This chapter gives an account of the origins of our present understanding of the natural/supernatural divide, showing how the terminology of the ‘supernatural’ first emerged in the Middle Ages and gradually assumed its modern form between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The attendant ‘isms’—naturalism and supernaturalism—arrive at the end of this period, during the 1800s. The original context for the naturalism/supernaturalism distinction was neither science nor philosophy, but the sphere of biblical criticism. From there it was imported into a scientific context. The nineteenth century also witnessed attempts to reconstruct the history of science with a view to arguing for a long-standing alliance between naturalism and science. A more accurate portrayal of the relevant history shows, to the contrary, that ‘science’ had been consistently aligned with theistic assumptions about the regularities of nature. These regularities were formalised as laws of nature in the seventeenth century, at which time they were understood as divinely authored imperatives to which nature necessarily conformed. In the nineteenth century, what had originally been understood as expressions of the divine will were simply redescribed in purely naturalistic terms by advocates of naturalism. Ironically, they were now claimed to represent evidence against theistic readings of nature.

This chapter considers how the exceptionalism of Western naturalism was given legitimacy through an appeal to narratives of progress. These narratives were indebted to a Protestant model that divided history into two periods—one in which miracles were genuine, followed by another in which they were not. The latter was associated with fraudulent Catholic miracles. Protestants also understood the Reformation as having ushered in an age of light after a period of medieval darkness. Eighteenth-century philosophes generalised and extended this argument, contending that the miracle reports from all historical periods were fraudulent. History could now be divided into an earlier period characterised by a naïve credulity in relation to miracle reports, followed by a more mature phase of history during which there was increasing recognition of the falsity of miracle reports. These same eighteenth-century thinkers also arrogated to themselves the mantle of enlightenment. The progressivist histories characteristic of the early social sciences and endorsed by advocates of scientific naturalism were doubly indebted to religious models since they also drew upon providential or eschatological notions of historical directionality. This raises the question of whether their progressivist philosophy of history is problematically dependent upon covert theistic assumptions.

Since the emergence of modern science in the West (roughly the 17th century), there has been tension between classical theism (there is a God, as envisioned in the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and different forms of naturalism (the denial of theism and the affirmation of a natural world with no souls, no afterlife, no supernatural, and so on). It is argued that the case for recognizing that some nonhuman animals have thoughts and feelings, and are thus morally significant, is stronger from a theistic perspective rather than from the standpoint of naturalism. Special attention is given to upholding a humane, Christian animal ethic.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century science came to be seen as providing the model for seeking truth. This led to a reorganization of all of the disciplines, including theology. We have also come to see the nineteenth century as a period in which a new set of assumptions about science and religion was introduced that continues to shape how we currently view their relationship. The appearance of Draper’s History of the Conflict between Science and Religion in 1874, in which the conflict thesis is fully developed for the first time, is no coincidence. One of the things that historians can do is open up current discussions by showing the paths not taken that were live options at one point, before new assumptions constrained and narrowed thinking. This chapter examines how scientific naturalists like T. H. Huxley attempted to constrain thinking about science and religion, how those constraints began to shape debates, and how major Christian theologians of the period responded to this development, whether through resistance or conformity.

Chapter 4 focuses on Charles Kingsley and Margaret Gatty, two mid-Victorian figures who wrote in multiple genres, including novels, parables, and seashore natural histories. The chapter centers on Kingsley’s novel of English provincial realism Two Years Ago (1857) and Gatty’s Parables of Nature (1855-71), both of which offer a clear discursive bridge between natural history and imaginative fictions at mid-century. Two Years Ago is the lost link between the more canonical provincial realism of Jane Austen’s Emma and those of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. The chapter considers the novel alongside Kingsley’s seashore natural history Glaucus: The Wonders of the Shore (1855). The chapter analyzes a section of Gatty’s Parables from Nature (in which a zoophyte, a seaweed, and a bookworm converse) alongside her British Sea-Weeds (1863). These texts explore the thematic and formal connections between reverent natural history and fiction at mid-century.