I’m enjoying Brad S. Gregory’s excellent new book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Gregory demonstrates how the metaphysical revolution of late scholasticism — nominalism, voluntarism, and the univocity of being — influenced the broader culture at the time of the Reformation, including through the Reformation itself. With respect to religion and science, Gregory notes that
the alleged incompatibility of science and religion derives not from science but in the first instance from a seemingly arcane metaphysical presupposition of some medieval scholastic thinkers. Yet it would be misleading to attribute it exclusively to the ideas of intellectual elites. Their views reinforced what would seem to be the general influence of linguistic grammar on conceptions of God, regardless of the historical period in question. Few things are as difficult as keeping clear about the distinction between God and creation as understood in traditional Christianity, and hence few things are as intuitive as unself-consciously regarding God as a quasi-spatial part within the whole of reality. Despite their formal, grammatical similarity, ‘the book is on the table’ and ‘God is in heaven’ are not comparable statements in Christian metaphysics. But beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, influential thinkers reinforced the default tendency in discourse about God and in effect made them comparable.
[T]he widespread acceptance of a new metaphysics set the stage for conceptions in modern science about the mutual exclusivity of natural causality and transcendent, divine presence.
Great stuff.