Some New World of Wonders: Levitation, Rationality, and Naturalism with Carlos Eire and Peter Harrison

“If we take a step back and look at the broad historical sweep and the cross cultural sweep, what we in the modern West find ourselves saying is that our predecessors in the early modern and pre-modern and ancient periods were completely mistaken in how they conceived the operations of the world. And more than that, the peoples of many other cultures, similarly, have been mistaken, and that we in the West have uniquely arrived at a true picture of how things really are now. That in itself, I think, is worth thinking about. The likelihood that in the last 200 years one particular culture would have settled on the correct way of understanding reality, on the face of it, it seems improbable. Why would we think that?

I think the reason we think that is because of the successes, the remarkable successes of modern science, and so our naturalistic outlook is, I think, one that's intimately connected with scientific understanding and the undeniable successes of science. So the historical story I attempted to show was…that actually we can decouple science from this naturalistic outlook. That if you look at the long history of Western rational understandings of the natural world, typically they've been predicated on a set of theistic assumptions about regularities in the natural world. And to cut a long story short, naturalism is not intrinsic to a rational scientific understanding. Now, why we think that, then, is partly because we've constructed false narratives about conflicts between science and religion, conflicts between naturalism and supernaturalism.”