The Way Forward in Science and Religion

Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) deeply influenced the Vienna Circle, initially provided a philosophical foundation for their logical positivism. Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and other logical positivists eagerly latched onto his assertion that language functions by picturing facts about the world, leading them to declare that any statement not empirically verifiable or logically deduced was, quite literally, “nonsense.”[1] If you could not measure it, it was not real. God? A syntax error. Poetry? Emotional static. Even philosophy itself became suspect, a parlor game for the linguistically deluded. Carnap’s The Unity of Science (1934) epitomized this approach, dismissing metaphysical and theological claims as empty of meaning because they failed to meet these strict epistemic criteria. In their zeal for clarity, the logical positivists declared entire realms of human inquiry to be little more than linguistic confusion, unfortunate relics of a less disciplined intellectual age.[2]

And yet, if the logical positivists had read their Wittgenstein a little more closely, they might have noticed that the most profound sentence in the Tractatus is the last one: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Rather than a triumphant banishment of metaphysics, Wittgenstein’s early work ended on a note of apophatic humility—a gesture toward limits rather than a claim to finality. In Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein performed a hermeneutic volte-face, rejecting the rigid framework of the Tractatus in favor of a view of language as a dynamic, context-bound set of “language games.” Meaning, he now insisted, was not chained to empirical fact-checking but danced in the communal rituals of life. Theology was not “nonsense”—it was a genre, operating on a plane as distinct from science as sonnets from spreadsheets.[3] To demand proof of God, he scoffed, was like critiquing a symphony with a voltmeter.

In this later vision, ethics, theology, and metaphysics were not nonsense but distinct ways of engaging reality, operating according to their own internal logic. Wittgenstein, that mercurial sage, had outrun his disciples. To demand scientific proof for religious claims, Wittgenstein insisted, is to misunderstand the grammar of faith. “If I thought of God as another being outside myself,” he wrote, “then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.”[4] Even those theologians who had tried to “prove” God’s existence had only done “infinite harm,” for they implied that God was an external fact—an idea that had become intolerable to Wittgenstein.

This pivot in Wittgenstein’s thought serves as an apt prelude to Harrison’s own concluding reflections in Some New World. Just as the later philosopher exposed the positivist’s “neutral” empiricism as a parochial grammar, Harrison unmasks scientific naturalism as a “crypto-theology”—a secularized Calvinism that worships “laws of nature” while denying the Lawgiver. Modernity’s epistemic grid, Harrison argues, is no impartial lens. Like Wittgenstein, Harrison resists the reductive epistemologies that have dominated modern thought, arguing that our conceptual vocabularies—shaped by language and culture—do not simply describe the world but constitute our very ways of engaging with it. The oft-repeated claim that “science disproves the supernatural” is, in his view, not a scientific discovery but a linguistic verdict smuggled in under the guise of objectivity. As he puts it, “There are no naked ‘facts’ in the sciences,” for “our observations are interpreted through a pre-existing grid of concepts and theories” (359).

To illustrate this, Harrison deploys two striking metaphors: the “wine-dark sea” of Homer and the “invisible gorilla” experiment of Simons and Chabris. Just as ancient Greek lacked a distinct word for “blue” and thus rendered the ocean as “wine-dark,” our conceptual categories shape what we perceive as possible or real. Similarly, just as subjects in the famous psychological experiment fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit while focusing on a basketball game, modern naturalism’s epistemic framework blinds us to phenomena that do not fit within its preordained categories. Our conceptual inheritance, far from being neutral, predisposes us to ignore, exclude, or diminish entire realms of experience.

Harrison also finds an instructive parallel between Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”) and Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific paradigms. Just as theological reflection begins from faith rather than detached neutrality, scientific inquiry operates within paradigms that structure how evidence is interpreted. Aesthetic, social, historical, and psychological factors are all involved in endorsing a scientific paradigm. The ideal of “pure science” is thus a chimera. If scientific naturalism presents itself as an unbiased, purely empirical enterprise, this is largely because it has forgotten the theological and philosophical scaffolding upon which it was originally built.

Drawing also on Owen Barfield and John Milbank, Harrison critiques scientific naturalism as jettisoning the divine while retaining theological assumptions about order, rationality, and progress. Indeed, as Milbank has argued, secular modernity is less a break from Christianity than a distortion of it, a theological mutation that pretends to be something else (367). As Harrison notes, naturalism retains an almost religious faith in the intelligibility of the universe, the reliability of human cognition, and the inevitability of human progress—assumptions that, historically speaking, were furnished by theological traditions, not by empirical science itself. Naturalism is not just a break from religion, but a bastard offspring, clinging to Christian assumptions about cosmic order while disowning the creed that birthed them.

Harrison extends this critique to modern narratives of technological progress, exposing their quasi-religious character. Borrowing insights from Heidegger, Bultmann, and Cavanaugh, he describes how the rhetoric of technological salvation has become a kind of secular liturgy, promising transcendence through the latest innovations. Science fiction, with its rapturous visions of transhumanism and the singularity, perpetuates these techno-utopian dreams, recasting eschatological hopes in silicon and circuitry. But, Harrison warns, a world without genuine transcendence leaves us vulnerable to worshipping technological idols. Without deeper ethical and existential grounding, progress risks becoming, in Heidegger’s phrase, the flight into the “uncanny.”[5] Silicon Valley’s eschatology—its rapture narratives of AI and quantum immortality—thus betrays a sacral itch, a hunger for transcendence duct-taped to circuit boards. But a progress stripped of telos can only become a Götterdämmerung of gadgets.

Modernity’s “clean break” from religion is a myth as flimsy as Carnap’s verification principle. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre, Harrison critiques naturalism’s rejection of transcendence, arguing that it leaves key modern ideals—progress, rationality, and moral order—floating in midair, ungrounded and incoherent. As MacIntyre warned in After Virtue (1981), much of modern moral discourse consists of fragments of an older worldview, stripped of the theological and philosophical foundations that once gave them coherence. Harrison extends this insight to naturalism itself: by amputating its religious roots, modernity risks intellectual incoherence, sustaining ideals it can no longer justify.

Harrison’s Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age is an extraordinary achievement in intellectual history. Combining meticulous scholarship with nuanced argumentation, he dismantles the triumphalist narratives of modernity, exposing the theological roots of concepts like naturalism, progress, and rationality. His critique complicates the simplistic “conflict thesis” between science and religion, revealing the deeply intertwined histories of theology and modern science.

Unraveling the Seam

Harrison’s exploration of the nature-supernature binary is a masterclass in intellectual archaeology, unearthing the theological roots of modernity’s most cherished illusion. What we now take for granted as a clean division between the “natural” and the “supernatural” is, in fact, a historical construct—a theological drama repurposed as secular dogma. Long before the Scholastics gave us natura and supernatura, the seeds of this divide were sown in the fertile soil of biblical and Greek thought, only to be harvested by a modernity that forgot its own genealogy.

The Hebrew Bible, though lacking a formal philosophical vocabulary, establishes an ontological chasm between Creator and creation. The God of Genesis 1 is no cosmic tinkerer but the sovereign Author of a world that remains utterly dependent on his sustaining Word. The psalmists, in their lyrical wisdom, capture this beautifully: God “makes the grass grow for the cattle” (Ps 104:14), and “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1). Here, divine action is not an alien intrusion but the very heartbeat of creation—a truth modernity has largely forgotten in its rush to banish the sacred to the realm of the “extraordinary.”

The Greek philosophical tradition introduced further refinements to these categories. Plato’s world of Forms and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover laid the groundwork for a metaphysical hierarchy that would later influence Christian thought. The Stoics, meanwhile, envisioned a cosmos suffused with divine logos—a rational order that echoed the Psalmists’ vision of a God-infused world. Yet, as we remarked earlier, these Greek categories were not merely adopted but transformed by Jewish and Christian thinkers.

Philo of Alexandria, that great synthesizer of Athens and Jerusalem, adapted Platonic dualism to biblical monotheism, presenting the logos as the bridge between the transcendent God and his creation. Early Christian theology followed suit, with Origen and Augustine envisioning a world permeated by divine presence. For Augustine, miracles were not violations of natural law but expressions of divine freedom within a world upheld by God’s providence. His distinction between natura and gratia was not a divorce but a marriage: nature, in its proper order, is always oriented toward its fulfillment in grace.

This vision reached its zenith in Thomas Aquinas, who drew on Aristotle and Islamic commentators like Avicenna and Averroes to craft a framework where nature had its own integrity yet remained ultimately dependent on God. Aquinas’s natura-supernatura distinction was not a wall but a window—a way of understanding different modes of divine operation without severing the sacred from the secular.

But then came the rupture. As Henri de Lubac argued in his seminal Surnaturel (1946), the delicate balance of Aquinas’s synthesis was shattered in later Catholic theology, particularly through the influence of Neo-Thomism. Where Aquinas saw grace as nature’s fulfillment, later thinkers treated it as an extrinsic add-on to a self-sufficient natural realm. This subtle shift, de Lubac contended, was the Trojan Horse of secularism: by constructing a vision of nature that no longer needed the supernatural, it made divine action seem superfluous—an anomaly in an otherwise self-contained cosmos.

De Lubac’s critique, which profoundly influenced twentieth-century Catholic thought, was a clarion call to recover the sacramental vision of earlier traditions. For de Lubac, humanity is not a natural being to whom grace is extrinsically added but a creature intrinsically oriented toward divine life. This insight, further explored in works like Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (2011), challenges the extrinsicism of later scholasticism and points toward a more integrated understanding of nature and grace.

Notably, the Eastern Christian traditions, at least in theory, never succumbed to this rigid divide. The Greek Fathers, particularly Gregory of Nazianzus and Maximus the Confessor, resisted the idea of a self-enclosed nature. Maximus’s doctrine of the logoi—the divine principles embedded in creation—affirmed that nature itself is shot through with divine rationality. His vision of theosis (deification) further blurred any strict nature-supernature divide, envisioning human nature’s ultimate participation in the divine life.

By the early modern period, however, the mechanistic philosophy of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton had redefined nature as a closed system governed by immutable laws. This shift not only altered scientific thought but also reshaped theology. Where medieval thinkers saw miracles as expressions of divine freedom within a God-sustained world, modern theology was forced to defend them as supernatural exceptions to a self-governing nature. The more “natural” the world became in the mechanistic sense, the more the “supernatural” appeared as an anomaly—a relic of a pre-scientific age.

Thus, the nature-supernature divide is not a medieval artifact nor an early modern construct but the product of a long intellectual history shaped by biblical, Greek, patristic, scholastic, and early modern thought. Harrison’s work invites us to recover the richer, more integrated vision of earlier traditions—a vision that neither reduces nature to mechanistic materialism nor isolates the supernatural as an external anomaly. In doing so, he offers a way forward: not a return to premodern enchantment, but a reimagining of modernity’s fractured categories in light of their theological roots.

The Need for a New Orientation

If Harrison is correct—and I believe he is—modernity still carries the fading scent of its religious origins, even as it denies the source. But a world that clings to the fragrance while discarding the vase will eventually find itself left with nothing at all. Modernity’s crisis, then, is not just intellectual but existential. It is the crisis of a civilization that has forgotten its liturgy but still hums its hymns. This brings us to the real question: Where do we go from here?

Harrison’s critique, incisive as it is, remains largely diagnostic rather than prescriptive. He has mapped the fractures in modernity’s epistemic foundations, but how might they be rebuilt? If secularism’s confidence in progress is inherited rather than self-sustaining, what alternative vision should take its place?

Recognizing secularism’s assumptions is necessary, but mere awareness does not undo a culture deeply embedded in these frameworks. Naturalism is not just an intellectual posture—it is an ingrained habit, reinforced by institutions, practices, and values that must be both challenged and reimagined.

Reordering society wholesale or arguing our way out of this predicament is, in practical terms, impossible. That ship has sailed. And yet, despite the gravity of the problem, passivity is not an option. Moving from diagnosis to meaningful alternatives requires a realistic appraisal of what change is possible—not through grand social engineering, but through a reorientation of practice, language, and purpose. Christians, especially those engaged in intellectual and scientific pursuits, must abandon modes of thought that diminish the depth of their faith, resist frameworks that reduce human life to mechanistic materialism, and cultivate practices that counteract the pervasive influence of what Charles Taylor calls the “buffered self.”[6]

The modern world is not merely secular—it is self-centered. Taylor traced how a “horizontal transcendence” rooted in humanistic beneficence has replaced the older “vertical transcendence” that oriented people toward God. The modern self is not simply without the transcendent; it is buffered against it, insulated by a mindset that places the individual at the center of meaning.[7] The late novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, in an unusually penetrating moment of cultural critique, captured the essence of this mindset: “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”[8] Harrison’s analysis underscores that this sense of the self as the universe’s focal point is a historically contingent development, not an inevitability. The emergence of the self as the primary interpreter and protagonist of existence marks a radical epistemic and spiritual shift.

Tara Isabella Burton, in her incisive works Strange Rites and Self-Made, traces how this shift has played out in contemporary culture. In Strange Rites, she concluded that we do not live in a godless world but in a profoundly anti-institutional one, where the proliferation of Internet culture and consumer capitalism has rendered us all “simultaneously parishioner, high priest, and deity.” This DIY spirituality, she contends, is less a rejection of transcendence than a redistribution of it—a sacralization of the self and its desires. In Self-Made, Burton shows how the modern cult of self-invention emerged from the ashes of traditional religious structures, fueled by the twin engines of consumerism and digital technology. The result is a world where meaning is not discovered but curated, and where the self is both the object and the arbiter of worship.

What is needed, then, is a counter-reformation of the imagination—a radical reorientation away from the self and toward a transcendent God. This shift is deeply Augustinian. For Augustine, the amor Dei reorders the human heart, drawing it away from disordered loves toward its proper end in the divine. Cultivating habits of faith shapes our affections, reconfiguring our perception of the world as creation sustained by a loving Creator rather than a meaningless accident of cosmic processes.

It is worth repeating: Christians, particularly those engaged in scientific and intellectual work, must resist the reduction of knowledge to mere mechanistic explanation. Calvin Seerveld, in Rainbows for the Fallen World (1980), captures this insight with poetic force:

We Western Christians, impregnated by hundreds of years of influential humanism, are also wont to think more highly of ourselves and our human technological achievements than we ought to think. It puts us in our place to realize every creature is made to praise God. All things are transparent manifestations of his power and wisdom. It is the very nature of creation that the whole world is like a burning bush—even though we walk around all the time with our shoes on.[9]

Seerveld’s words recall an ancient way of seeing the world—one that recognizes creation not as a dead mechanism but as a theophanic reality, a sign pointing beyond itself. The Roman Catholic Church has another word to describe this view, one that Eugene McCarrarher has recently described as a “sacramental” economy.[10] The sacramental worldview sees a flower, a mathematical equation, a work of art, as holding within it an inexhaustible depth, not because of what it is, but because of what it gestures toward.[11] Modern scientific naturalism, in contrast, flattens reality, reducing the world to nothing more than an arrangement of particles and forces.

This reductionism cannot satisfy the human heart. Taylor has noted that many experience what he calls the “malaise of immanence”—a restless dissatisfaction with a world emptied of transcendence. Harrison’s critique of secular modernity suggests that this malaise is not an illusion but a symptom. The world is not self-sufficient, and we are meant for something more. The solution, then, is not a retreat into nostalgia, nor a futile attempt to “rationally” restore faith in an age that has moved past it. Rather, it is the recovery of what Taylor calls “immanent transcendence”—a way of seeing the divine through the created order, rather than merely beyond it.[12]

This vision has significant implications for Christian scholars and scientists. In a world shaped by secular reason, even faithful academics often adopt the stance of accommodation, seeking common ground in order to maintain credibility. But as literary theorist Stanley Fish has provocatively argued, such an approach is fundamentally misguided. Though not religious himself, Fish argues that Christianity, if taken seriously, should disrupt the liberal intellectual order rather than merely fit within it. Faith, he contends, is not just a private commitment but an epistemic framework that challenges the assumptions of modern secular thought. In his stark phrasing, a person of religious conviction “should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas, but to shut it down,” at least insofar as that marketplace assumes that truth is negotiable rather than revealed. Fish argues that liberalism and Christianity are, at their core, incompatible: one presumes that all beliefs must be subject to rational scrutiny and revision, while the other holds that some truths are given and non-negotiable.[13]

For Christian scientists, this is a bracing challenge. It forces them to ask: is their work simply being accommodated within a secular framework, or is it redefining the framework itself? Are they merely finding a “place” for faith within science, or are they seeing science itself as a pursuit already ordered toward God? Fish’s critique may be overstated, but it highlights a crucial tension: Christianity is not a neutral participant in the modern intellectual order—it is a challenge to it. And the way forward is not accommodation but transformation.

Toward A New Natural Philosophy

If modern naturalism is, as Harrison suggests, a crypto-theology—a thief in the night, pilfering transcendence while denying its source—then it is not enough to expose modernity’s inconsistencies or the self-defeating nature of its epistemology. What is needed is not merely a more accommodating naturalism, but an entirely new way of knowing—a new Natural Philosophy that does not just tinker with the framework but smashes it and starts anew.

C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man (1943), anticipated this need. His critique of modern science was not a Luddite’s lament but a prophet’s warning: if science continues down its current path—stripping the world of meaning, reducing knowledge to utility, and treating nature as raw material for manipulation—it will not just misunderstand reality; it will dehumanize those who pursue it. His antidote was a renewed “Natural Philosophy,” one that resists reductionism, safeguards meaning, and retains a reverence for the created order.

Lewis laid out three non-negotiable corrections for modern science. First, it must resist reductionism—recognizing that its abstractions are not the whole story but a fragmentary glimpse. Science must bow before the mystery, acknowledging that nature’s order points beyond itself to the Creator. Second, science must explain without explaining away—rigorous analysis, yes, but without flattening the wholeness and mystery of what it studies. And third, it must resist dehumanization—ensuring that the study of nature remains attuned to its moral and theological significance, not just its utility for control and exploitation.

These corrections are not simply intellectual refinements; they are moral imperatives. Left unchecked, modern science risks becoming what Lewis foresaw: an instrument of domination—of nature, of human life, and, ultimately, of the self. Indeed, as Philip Sherrard put it more starkly: our current worldview of modern science is nothing short of “suicidal.”[14] A New Natural Philosophy, then, is not about baptizing science’s worst tendencies or opposing it outright. It is about reorienting science toward a vision of reality that acknowledges both the integrity of nature and the limits of human power. This is not just about avoiding self-contradiction; it is about averting self-destruction.

If Lewis gave us the why, Michael Polanyi gave us the how. A chemist-turned-philosopher, Polanyi argued in Personal Knowledge (1958) that all scientific inquiry rests on a “fiduciary framework”—a web of traditions, presuppositions, and shared commitments that guide the pursuit of truth. He identified three pillars: first, the indwelling of a tradition, where scientists immerse themselves in the accumulated wisdom of their field; second, the recognition of problems and the creative pursuit of solutions, which drive genuine progress; and third, the personal participation of the knower, which shatters the illusion of detached, purely objective inquiry.

Later, in The Tacit Dimension (1966) and his collection of essays in Knowing and Being (1969), Polanyi deepened this insight, arguing that all knowledge is tacit rather than objectively and self-consciously acquired. Our perception of the external world is not a mechanical, straightforward absorption of data. Instead, we integrate a vast number of things into a focal awareness, subjecting them to an interpretative framework so deeply rooted that we cannot make it explicit. This tacit dimension of knowledge, Polanyi insisted, is not a flaw but a feature—a testament to the profoundly personal and participatory nature of all knowing.

For Polanyi, knowledge is always personal and participatory. Scientific discovery is not the result of neutral, algorithmic procedures but of intellectual commitment—a kind of faith in the intelligibility of the world. This insight aligns deeply with a Christian vision of inquiry, where faith, hope, and love are not just theological virtues but essential conditions for intellectual life. Faith provides the trust necessary for collaborative discovery, hope sustains the search for truth even in uncertainty, and love fosters responsibility toward creation.

But reimagining science this way demands more than a shift in method; it requires the reintegration of the liberal, fine, and common arts. Science cannot flourish in isolation from literature, philosophy, or the practical wisdom embedded in human craftsmanship. Wendell Berry, the agrarian writer and environmental thinker, has long championed this reconnection. He argues that practices like gardening, carpentry, and direct observation cultivate attentiveness and humility—virtues just as vital in scientific inquiry. The tools we use shape our perception of the world, forming habits of thought that either deepen or dull our engagement with reality.[15]

Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, echoed this insight in The Medium is the Message (1964). His famous aphorism—“We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us”—serves as a warning against technological detachment. McLuhan saw the modern mechanization of thought as a grave danger, urging a recovery of tools and practices that deepen rather than distort our relationship with creation. His work complements Lewis’s critique by highlighting how technological progress can alienate us from the world rather than draw us into deeper understanding.

Lewis’s vision for a new Natural Philosophy is not merely nostalgic; it is deeply interdisciplinary. It recalls an era when the boundaries between science, philosophy, and the arts were fluid, allowing for richer intellectual exchange. It also echoes Aristotle’s demand to cultivate both sophia (theoretical wisdom) and phronēsis (practical wisdom), ensuring that scientific knowledge is integrated with ethical and metaphysical reflection.

This concern for integration was central to physicist Gerald Holton. In Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (1973), Holton argued that science is not a purely objective endeavor but is shaped by deep “themata”—underlying metaphysical and aesthetic commitments that influence what questions are asked, what methods are pursued, and what answers are deemed satisfactory. Recognizing these themes, Holton suggested, fosters intellectual humility and openness, countering the arrogance of scientism while encouraging a richer understanding of the world.[16]

Roger Trigg, in Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics (2015), drives the point home: “All science collapses without metaphysical support.” He elaborates, “Metaphysics without science may not have its feet on the ground,” but “science without metaphysics flounders, as if lost in a vast and featureless ocean. It loses all sense of direction or purpose.”[17] Like Harrison, Trigg exposes the illusion that science operates in a purely empirical vacuum, revealing instead that its very coherence depends on prior philosophical assumptions—assumptions about order, causality, and the very intelligibility of nature.

Without these metaphysical foundations, science risks devolving into what Nietzsche foresaw: a relativistic framework where truth is subordinated to power. Stripped of its grounding in reason and objective meaning, all that remains is the “will to power,” the reduction of knowledge to a mere tool in the struggle for dominance. This, of course, is a return to the argument of Thrasymachus in The Republic—the claim that justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger, that “might makes right.” Socrates and Plato spent their intellectual lives resisting this nihilistic drift, insisting that knowledge and virtue must be inseparable. Their struggle is our own.

Polanyi, Holton, Trigg, and Lewis converge on a fundamental truth: science, at its best, is not merely about acquiring knowledge but about pursuing wisdom. It must be grounded in metaphysical and theological commitments that acknowledge the order, beauty, and intelligibility of creation. This is why Michael Hanby, in No God, No Science? (2013), argues that modern science has reached an intellectual crisis precisely because it has severed itself from these deeper foundations. Hanby critiques the mechanistic worldview that dominates contemporary scientific thought, exposing its failure to account for the very intelligibility it presupposes.

Hanby’s critique points to an urgent need: the recovery of a science that does not treat nature as a machine to be manipulated but as a reality to be beheld. This is the heart of the new Natural Philosophy—a vision of science that refuses to separate knowledge from meaning, explanation from reverence, or discovery from wonder.

Christian scientists, then, are not merely called to practice science but to reimagine it—to reconfigure its assumptions, expand its boundaries, and reclaim its place within a broader intellectual and spiritual tradition. This is not an act of nostalgia but one of profound necessity. For if modern science remains untethered from its deeper foundations, it will not only misunderstand the world—it will cease to understand why understanding matters at all.

The Magician’s Bargain and the Oldest Sin Redivivus

While the Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions provided enduring frameworks for integrating practical knowledge with moral and spiritual wisdom, a darker undercurrent flows through Western thought, which has shaped the development of modern science in ways often overlooked. This stream emerged not from the Christian pursuit of wisdom but from an older and more dangerous impulse: the temptation to power, to mastery over nature untethered from humility or moral responsibility. This heresy of mastery is a bargain as old as Eden. It is the same temptation that Lewis famously called the “magician’s bargain”—the allure of dominion without wisdom, of knowledge wielded for control rather than contemplation.

The Renaissance, often hailed as a rebirth of reason, birthed a more sinister creed. Scholars like Frances Yates and Antoine Faivre unmask its occult roots: the Hermetic Tradition. Marsilio Ficino’s translations of the Corpus Hermeticum smuggled in a gnostic gospel—not creatio ex nihilo, but creatio ex imperio. No longer a cosmos singing gloria Dei, nature became a cipher to crack, a vault to loot. This was no mere mysticism; it was the first draft of modernity’s manifest destiny, where knowledge is power, and power is license. Unlike the medieval Christian view of the cosmos as a sacramental order, Hermeticism encouraged a vision of knowledge as power—an instrument for transformation and control rather than for understanding and participation in divine wisdom.

This shift set the stage for what Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, identified as the central crisis of modernity: the redefinition of truth as utility. No longer was knowledge something to be received with reverence; it became something to be seized, manipulated, and ultimately wielded as a tool of dominion. Hermeticism did not merely inspire speculative mysticism—it infused Renaissance thought with the idea that knowledge, rather than being a means of ordering the soul, could be a means of ordering the world.

Its influence extended to the very foundations of modern science, particularly through the work of Francis Bacon. While Bacon is often portrayed as a rationalist champion of empirical inquiry, his writings are suffused with the language of mastery and control. Cloaked in empiricism, he recast science as redemption—not through grace, but through dominion. His project? A “Great Instauration” to reclaim Edenic authority lost at the Fall. Wouter Hanegraaff exposes Bacon’s debt to Hermetic ambition: science as sorcery, nature as a damsel to be conquered. Bacon’s project did not emerge in isolation; it was shaped by a broader intellectual milieu in which the Hermetic ambition to manipulate the natural world for human ends had become increasingly prominent.[18]

Lewis saw the rot early. Bacon’s vision of science is profoundly Faustian. In The Abolition of Man, he compared Bacon’s project to the deal made by Goethe’s Faust, who trades his soul for unlimited knowledge and power. “We reduce things to mere nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them,” Lewis wrote, lamenting that the cost of such conquest is ultimately the degradation of both the conqueror and the conquered.[19] Bacon, like Faust, sought to extend human dominion, but in doing so, he severed knowledge from its proper ends, transforming science from an act of wonder into an exercise in control.

Several contemporary scholars have expanded on this critique. Carolyn Merchant contends that Baconian science catalyzed the desacralization of nature. Merchant demonstrates how Bacon’s metaphors of nature as a “female to be mastered” and “put on the rack” for interrogation codified a worldview that reduced the living Earth to a passive, mechanical resource. This framework would legitimize ecological exploitation and severed humanity’s ethical bond with the natural world.[20] Similarly, Cameron Wybrow argues that Bacon’s mechanistic approach severed humanity’s connection to the natural world, prioritizing control over harmony.[21]

Michael Gillespie further highlights how Bacon’s reorientation of human aspirations toward mastery shaped modernity’s broader intellectual currents, leading to an epistemic framework where knowledge is legitimized primarily through its capacity for domination.[22] Remi Brague also critiques Bacon’s rejection of teleology, noting its role in undermining the sacramental view of nature.[23] John Henry traces Baconian science’s influence on the Industrial Revolution, showing how the common arts were subsumed under the logic of efficiency and exploitation.[24] Taylor himself situates Bacon’s vision within the broader narrative of disenchantment, arguing that it contributes to the stripping away of nature’s spiritual and moral significance.[25]

This trajectory, however, does not end with Bacon. It has deeply shaped modern theology as well, particularly in the rise of the “science-engaged” theology movement. On the surface, this movement appears to be a noble attempt to reconcile faith and scientific inquiry. Yet in its eagerness to achieve cultural legitimacy, it often mirrors the very Baconian logic it seeks to critique—subordinating theology to the epistemological frameworks and methodologies of science. Just as Bacon subordinated nature to human ambition, this movement risks subordinating theology to the authority structures of secular scientific discourse, ultimately sacrificing its contemplative and prophetic role.

Here, René Girard’s mimetic theory offers a crucial insight.[26] Girard argued that human desire is imitative—that we learn what to value by imitating others. Theologians who seek legitimacy in the modern age inevitably find themselves drawn into a mimetic rivalry with modern science, adopting its language, methodologies, and assumptions in an effort to gain cultural acceptance. But in doing so, they risk losing precisely what makes theology distinct: its capacity to critique power rather than participate in it.

Historically, liberal theologians have been particularly susceptible to this temptation. As Harrison himself notes, many of the figures responsible for the rise of scientific naturalism were themselves shaped by Protestant historiography. In seeking intellectual credibility, liberal theologians often adopted the epistemological assumptions of their scientific contemporaries, unintentionally reinforcing the very secularism they sought to challenge. The “science-engaged” theologians of today risk repeating this mistake, mirroring Bacon’s error by seeking validation not from the divine order but from the structures of modern power.

But theologians like Wolfhart Pannenberg storm the Bastille. Pannenberg’s theological approach provides a crucial counterpoint to this trajectory. In works such as Theology and the Philosophy of Science (1976) and Systematic Theology (1988-1994), he flips the script. Rather than kneeling at the altar of science, he insists that theology must retain its own epistemic authority. He argues that science itself depends on theological assumptions—particularly the assumption that the universe is ordered and intelligible. This insight directly challenges the Baconian belief in autonomous human mastery. If science is ultimately grounded in a theological vision of reality, then theology is not merely an ancillary discipline—it is the foundation upon which all true knowledge rests.

For Pannenberg, a shift from anthropocentrism to theocentrism is vital. Pannenberg’s vision aligns with Augustine’s amor Dei—the love of God as the proper end of all human inquiry. For Augustine, knowledge was never about power but about participation in divine wisdom. Similarly, Pannenberg calls for a reorientation of human desires away from self-aggrandizement and toward the Creator, offering a direct antidote to the pride inherent in the Baconian tradition.

This is the real crisis of modernity—not merely an intellectual crisis, but a crisis of desire. The problem is not just that we think wrongly, but that we love wrongly. And as Lewis knew, disordered love leads to destruction. It is not enough to critique the errors of scientific naturalism or lament the loss of transcendence in the modern world. What is needed is a deeper transformation—a reordering of love itself. To recover a true natural philosophy, we must reject the magician’s bargain. We must recognize that the pursuit of knowledge, severed from wisdom and humility, leads only to domination, decay, and, ultimately, self-destruction. A genuine integration of science and theology will not come from mimicking secular epistemologies but from reorienting human inquiry toward its proper end: the glorification of God and the contemplation of his creation.

As Lewis warned, if we persist in the Baconian fantasy of control, we will not simply lose our souls—we will abolish our very humanity. The antidote to this fate is not more knowledge, nor more power, but a recovery of wisdom. A wisdom that sees creation not as raw material to be conquered, but as a gift to be received. A wisdom that understands that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. A wisdom that knows, with Augustine, that our hearts are restless until they rest in him.

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