Divine Voluntarism and the Origins of Scientific Naturalism

Peter Harrison (University of Queensland)

On the face of it, no positions could be further apart than theological voluntarism and scientific naturalism. Voluntarists hold that the universe is radically dependent upon the divine will. In the causal realm this position tends towards an occasionalism in which every ‘natural’ event is directly caused by divine volitions. Scientific naturalism, in its most straightforward sense, denies the existence of supernatural entities and powers, and hence posits the impossibility of anything like direct divine action in the universe. In this paper I suggest that these positions are not a radically opposed as it might seem, and that modern scientific naturalism is in fact the direct historical descendent of early modern voluntarism.