Already in the seventeenth century the sequence of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific revolution led some to speculate about how these ‘dual reformations’ were related. Ever since, various thinkers have posited causal links between them. This lecture will consider a range of such possible connections – the Protestant ‘ethic’, challenges to tradition, new interpretative approaches to scripture and nature, ideas about the earthly vocation, and eschatological ideas that focused on material improvement. It will conclude with a consideration of the ways in which ‘Protestant’ versions of history, in a secularized form, came to be incorporated in Enlightenment stories of progress and ironically became implicated in the construction of science-religion conflict narratives in the nineteenth century.
Peter Harrison is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. He was previously the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. From 2015-21 he was an Australian Laureate Fellow. He has published extensively on the philosophical, scientific and religious thought of the early modern period, and is one of the world’s leading scholars on the historical relations between science and religion.