[2] They were exercises in wonder, designed to awaken gratitude and awe toward the Creator. Physico-theology, Harrison suggests, was less about accumulating evidence for God and more about fostering a disposition of worship.

In this book and others, Harrison has long drawn on Pierre Hadot’s magnificent What is Ancient Philosophy?, particularly his concept of philosophy as a “spiritual exercise,” a transformative practice aimed at aligning human perception with divine truths. Socrates’ philosophy as a way of life, Boethius’s reflections on divine justice, and Roger Bacon’s view of empirical science as a pathway to understanding God exemplify this approach. These thinkers treated theology and natural philosophy as intertwined, emphasizing faith’s relational and contemplative aspects.

Yet this harmony was short-lived. Harrison chronicles the transformation of natural theology as it succumbed to the mechanistic worldview of early modern science. Francis Bacon’s rejection of final causes and Newton’s mathematization of nature marked a shift from contemplation to control. By the eighteenth century, natural theology had become a pale shadow of its former self—more concerned with proofs and propositions than with piety.

To be sure, by tracing the transformation of classical proofs from spiritual exercises to empirical arguments, Harrison reveals the deep interconnections between religious, philosophical, and scientific developments in the early modern period. But as science became more autonomous in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, natural theology lost its central role. What had once been a theological foundation for scientific inquiry was increasingly sidelined as science pursued naturalistic explanations independent of divine purposes. This mirrors Harrison’s broader argument about metaphysical proofs for God’s existence: like natural theology, these proofs were gradually reinterpreted within a more rationalist and empirical framework, which diminished their spiritual and devotional dimensions.

By the early modern period, Harrison argues, natural theology underwent a profound inversion, becoming “a necessary foundation for revealed theology” rather than its auxiliary (206). This marked a decisive shift from earlier Christian traditions, where natural theology was often a supplementary lens through which divine truths could be contemplated, not constructed. In making natural theology foundational, early modern philosophers elevated reason as the primary tool for understanding divine truths. This rationalization came at a cost: it reframed theology in terms of evidential argumentation, aligning it with Enlightenment priorities while estranging it from its mystical and relational roots.

Harrison rightly notes that Protestant reformers like Luther and Calvin, but also the Catholic Pascal, were acutely aware of reason’s limitations. For these thinkers, reason, compromised by the Fall, was an unreliable guide to ultimate truth. True knowledge of God required divine revelation, not the speculative scaffolding of natural theology. For them, natural theology was, at best, a shadowy prelude to the fuller light of Scripture and faith, incapable of standing independently.

In the closing section of Chapter Four, Harrison revisits the consensus gentium principle—the notion that belief in God is universal—mapping its reinterpretation through post-Kantian philosophy, Scottish common-sense realism, and modern cognitive science. Despite its Enlightenment-era critiques, this principle endures in contemporary debates on religious experience, albeit in a reframed and empirically grounded guise. We see this in the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries, for example, who sought to validate religious experience by introducing the concept of Ahndung, a pre-rational, intuitive capacity for apprehending divine truths. Fries’ work, as Harrison shows, reflects a broader effort to recover the universality of religious experience in a way that acknowledged Enlightenment critiques while preserving its spiritual significance. Fries’ legacy finds an echo in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1917), where Otto expands the intuitive dimension of religious experience into the concept of the numinous—a mysterious, awe-inspiring encounter with the divine that defies rational explanation. For Otto, the numinous reframed the consensus gentium as humanity’s intrinsic capacity to perceive the sacred, beyond the reach of cold, analytic reason.

Harrison connects this thread to contemporary cognitive science, where researchers like Paul Bloom and Justin Barrett investigate the natural predispositions that give rise to belief in God or supernatural agents. Barrett’s work, in particular, argues that human cognition is finely tuned to detect agency and purpose, rendering religious belief nearly instinctive.[3] This empirical turn, while shedding new light on consensus gentium, reframes it within a scientific paradigm, transforming the sacred into a cognitive default.

Harrison concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of Enlightenment rationalism for natural theology. Rationalist approaches, though intended to defend Christianity, inadvertently reduced it to a series of propositions and evidential arguments. This intellectualization weakened the relational and experiential dimensions of faith, leaving it vulnerable to secular critique. Harrison’s narrative underscores the unintended consequences of this rationalist turn: by prioritizing reason over community and transformation, the rationalist defense of faith sowed the seeds of its own fragility in the modern age.

The Birth of the “Supernatural”

From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilization.[4]

In Chapter Five, Harrison takes aim at Thomas Henry Huxley’s triumphalist narrative of a perennial struggle between naturalism and supernaturalism, showing instead that this dichotomy is a modern invention. For premodern thinkers, the divine was not quarantined into a “supernatural” realm but immanent within the natural order. The sharp boundary between natural and supernatural, which now feels almost axiomatic, would have been unrecognizable to ancient and medieval minds. Harrison’s genealogy traces this binary back to the theological and philosophical debates of the medieval and early modern periods, where it slowly gained traction and coherence.

Harrison acknowledges his debt to Robert Bartlett’s The Natural and Supernatural in the Middle Ages (2008), a foundational work that maps the shifting meanings and applications of these terms. Bartlett illustrates how medieval theologians understood nature as inherently open to and dependent on the supernatural. This dynamic was not a hierarchical opposition but a seamless integration. The medieval cosmos, in short, was enchanted: nature was not self-sufficient but permeated by divine activity, with no impermeable boundary separating the two realms. Harrison builds on this insight to explore how the eventual disentanglement of nature from the supernatural set the stage for the rise of scientific naturalism.

C. S. Lewis’s Studies in Words (1960) also hovers in the background of Harrison’s analysis. Lewis, with his characteristic erudition, traced the evolving meanings of “nature” and their implications for Western thought. He observed how the word, originally encompassing everything that exists, gradually acquired narrower and more materialist connotations. This historical shift underpins the conceptual transformation of nature into a self-contained, mechanistic system that required a distinct category—the “supernatural”—to account for divine action.

Beginning with the Pre-Socratics, Harrison shows that while they sought natural explanations for the cosmos, they continued to affirm some form of divine immanence. Thales famously claimed, “everything is full of gods,” and Aristotle’s divine “Unmoved Mover” preserved a metaphysical unity between the natural and the divine. The Epicureans, in contrast, began stripping divine causation from the natural order, while the Stoics maintained a sacred rationality (logos) governing nature. These early tensions foreshadowed the debates to come but did not impose a rigid divide between the natural and supernatural.

Christian theology added its own innovations. By emphasizing the Creator-creation distinction, early Christian thinkers desacralized nature to reject the divinization of the cosmos. Figures like John Philoponus challenged Aristotle’s eternal cosmos by arguing for a created universe governed by laws reflective of divine rationality. This desacralization, as Harrison provocatively suggests, was a double-edged sword: it cleared the way for the natural sciences to emerge but also sowed the seeds for a world where divine causality would eventually be deemed extraneous.

By the twelfth century, the seeds of the natural/supernatural distinction began sprouting. Harrison draws heavily on Henri de Lubac’s Surnaturel (1946), which underscores the medieval view that nature was inherently oriented toward the divine. Nature was not self-sufficient but wholly dependent on God, with no impermeable boundary separating the natural from the supernatural. Yet, systematic articulations by thinkers like Albert the Great and Nicole Oresme began delineating natural philosophy from theology, creating the intellectual scaffolding for the modern dichotomy. “Christianity’s emphasis on God’s transcendence,” Harrison writes, “inadvertently naturalized the world,” making it ripe for scientific inquiry but at the cost of severing nature from its sacred roots (232).

The Scientific Revolution, often mischaracterized as a secular awakening, retained deep theological entanglements. Harrison introduces the concept of “scientific supernaturalism” to describe figures like Gassendi, Boyle, and Newton, who integrated atomistic theories with Christian doctrine. For Gassendi, reconciling Epicurean atomism with divine providence opened new ways of understanding nature. Boyle viewed scientific inquiry as an act of worship, while Newton insisted on God’s active role in sustaining the cosmos, countering Descartes’ mechanistic vision of a self-sufficient universe.

Harrison’s analysis underscores the irony that the Scientific Revolution, far from eradicating theological commitments, reconfigured them to support empirical inquiry. Yet this theological scaffolding began to erode in the nineteenth century as the concept of “laws of nature” became decoupled from its divine roots. Figures like John Herschel and Charles Darwin illustrate the transitional period when scientific naturalism gained momentum, borrowing, interestingly enough, Protestant historiographical narratives to frame itself as a triumph over superstition.

This Protestant historiography, Harrison argues, was co-opted by scientific naturalists like Huxley, who cast science as a crusade against “supernatural” dogma. As I have noted elsewhere in Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition, this polemical strategy mirrored Reformation-era narratives of spiritual progress. Huxley repurposed Protestant critiques of Catholicism to frame science as liberating reason from the clutches of ecclesiastical superstition, cementing the modern divide between the natural and supernatural. This polemic, however, has long been recognized, especially by Catholic writers.[5]

Harrison also highlights that the emergence of supernaturalism as a distinct category was not confined to debates about science and religion but also deeply influenced by developments within biblical scholarship. He observes that higher biblical criticism played a critical force in shaping the supernatural/natural binary. German critics like Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and David Strauss approached Scripture through historical and literary lenses, dissecting its divine claims as though they were scientific hypotheses. Huxley eagerly embraced this method, applying its evidentialism to challenge miracles and other “supernatural” phenomena. Indeed, the prefaces and prologues to his Collected Essays (1892-94) provide ample evidence of the influence of biblical criticism on Huxley’s mind. At the very beginning of one volume, for instance, Huxley gives a long quote from Strauss’s later 1872 work, Der alte und der neue Glaube (“The Old Faith and the New”), a lengthy treatise in which Strauss sought to demonstrate that Christian dogmas were historical creations rather than divine truths. For Huxley, Strauss is “one of the protagonists of the New Reformation,” and thus sees in him a kindred spirit.[6] By isolating divine acts as anomalies requiring separate justification, higher criticism not only aligned with scientific naturalism but entrenched the idea that religion was confined to the “supernatural.”

“What we see in these developments,” Harrison writes, “is essentially the application of naturalistic principles, respectively, to the history of Christianity and the biblical text” (273). The intellectual triumph of naturalism, he argues, was not inevitable but the result of theological debates that desacralized nature and reframed religion as “supernatural.” Huxley and his allies merely adapted Protestant historiographical tools to their own ends, recasting science as the final arbiter of truth. “Advocates of scientific naturalism,” Harrison concludes, “simply helped themselves to the basic plotlines of these Protestant polemics” (282).

In tracing the origins of the natural/supernatural divide, Harrison reveals its contingency. The binary is not a timeless truth but a modern construct, shaped by theological, philosophical, and cultural shifts that desacralized the cosmos and paved the way for scientific naturalism. As with so much in Harrison’s work, the lesson is clear: modernity’s self-conception as a triumph over religious superstition is itself a myth, deeply indebted to the very traditions it seeks to disown.

“History Wars”

In Chapter Six, Harrison explores in more detail how the Reformation transformed history into an ideological battleground, a “history war” with consequences still reverberating in secular thought. Protestant and Catholic factions weaponized historical narratives to legitimize theological positions, inadvertently shaping modern notions of progress, miracles, and religion itself. Harrison connects these historiographical skirmishes to later secular critiques, showing how Reformation-era polemics provided the scaffolding for modern ideas about science and religion.

The groundwork for this approach has long been acknowledged. One nineteenth-century reviewer of the so-called “conflict” narratives between science and religion, for instance, quipped that the genre merely recycled “old, time-worn, oft-refuted, and ridiculous stories which stain the pages of long-forgotten Protestant controversialists.”[7] For his part, Harrison begins by revisiting one of the most powerful of these narratives: Luther’s portrayal of the Catholic Church as a corrupted institution that had deviated from true Christianity. Protestant historians like Theodore Beza and the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries cast the Reformation as a divinely ordained restoration, framing the Middle Ages as an age of spiritual darkness—post tenebras lux (“after darkness, light”).[8]

This narrative became a Protestant hallmark and was later repurposed by secular thinkers to discredit religion altogether, portraying it as an archaic impediment to reason and progress. Harrison traces this trope through English writers like Francis Bacon, Bishop Thomas Sprat, and Cotton Mather, who invoked the “dark ages” to critique Catholicism and celebrate a Protestant-inspired vision of progress. Unlike earlier Christian philosophies of history—such as those of Augustine, who emphasized divine providence as history’s guiding force—Protestant polemicists used history to create a dichotomy between superstition and enlightenment. Catholics, for their part, fired back with their own counter-narratives, sparking a historiographical battle that Harrison aptly dubs the “history wars of the sixteenth century.”

The Protestant doctrine of cessationism—asserting that miracles ceased after the apostolic age—further escalated this conflict. While initially aimed at discrediting Catholic claims of ongoing supernatural events, cessationism unwittingly provided Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Hume with tools to deny miracles outright. These arguments undercut the plausibility of divine revelation, reducing miracles to mere relics of pre-modern superstition. Harrison shows how stadial theories of history—progression from primitive to civilized stages—co-opted Protestant critiques to present religion as a vestige of humanity’s intellectual infancy. Ironically, the Protestant polemics that sought to defend Christianity against Catholicism became a blueprint for secular critiques of all religion.

Protestant historiography also influenced Enlightenment ideals of progress. Reformers’ narratives of historical renewal were secularized by thinkers like Voltaire, Condorcet, and Turgot, who replaced divine providence with science and reason as the engines of human advancement. Yet they retained the Protestant critique of medieval “darkness.” Harrison argues that these stadial models, rooted in Protestant eschatology, remained tethered to theological frameworks even as they declared independence from religion. “In all of this,” he writes, “the connection of science to social progress, along with a thesis of the retrograde influences of all forms of Christianity, was central to the Enlightenment propagandists’ sense of their own place in the story of human progress” (306).

Harrison further connects these narratives to nineteenth-century social sciences, particularly Auguste Comte’s positivism. Comte’s “law of three stages” (theological, metaphysical, and scientific) mirrored Protestant and Enlightenment progress narratives but substituted science for providence. Anthropologists like Edward Tylor and James Frazer perpetuated these frameworks, presenting Western rationality as humanity’s apex. Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud further entrenched this view, treating religion as a psychological or cultural artifact from humanity’s childhood. Harrison critiques these approaches for their theological origins, despite their pretensions to scientific objectivity.

German Romanticism and Idealism offered a different reinterpretation of providence. Thinkers like Novalis, Lessing, and Hegel replaced divine providence with philosophical constructs, such as Hegel’s Geist (Spirit), to give history a teleological purpose. However, later thinkers like Feuerbach and Marx secularized this framework, replacing Spirit with material conditions or socio-economic structures. Harrison argues that this shift created a crisis of meaning: without its metaphysical foundation, history became either arbitrary or mechanistic, driven by impersonal forces rather than moral or spiritual aims. Harrison’s critique echoes Nietzsche’s warnings about modernity’s “death of God,” leaving Western thought to wrestle with the absence of a transcendental anchor for purpose and morality.

Harrison concludes with a striking metaphor from Ernest Renan: modernity is the “perfume of an empty vase.” The perfume represents concepts like progress and reason, which retain the fragrance of their theological origins. The empty vase, however, reflects the absence of the metaphysical framework that once gave these ideas coherence. Remarkably, Harrison asserts that even deterministic systems like Comte’s positivism are “hardly intelligible outside the context of the Christian faith” (346). Without recognizing these origins, secular frameworks risk collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions, losing the meaning they inherited from theological traditions.

Harrison’s Some New World masterfully unpacks how Protestant historiography, Enlightenment rationalism, and scientific naturalism intertwined to create the modern natural/supernatural dichotomy, shaping not only our understanding of religion and science but also the very framework of historical and intellectual progress. I reached similar conclusions in my own work, which demonstrated how Protestant narratives were co-opted by scientific naturalists to craft the “conflict thesis,” presenting science as the culmination of humanity’s liberation from superstition. Harrison further develops these themes, offering a nuanced account of how secularism remains indebted to theological frameworks, even as it seeks to distance itself from them. In the final essay of this series, I will critically engage with Harrison’s concluding reflections—rooted in Wittgenstein’s insight that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” and Herder’s claim that language shapes human knowledge—and outline my own prescriptive vision: a “new Natural Philosophy,” which aims to recover a holistic integration of reason, imagination, and moral order.

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