Scientific naturalism, broadly seen as the displacement of supernatural explanation by a strict focus on laws of nature, is the dominant perspective in modern science and popular culture. In light of the remarkable success of the naturalistic explanations of modern science, theological or metaphysical concerns are often discounted as superfluous both in philosophical value and in historical significance. Yet this version of scientific history fails to account for the striking extent to which the natural world has throughout history been understood to rest on theological or metaphysical assumptions that defy naturalistic categories. With this collection of essays by leading historians of science, religion, and philosophy, Peter Harrison and Jon H. Roberts provide a highly compelling alternative history of the sciences and their relation to naturalism that will be of direct relevance to contemporary philosophical arguments about the nature of scientific explanation and the enduring importance of religious belief.

The collection offers valuable ways of rethinking both philosophical and historical aspects of the relationship between science and naturalism. In terms of philosophical considerations, there are a number of essays in which the supposed dichotomy between natural and supernatural – a distinction often unthinkingly assumed in modern discussions – instead gives way to a more complex sense of interrelation. With an expansive account of ancient Greek philosophers who invoked divinities to explain the regularity and complexity of nature, Daryn Lehoux demonstrates that the line between natural and supernatural – and, indeed, the line from naturalism to science – is nowhere near as uncomplicated as conventionally imagined. In a similar vein, Michael Shank argues that the confluence of Aristotelian thought with mediaeval Christian theology resulted in a form of naturalistic explanation based on divine providence, with miraculous events coming into view as God's direct action precisely because they can be distinguished from the regularities implanted by God in nature.

This interdependence of natural and supernatural has implications for the philosophical question of whether naturalism alone might constitute the basis for laws of nature. Harrison, in his contribution to this collection and elsewhere, highlights the paradox that scientific explanation rests on assumptions about the intelligibility and regularity of the universe – assumptions with deep theological (or at least metaphysical) roots. He refers to Descartes's development of the modern conception of laws of nature, in which God is the foundation of all scientific knowledge and the source of the constancy and universality of the laws. Ironically, as Harrison notes, the very success of this divinely inspired naturalistic account of the world permitted subsequent thinkers to dispense altogether with God. After all, if natural laws accurately describe the world, it might be tempting to let them stand as self-sufficient rather than venture further into metaphysical territory. That all natural events are explicable in terms of blind laws of nature is the prevailing view among many contemporary scientists, including Richard Dawkins, whose uncompromising metaphysical naturalism is considered in Michael Ruse's essay on the persistent theological echoes in modern evolutionary thinking.

In terms of historical considerations, this collection provides a useful corrective to a history of naturalism which emerged among nineteenth-century naturalists and continues to distort the way in which science is understood today. On this account, the ancient Greeks invented scientific naturalism, which fell into relative disuse in the Middle Ages, before recovering in the scientific revolution, and reaching full expression in the nineteenth century and beyond. Instead, the essays presented by Harrison and Roberts suggest that naturalism flourished in the Middle Ages, only to be replaced during the scientific revolution with a kind of supernaturalism, such that theology is more properly seen as providing the basis for modern science. Thus, Matthew Stanley's essay highlights a nineteenth-century tradition of theistic physics, whereby thinkers such as John Herschel, William Whewell, and James Clerk Maxwell believed the practice of physics to be necessarily connected with the divine, allowing for the basic concepts of physics to be framed both naturalistically and theistically. The persistence of theology applies not just to the natural order described by physics and biology, but also to medical and anthropological treatments of the human person. In an intriguing contribution on materialism and immortality, Michelle Pfeffer highlights seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Christian thinkers who developed theological and scriptural rationales for thinking of the soul in material terms. In her essay on the ostensibly naturalizing enterprise of anthropology, Constance Clark shows that Christian doctrines such as original sin continue to inform anthropological narratives of human origins and development.

With this timely collection, Harrison and Roberts bring together a stimulating, provocative, and richly interdisciplinary alternative history of the relationship between naturalism and science that is philosophically and theologically sophisticated and follows a coherent and logical trajectory from ancient to mediaeval to modern periods. While some aspects of the contributions by Harrison, Ruse, and John Hedley Brooke will be familiar to those with longstanding interests in the science and religion dialogue, the collection also provides space for emerging scholars such as Pfeffer and Scott Gerard Prinster, whose essay on naturalism and biblical criticism highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century religious thinkers engaged in scientific criticism of biblical texts. Again, the science and religion relationship is reimagined as one of constructive dialogue and even interdependence, rather than of conflict or indifference. As such, this collection will not only encourage a reconsideration of the history of scientific naturalism, but might also prompt philosophers of religion to attend more urgently to the crucial task of engaging with the methodologies and objectives of contemporary science in all of its diversity and complexity.