William Robertson and Scientific Theism

Abstract

Scholars have hitherto found little to no place for natural philosophy in the intellectual makeup of the Enlightened historian William Robertson, overlooking his significant contacts with that province and its central relevance to the controversy surrounding David Hume and Lord Kames in the 1750s. Here I reexamine Robertson's Situation of the World at the Time of Christ's Appearance (1755) in light of these contexts. I argue that his foundational sermon drew upon the scientific theism of such thinkers as Joseph Butler, Edmund Law, and Colin Maclaurin to counter the autonomous figurations of the universe associated with Hume and Kames, and to develop a historical account of progress based around Christian progressivism rather than the stadial theory of Adam Smith. Robertson conceived of history neither in secular terms nor in those of traditional religion, but sought instead to update the language of providentialism by naturalizing the sacred within a framework of general laws.

Lord Kames's analysis of the natural origins of religion: theEssays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion(1751)

“…The Principles was favourably received by a number of leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, notably Adam Smith and Thomas Reid . Joshua Ehrlich has recently argued that William Robertson's Situation of the World at the Time of Christ's Appearance (1755), one of the first texts of Scottish philosophical history and a leading statement of the historical theology of the Moderate party, was written with an eye to refuting Kames's deistic view of human progress . The prominence of Kames's arguments in the seventeen‐fifties also means it is plausible that Hume had the account of the origin and progress of religion in the Principles in mind when he was writing the Natural History of Religion (1757) in the early part of the decade.…”