Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol. 32, No. 2, pp.

377–386, 2001
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Religion, Science and Natural Philosophy:

Thoughts on Cunningham’s Thesis

Peter Dear*

The theme of religion and science in early-modern Europe is one that cannot be
approached without a lot of presuppositions impeding the route. As a way of clear-
ing the path somewhat, it may prove useful to focus on some suggestions made
over the last several years by Andrew Cunningham regarding early-modern natu-
ral philosophy.1
Cunningham has formulated arguments concerning the precise meaning of the
familiar label ‘natural philosophy’. Historians’ use of this term, rather than
‘science’, in recent years often seems to be a way of signalling a major development
in historiographical sophistication: it implies an active attempt to avoid anachron-
ism by steering away from the word ‘science’ in favor of one more appropriate
for the early-modern period. When historians of early-modern science wish to avoid
the word ‘science’, we frequently take the easy way out by noting that formalized
knowledge of nature in early-modern Europe was usually called ‘natural philo-
sophy’. The practical consequence is that whenever we think about ‘science’ for
that time and place, we can simply substitute the term ‘natural philosophy’ and
carry on exactly as before—while feeling pleased at having avoided the pitfalls of
present-centeredness.
But, of course, early-modern natural philosophy was not in fact topically
coterminous with those areas of thought and endeavor that correspond most closely
to what we take the word ‘science’ to designate nowadays. Cunningham’s general
point is precisely this, and it seems to be correct. The precise reasons for regarding
it as correct, however, may not turn out to be exactly the same as those adduced
by Cunningham. One point not considered by Cunningham is that much of the

* Department of History, McGraw Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, U.S.A. (e-mail:
prd3@cornell.edu)
Received 7 June 1999.
1
Cunningham (1988, 1991), Cunningham and Williams (1993) and Cunningham and French (1996).
Aspects of Cunningham’s views also appear in Cunningham (1997); see also French (1994).

PII: S0039-3681(01)00003-6
377
378 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

material making up the usual focus of study for the history of science in this period
would at the time have been called mathematics, and not natural philosophy. There
is, in other words, a basic anachronism involved in using the term ‘natural philo-
sophy’ to cover both physical and mathematical domains (both terms here being
used in their historically contemporary sense). It is as if there were something,
called ‘science’, that remains the same in all periods regardless of the particular
labelling conventions used to designate it.
Cunningham himself, however, focuses on a different and much more debatable
point about the character of ‘natural philosophy’. Rather than saying that we need
to remember the early-modern demarcation between natural philosophy and such
disciplines as mathematics, he claims that natural philosophy (even including math-
ematical approaches),2 is itself an enterprise directed towards a different kind of
knowledge from that sought by modern science. Natural philosophy, he argues,
was essentially about God and God’s Creation. Thus people doing natural philo-
sophy were at some level or another always talking about God. Thus, it makes
little sense to talk about ‘science and religion’ in that context: there are no two
things the relationship between which can be examined; there is simply one inte-
grated enterprise.
This perspective has considerable appeal. Making early-modern natural philo-
sophy into as alien as possible an enterprise sounds like a worthwhile endeavor—
to see how strange the past can be made to seem. Furthermore, the suggestion has
some immediate plausibility: we all know full well how important God is in just
about any system of natural philosophy in the period; a characterization of natural
philosophy that makes God central is a neat way of removing a sense of sheer
coincidence between all these cases. We no longer need resort to saying, for
example, that natural philosophers in the seventeenth century talked a lot about
God merely because they lived in a religious age, where God got into everything.
That would be to dismiss religion as an irrelevant cultural element because of its
very ubiquity—as if it were too important to be noticed. One might as well argue
that people who took Holy Communion regularly also just happened to believe in
God because everyone did, with no essential connection being posited between
the taking of communion and professed belief in the Christian God. Following
Cunningham, however, we can say that by very virtue of doing natural philosophy,
people necessarily included God, because that was what the enterprise was essen-
tially about.
The thesis is quite economical, therefore, and even elegant. The next question
to ask of it is this: is it true?
There is a basic problem that relates to the coherence and unitary nature of this
enterprise called ‘natural philosophy’. Cunningham is very concerned to make a
firm demarcation between it and ‘science’, so as to ensure that the two will not

2
See, for example, Cunningham (1991), p. 380.
Thoughts on Cunningham’s Thesis 379

be conflated. This laudable intention has, however, an unfortunate consequence:

Cunningham ends up by treating ‘natural philosophy’ and ‘science’ as if they were
distinct natural kinds.3 This is a particular problem for the connection between the
arguments of Cunningham’s articles, which are focused on the early-modern per-
iod, and those of the recent book written by Cunningham and Roger French on
what they call the ‘invention of natural philosophy’. The book is focused on the
Dominican and Franciscan enterprises in natural philosophy in the thirteenth cen-
tury; what Cunningham and French dub the ‘friars’ natural philosophy’.4 Their
point is, once again, that natural philosophy was fundamentally about God and
religion; it was designed from the very start to speak to those subjects and to
uphold the Roman Catholic Church. Leaving aside the truth of that quite interesting
claim, there remains a problem in drawing a direct and unproblematic connection
between the natural philosophy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and that
of the seventeenth. Such an argument, which is at least implicit in Cunningham’s
work, runs the risk of falling foul of what the philosophers call the ‘genetic fallacy’,
the assumption that the conditions of origin of something inevitably and forever
afterwards determine something essential about its current nature: hence the dif-
ficulty that arises when treating natural philosophy as if it were a natural kind that
persists over time.
If we resist treating Latin European ‘natural philosophy’ of the medieval and
early-modern periods as a single kind of enterprise, then the assumed relation of
the thirteenth-century story to that of the seventeenth becomes less compelling.
We might, for example, happily confess the theocentricity of thirteenth-century
natural philosophy without necessarily inferring the theocentricity of natural philo-
sophy in the seventeenth century. What ‘natural philosophy’ was as an enterprise
in any given time and place is then a matter of empirical investigation rather than of
essentialist definition. At this point in the argument, the demarcation itself between
‘natural philosophy’ and whatever ‘science’ is becomes a situated, empirical matter.
In examining the merits of the case for the seventeenth century alone, therefore,
the first things to look for are possible counter-examples to Cunningham’s charac-
terization of natural philosophy—to see how many of them, on this hypothesis, are
real and how many just apparent. Instructively, this search quickly emerges as a
big job. Are there any people in the period who explicitly exclude God from their
natural philosophy? We have to be careful here: it would be one thing for someone
to adopt a position of atheism while claiming to be doing natural philosophy none-
theless, and another for someone to believe in the existence of God and yet declare
that their natural philosophy had nothing to do with Him. In the first case, an

3
For a comparable criticism of work on ‘science and religion’ that utilizes quasi-essentialist
approaches, see Osler (1998). Osler prefers the notion of the ‘appropriation and translation’ of concepts
between different discourses, whereas my own discussion is as much concerned with the possible exist-
ence of a single such domain as it is with formal concepts shifting between domains.
4
Cunningham and French (1996), subtitle.
380 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

atheistical natural philosophy, one might argue, could also be ‘about God’, albeit
in a negative sense, just as one can represent atheism itself as a variety of theology.
In the second case, it would be necessary to find a person who could explicitly
banish God from natural philosophy while at the same time believing that God
had created the very universe that natural philosophy studied. Presumably Cun-
ningham would regard this latter alternative as amounting to an abandonment of
natural philosophy altogether. Perhaps it would be the start of the enterprise of
‘science’, instead (which, on Cunningham’s timetable, in reality came to supplant
natural philosophy in the nineteenth century).5
The argument for the theocentricity of atheism is not one that Cunningham him-
self discusses. But there are places where his position seems to call for it. His
article ‘How the Principia Got Its Name, or, Taking Natural Philosophy Seriously’
explains how one of Newton’s self-professed motivations for writing the book
was to confute Cartesian natural philosophy. Cunningham says that for Newton,
Descartes’s system was ‘atheistical’, and so Newton wanted to replace it with his
own superior brand of natural philosophy that better suited his own conception of
the nature of God.6 Now, if everyone simply understood, as a matter that ‘hardly
ever got mentioned’, as Cunningham says,7 that natural philosophy was about God,
then how could it have been possible for Newton to see Descartes as promoting
a natural philosophy that dispensed with Him? Perhaps the notion of the ‘theocentr-
icity of atheism’ might here be drafted in to save the argument, although it would
require us to maintain that Descartes’s account of God’s Creation must, for Newton,
have implied that it had not been created by God. Now would this be a flat contra-
diction in terms, or an interesting paradox?
I tend more towards the first than the second interpretation. While the problem
really concerns Newton’s view of Descartes’s world-system rather than that system
itself, its importance here lies in the very thinkability of such a view—a thinkability
that Cunningham would seem to deny. Cunningham’s position would be more
plausible if Newton had said that Descartes’s work did not amount to legitimate
natural philosophy because it failed to incorporate God in the right way; such a
criticism would make it clear that Newton took it for granted that God had to be
included somehow.
The clearest solution to these sorts of problem would be to say that Cunningham
is in error: natural philosophy was not constitutively about God and God’s Creation;
instead, it was about the world of secondary causes only, God usually being brack-
eted out of the picture for the purposes of the enterprise. That would constitute
an alternative explanation for God’s supposed central role ‘hardly ever [getting]
mentioned’, as Cunningham observes.8 Cunningham also quotes Newton’s famous

5
For example, Cunningham (1988), p. 385.
6
Cunningham (1991), p. 384.
7
Ibid., p. 382.
8
Ibid.
Thoughts on Cunningham’s Thesis 381

remark of 1692 to Richard Bentley: ‘When I wrote my treatise about our system,
I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the
belief of a Deity.’9 In saying that, however, Newton evidently thought that he was
saying something with real content rather than just uttering a tautology; whereas,
if Cunningham is right, that is just what it should have been. Natural philosophy
seems, in fact, to have a strong but contingent link with issues to do with God,
rather than being defined by such issues. Much the same point could, no doubt,
be argued for countless other figures of the seventeenth century besides Newton.
A useful thought-experiment is to set up an alternative, but structurally similar,
hypothesis to that of Cunningham. For example, one might with some plausibility
argue that seventeenth-century natural philosophy was fundamentally about the
health of the human body, and the prolongation of life. That was certainly a recur-
rent theme in the philosophical work of Descartes.10 And following Cunningham’s
example, we might say that whenever a natural philosopher said nothing explicit
about medical issues, this was simply because the medico-centricity of natural
philosophy was too well known to need stating. It becomes difficult to see such
arguments as anything other than unfalsifiable.11
However, despite being overstated, Cunningham’s perspective does possess a
great deal of value. At the very least, it encourages us to remember that seven-
teenth-century philosophers did not routinely tack God on to their accounts of
nature as an afterthought; God very frequently was central to their projects. If
Cunningham’s lesson is taken as a kind of heuristic, a thread to guide us through
the complicated paths that comprise early-modern ideas about nature, it can be of
great value. But an essentialization of ‘natural philosophy’, so as to rule out the
possibility of either atheistic or agnostic varieties, is perhaps an unwise route to
take.
Cunningham makes this essentializing move, of course, so as to distinguish natu-
ral philosophy from modern science. This is a relativization that seems very salu-
tary and worthwhile. However, it raises the question of how one would deal with
apparent examples of ‘science’ in the nineteenth century that themselves involved
God rather centrally, in a manner apparently similar to that of Cunningham’s ideal
of natural philosophy. British physicists such as James Prescott Joule, or James
Clerk Maxwell, implicated God centrally in their pictures of the world. For Joule
in the 1840s, God warranted those metaphysical principles that supported the notion
of an interconversion of ‘forces’ implied by his experiments on the mechanical
equivalent of heat; God, that is, had been by no means sidelined.12 At the same
time plenty of other people, whether on the Continent of Europe (Cunningham

9
Quoted in ibid., p. 383.
10
Lindeboom (1978); see also Carter (1983).
11
The value of which criterion lies, of course, in its moral rather than strictly epistemological force.
12
See Joule quoted in Smith and Wise (1989), p. 306; also, on Maxwell, ibid., chap. 18, esp. pp.
629–633.
382 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

treats Laplace as emblematic),13 or in other scientific specialties (such as Huxley,

or Darwin) were indeed prepared to dispense with God. Thus the idea that what
appears as a developing heterogeneity was not in fact part of a process that was
continuous with the old ‘natural philosophy’ seems implausible.
An appropriate challenge, therefore, is to understand the process (taken non-
teleologically) itself; to explain these changes. One can argue, for example, that
in early-modern natural philosophy, particularly in the eighteenth century, where
once it had been God that tended to underpin knowledge of nature, by being a sort
of moral guarantor of nature’s intelligibility (the cosmic crossword composer, so
to speak), so it increasingly happened that a personified Nature came to play such
a role, and continued to do so at some level even in modern science (with the
possible exception of the positivists).14 If this is so, how might it relate to the
‘science and religion’ question for the seventeenth century?
This argument centrally concerns transcendence—the sense in which philo-
sophies of nature relied on the notion of an independently existing intelligible
reality, whether that was understood in relation to God or just as a self-subsisting
independent Nature. Of necessity, there had to be something of this sort. But in
addition to God and/or Nature, another actor also figures in the cast: ‘reason’. When
Robert Boyle talked about things that were ‘above reason’, he was demarcating a
proper role for philosophy—‘experimental philosophy’, in his case—that by its
very nature was not exhaustive of everything that existed or could be known. What
was left over was the transcendental part of knowledge, whether called ‘God’ or
‘Nature’.15
In speaking of the ‘reconcileableness’ of reason and religion, Boyle laid out an
important epistemological divide between these two realms of potential knowl-
edge.16 The character of the divide is not just a straightforward matter of holding
that religion (i.e. ‘revelation’) can tell us about things to which reason has no
access; instead Boyle talks about the ways in which revelation can tell us things
that otherwise we would find incomprehensible. Reason must humbly render itself
subservient to revelation, but this does not render reason unreliable. Boyle attempts
to rescue the validity of reason itself by adducing a couple of mathematical para-
doxes, including the famous ‘wheel of Aristotle’, so as to suggest that finding a
proposition unintelligible need not necessarily render it contrary to reason.17 The
mystery of the compatibility of predestination and human free will could be rep-

13
Cunningham and Williams (1993), p. 424.
14
This argument was presented more fully at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society,
Santa Fe, November 1993, in a session on ‘The Moral Economy of Science’, under the title ‘Trust-
ing Nature’.
15
Boyle (1681).
16
Boyle (1675).
17
Boyle (1681), p. 413.
Thoughts on Cunningham’s Thesis 383

resented as perfectly ‘reconcileable’ with reason, even though we might be unable

to comprehend it properly.18
There are obvious comparisons to make here, such as the distinction that Galileo
had made between ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ knowledge. Extensive knowledge is,
in effect, how much is known, whereas intensive knowledge concerns how per-
fectly some item of knowledge is known. Galileo famously asserts in the Dialogue
that some human knowledge of the latter kind, specifically mathematical prop-
ositions, is equal to that of God—we know a demonstrable geometrical truth just
as certainly as God does. Boyle’s position, however, evidently distinguishes
between truth and demonstrability even more radically than Galileo: the only absol-
ute truths are those handed down by divine revelation, because (although Boyle
seems to be a bit reluctant to state the point outright) human reason is sometimes
incapable of grasping revealed truth—mathematical paradoxes notwithstanding.
When the natural world is as contingent on God’s will as Boyle seems to argue
that it is, the character of human knowledge of it becomes thoroughly non-auton-
omous. According to Boyle’s argument, there should, at least in principle, be no
demarcation between ‘religion’ and ‘science’. And yet Boyle strives mightily to
uphold the value of reason nonetheless. Reason almost acts as if it were as transcen-
dental as God, or Nature—almost, but not quite. It is not transcendental, or separate
from the knower, because it is actually part of the knower—which is how it can
have the various weaknesses of incomprehension that Boyle mentions. Reason is
simply the human side of the sharp dichotomy between the human knower and the
ultimate object of that knowledge, which is God or Nature. The latter do not neces-
sarily conform to the same rules as does human reason.19
The positive aspect of Andrew Cunningham’s ideas thus appears very clearly,
in the form of a guide to the sensitive formulation of historical questions. However,
it remains an empirical matter to determine how these considerations play out in
any particular setting. Certainly, an approach of this kind will fail to provide any
sharp demarcation between an enterprise called ‘natural philosophy’ and one called
‘science’. In practice, the approach to the matter adopted in John Hedley Brooke’s
1991 Science and Religion20 seems well judged in this regard: Brooke identifies
those occasions on which God is or is not particularly central to, or implicated in,
any given natural-philosophical or scientific enterprise and examines the conse-
quences. Nonetheless, to the extent that Brooke still speaks of the ‘interaction’
between ‘science and religion’, particularly in the early-modern period, Cun-
ningham’s stress on their inseparability has its value—even if that inseparability
is not quite as invariable as Cunningham tends to suggest.21

18
Ibid., p. 411, and Wojcik (1997).
19
This point intersects with the issue of voluntarism in and rationalism in theology: see, for example,
the discussions of these matters in Osler (1994).
20
Brooke (1991); see esp. chap. 1.
21
Ibid., p. 51.
384 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

One of the places in which Cunningham’s views have borne real historiographi-
cal fruit in studying the early-modern period is in the recent book by Sachiko
Kusukawa on Phillip Melanchthon.22 Explicitly indebted to Cunningham’s views
(Kusukawa did her doctoral work with him at Cambridge), the book turns to real
account his central insight—ironically, in relation to precisely the point for which
I criticized him earlier, namely his disregard of the place and nature of the math-
ematical sciences outside natural philosophy.
In discussing the specific, Melanchthon-directed teaching of natural philosophy
at the University of Wittenberg, Kusukawa notes the role of the mathematical
sciences, especially astronomy and astrology, in the natural-philosophical curricu-
lum.23 Within an Aristotelian taxonomy of the disciplines these were traditionally
taken to be distinct from natural philosophy, whereas in Melanchthon’s particular
reformed vision they were an integral part of it. Astronomy was, after all, an effec-
tive means of revealing God’s Providence in the universe. Kepler surely stands as
the clearest example of the Lutheran theological/natural-philosophical complex at
the end of the century, and Kusukawa’s discussions on this point also remind us
of Kepler’s ambition to develop a physical, not merely a mathematical, astron-
omy.24 This example shows that there is still a lot to be said about physics, math-
ematics and God in this period, precisely by treating these categories as flexible
and always renegotiable.
But what, then, of the atheists? A further point can be made that develops on the
earlier observation that atheistical positions are in some sense theological insofar as
they are about God. In regard to the issue of transcendence, an atheistical position
(perhaps that of Spinoza) would have been one in which a reified Nature has com-
pletely replaced God as the transcendental object of knowledge. If we decide that
such a position does not really differ from pantheism, then Cunningham’s position
would once again seem to be vindicated: natural philosophy really is all about God.
Unfortunately, exactly the same argument would also applied to nineteenth- and
twentieth-century science, so that the demarcation between it and natural philo-
sophy still fails to hold up.
But all may not be lost. In the nineteenth century, as Friedrich Nietzsche fam-
ously said, ‘God is dead’. Recently another cultural guru, Bruno Latour, has written
of the ‘erased’ God of modernity.25 Putting the two together, we might devise the
plausible view that what has happened during the past two centuries is that a con-
tinuing lip-service to the notion of God has gone along with the removal from that

22
Kusukawa (1995).
23
Ibid., pp. 134–144.
24
Cf. ibid., p. 188. On Kepler and physical astronomy in relation to the Lutheran pedagogical tra-
dition, see Barker and Goldstein (1994).
25
From Nietzsche’s The Gay Science we move to Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern
(Latour, 1993, esp. pp. 32–35).
Thoughts on Cunningham’s Thesis 385

concept of any practical content: God has been made so distant as to be irrelevant.26
Perhaps by taking advantage of this perspective, Cunningham’s thesis could be
revised in the following way.
Pre-nineteenth-century European natural philosophy was indeed about God, in
the sense of His being its transcendental reference point. Subsequently, the
enterprise that emerged in the nineteenth century and wore the name ‘science’ had
either God or else a functionally equivalent ‘Nature’ as its reference point. The
difference between the two lay in how the notion of God was related to the notion
of Nature. The God of science, when there has been one, becomes in the nineteenth
century inoperative—perhaps that might be seen as a hallmark of science. In the
1840s, God could still underpin Joule’s metaphysical convictions relating to the
conservation of ‘force’, but Joule’s kind of argument had become largely unusable
in a scientific paper or scientific forum much later in the century—however pious
the scientist and his audience might have been in private life, or in popular lectures.
In short, science became a secular endeavor. This is, I suggest, the best way of
expressing Cunningham’s insight. On the one hand, natural philosophy was indeed
about God in some way or another; but those ways were so multifarious that this
assertion will not always get us very far. On the other hand, by saying that the
story is different for the enterprise that comes to be called ‘science’, questions
emerge concerning the new secularization and the fortunes of the notion of Nature
that are of great historical significance.
In other words, Cunningham may have made a tactical error in setting up ‘natural
philosophy’ and ‘science’ as if they were essentially distinct natural kinds. He is
nonetheless getting at something important in trying to find a way of expressing
the idea that the concern with God so often found in early-modern natural philo-
sophy was not just a matter of contingency. Perhaps the best heuristic lesson for
the historian of science to take from this is that, in examining early-modern knowl-
edge of nature, it may be wise to start with God rather than simply waiting for
Him to turn up.

Acknowledgements—I would like to thank all those who participated in discussion of the talk on which
this article is based at a session on early-modern science and religion at the 1997 History of Science
Society meeting; I also thank Ted Davis for his valuable comments on the original manuscript.

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386 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

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