Supernatural Polemics: Reason, Wonder, and Science with Carlos Eire & Peter Harrison, Part Two

Peter Harrison and Carlos Eire continue their conversation on how science and scholarship decide what is possible and impossible. It turns out, the very enlightened sounding idea that science explains everything, a view called Scientism, has theological origins in Protestant polemics about supernatural occurences and how they could be rationally assessed. David Hume's breezy dismissal of wonders is more a move of Protestant polemic than an act of secular reason. The conflation of polemical religious positions, like Hume's, with scientific theory and data leads to the tragic and unnecessary undermining of scientific authority. The Enlightenment's tendency to self-subversion is a sign that we need a much deeper historical understanding of science and the Enlighenment, not a rejection of either.

Carlos Eire is a National Book Award Winner, author of They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale University Press), and the Riggs Professor of History and Religion at Yale University. Peter Harrison is author of Some New World: Myths of the Supernatural in the Secular Age (Cambridge University Press), the Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia, and former Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University.