Reply to Euan Cameron, Carlos Eire, Bruce Gordon, and Alexandra Walsham

It is a great honor to have had these four eminent colleagues, from whom I have learned so much over the years, read and review my book. I am deeply grateful to all of them and gratified that in their respective ways they recognize the book's ambition and importance. This reply will attempt to address their principal criticisms and questions, proceeding chapter by chapter before taking up broader issues. Perhaps it will resemble an initial defense of the book as besieged fortress as imagined by Professor Eire.

The book's first chapter addresses the relationship among metaphysics, conceptions of God, and the natural sciences. It is intended to explain why so many highly educated people today think that the truth claims of revealed religion per se are rendered less plausible in proportion to the explanatory power of the natural sciences. Chapter one argues that this assumption is a function not of scientific findings, but rather derives from a metaphysical view with its origins in the later Middle Ages. This view subtly conflates a transcendent creator God with creation and conceives natural causality and divine influence as mutually exclusive. By subverting the Weberian "disenchantment of the world" as though it followed inevitably from the scientific explanation of natural regularities, the chapter clears an opening for the open-minded to consider the intellectual viability of some religious truth claims in the present. I seek not to show the compatibility of scientific findings with "religion" or "religious truth claims" in any generic sense, but rather their compatibility with certain particular claims about God, for example, or about the possibility of miracles. Not all religious truth claims are alike; natural scientific findings unquestionably falsify many of them. "The real issue is the specific religious truth claims one makes, and how they are to be understood" (69).

This is perhaps the densest and most difficult chapter in the book, so it is unsurprising that not all reviewers have understood the Reformation's place in the story. I deliberately put this chapter first, though, to challenge an all-too-complacent textbook narrative about the relationship between religion and science; recognizing its mistakenness helps to account for intellectually sophisticated present-day religious believers. The argument is not that the Protestant reformers or all subsequent Christian thinkers adopted metaphysical univocity, as Professor Cameron seems to think. My argument turns on neither issue, so I pursue neither. (Even if one follows those Scotus interpreters who regard his univocity as a semantic theory about religious language rather than a metaphysical theory about being, it would only modify the chapter's argument with respect to Scotus.) Nor, as Professor Gordon seems to have inferred, do I claim that Calvin or Reformed Protestants rejected sacramental thinking as such, even though they unquestionably rejected "sacramentality as it was understood in the Roman church" (41, 43; my emphasis here). Yet considered in itself, this rejection probably contributed at most secondarily to the trajectory that led from univocity through deism to atheism (41-43).

The Reformation primarily contributed to this process indirectly through the unending doctrinal controversies that followed in its wake. This unintentionally sidelined explicitly Christian claims about God's relationship to the natural world that derived from claims about divine revelation (40-41, 43, 46-47, 48-49). Deadlocked doctrinal disagreements about these claims left only empirical investigation and/or philosophical speculation as supra-confessional (as opposed to ongoing, theologically confessional) means of investigating and theorizing that relationship. Beginning in the early 1520s, ecclesiastical tradition, authority, scripture, and religious experience were in effect off limits if one hoped to avoid the impasses of theological controversy, as had become apparent by the early 17th century.

Univocal metaphysics inherited from before the Reformation therefore became newly important because it was the dominant framework within which empirical investigation of and philosophical speculation about God's relationship to the natural world would unfold. If one imagined that God belonged to the same causal and conceptual reality as creation; believed that natural causality and supernatural influence were mutually exclusive; and understood that natural regularities could be explained through natural causes...