Science and Religion
Throughout the ages, science has frequently stood against political and religious forces to describe reality, sometimes with divisive consequences. For example John Wesley (1703–1791), the founder of Methodism and one of the most influential religious figures of the 18th century, was deeply suspicious of the mechanistic worldview precisely because he believed it suppressed legitimate evidence of demonic activity. In his Journal and his A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation (1763), Wesley argued that dismissing apparitions, hauntings, and supernatural occurrences in favour of natural explanations was spiritually dangerous — because it denied the reality of the Devil’s ongoing operations in the world. Wesley famously remarked that abandoning belief in witchcraft amounted to abandoning belief in the Bible, and he directly connected the growth of mechanical philosophy — with its invisible forces and godless natural laws — to the erosion of supernatural belief that he blamed on men like Newton and Locke.
For Wesley and many in the evangelical tradition, the danger of Newtonian gravity specifically was that, by making the cosmos into a self-regulating machine operating through impersonal force, it left no room for active divine and demonic agencies. If everything ran by gravity alone, what was Satan doing? Where was God’s direct providential hand? These questions drove genuine theological anxiety throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the 100 years since, science remains at risk, not only from religious extremism, but the unchecked flow of social networks and their mediation by Artificial Intelligence and government interference. Supercomputing and neural networks use increasingly sophisticated LLMs to facilitate false narratives, create extreme rhetoric, and produce research “findings” that are non-reproducible.