Fate, Computation and the End of Christian Time
Reflections on Time and the Enlightenment using:
Hans Blumenberg: ‘Secularization’ and The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time
Michel Serres Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent
As Christian time loosened its grip on Western consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it did so not primarily at the hands of disbelief, but of calculation and computation. The familiar story casts this shift as the secular overthrow of the sacred, reason finally displacing religion. In that telling—often narrated as inevitable—Christian time survives only as an unconscious residue: progress, linear advance, even the End of History smuggled back in as secularized eschatology.
That story is too neat, and too ahistorical.
Hans Blumenberg began dismantling this opposition in the mid–twentieth century. Christianity, he argued, contains no doctrine of progress. Biblical time begins in Genesis and ends in Apocalypse, with no promise that what unfolds between those poles accumulates, improves, or even coheres. The eschaton does not arrive as a progression but by surprise. It comes suddenly, severing what follows from what came before.
Christianity’s more durable legacy, Blumenberg insists, is not progress but meaning. History matters, even if it does not improve. Modern historical consciousness inherits this desire for meaning—after the God who once guaranteed it has been sidelined. The philosophy of history emerges precisely at this threshold, when biblical claims about the end of the world can no longer be read literally and must instead be reinterpreted as allegory:
The seed of the philosophy of history is sown the moment that the biblical claims about the end of the world can no longer withstand a literal reading but must instead by interpreted more or less as allegories. (‘Secularization’, The Blumenberg Reader, 61)
Around the same time, Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield traced a parallel transformation in The Discovery of Time, though from a different angle. Rather than theology, they focused on geology—on the Enlightenment scientists who forced humanity to confront an unsettling realization: ‘the Earth had existed very much longer than had customarily been supposed’ (157).
The threshold that separates the Middle Ages from the Enlightenment is a fundamental change in the human experience of time.
For well more than a millennium, the age of creation hovered around six thousand years, derived from exegetical arithmetic—adding up biblical ages and genealogies. Newton himself dated creation to roughly 4000 BCE. This chronology did not feel cramped so long as historical time was read primarily through humanity’s texts.
What the Enlightenment truly brought about was not simply progress, but temporal expansion. Time stretched outward—forward and backward—beyond the reach of memory, tradition, or scripture. This break could occur only once natural laws were understood as operating over vast durations, and those durations could be calculated.
Geologists did the heavy lifting.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, followed Newton by applying the physics of heating and cooling to the Earth itself. His conclusions were astonishing:
… one finds that the terrestrial globe will have solidified to the centre in 2,905 years approximately, cooled to the point at which one could touch it in 33,911 years approximately, and to the present temperature in 74,047 years approximately.
James Hutton drew the implication with particular clarity. Against Mosaic chronology, geology revealed a depth of time that could not be squared with biblical reckoning:
The Mosaic history places this beginning of man at no great distance…. But this is not the case with regard to the inferior species of animals…. We find in natural history monuments [fossils] which prove that those animals had long existed; and we thus procure a measure for the computation of a period of time extremely remote, though far from being precisely ascertained. (The History of the Earth, 1788, my emphasis)
Once the cosmos is understood as the product of calculable natural laws, biblical calculations break down. More than that, the very experience of time changes. Buffon’s numbers exceed anything multi-generational memory can transmit. When calculation outruns memory, time itself cracks open and elongates.
Duration becomes abstract, stretchable, indifferent to human scale.
What emerges from geology is not a world flipped upside down, but one gradually unraveling. Sacred and secular are not eternally separate kingdoms locked in combat. Rather, secular consciousness somersaults its way out of sacred impasses—carrying its questions forward while inverting their frame.
This metaphor matters. The secular is not a bastard offspring of the sacred, nor its simple negation. The same questions—about history, meaning, and futurity—linger but without the interpretable comfort of a sacred text.
Eventually, humanity finds itself living in a world of natural processes that structure time itself, but could also be understood and controlled with the right knowledge and engineering know how.
Fate and Computation
In the work of Enlightenment geologists, we encounter a decisive turning point in the history of fate—one that reshapes how humans live with contingency in an unpredictable world.
Once human existence is situated within temporal processes shaped by natural rhythms and tempos, calculability becomes control. What can be computed begins to look governable. The events once attributed to fate—war, famine, disease, weather, wildfire, earthquake, population growth, labor productivity—are stripped of divine intention and recast as objects of inquiry.
Inquiry, however, is never neutral. It bends toward mitigation, toward management, toward governability.
To compute nature’s trajectories is already to imagine steering them. Calculation places humanity in the driver’s seat of history, projecting futures in order to adjust them to our ends. Prediction and control collapse into one another.
Michel Serres captured this inversion with characteristic clarity:
The way Prometheus stole stole fire from heaven, we stole prevision from God. The Enlightenment therefore taught us to respect laws, not only the laws whose spirit Montesquieu described or the ones whose legislator Rousseau named and whose contract he defined, but the laws of physics, mechanics and natural history, laws that are regular and allow previsions…. the Enlightenment continued to revere the Father; mastering prevision, the Enlightenment set itself up in its place. (Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent, 25-26, Randolf Burks, translation)
When Thomas Malthus runs his calculations in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), we see this aspiration crystallize. His call for ‘preventive foresight’ is not prophecy but projection. Humanity is urged to model itself forward, to restrain itself in advance, to become calculative enough to become masters of our own fate.
Man himself become a calculator—Homo calculus—just to be worthy of the deed.
Even the Romantic poets belong here. Their reverence for nature intensifies precisely as its rhythms and tempos become intelligible—at the moment when understanding shades into the desire for control.
The Return of Fate
Yet control has a strange aftertaste. Increasingly, it feels less like freedom than enclosure.
When we stare into the flames that erased much of Superior and Louisville, Colorado in a few hours at the end of 2021, where do we draw the lines between, fate, computation, and control?
. . . when human-made materials like these burn, the chemicals released are different from what is emitted when just vegetation burns. The smoke and ash can blow under doors and around windows in nearby homes, bringing in chemicals that stick to walls and other indoor surfaces and continue off-gassing for weeks to months, particularly in warmer temperatures.
See The Return of Fate for a deeper dive into this episode in the history of calculation, control, and contingency.
Here contingency returns, but accelerated. Calculation gives us lives of remarkable predictability—perhaps even the quiet comfort of the mundane. But when things fail, when systems tip, the same infrastructures that promised control amplify the speed and spread of disaster. Fate now travels faster than unaided nature ever could.
Social media is not an exception to this pattern. It is its cultural expression.
As Serres observed, ‘We fear the sciences and technologies doubly: when, continuing the Enlightenment, they eradicate the vagaries of contingency; when, continuing the old vagaries, they eradicate our security. We prefer to trust the accidents of nature, provided, of course, they remain gentle’ (26).
What unsettles us is not calculation itself, but the recognition that it binds us more tightly to the futures it yields.
The Enlightenment did not abolish fate; it relocated responsibility for it—inviting us not to retreat from calculation, but to learn how to live wisely within the futures we now help to shape.
Read more of my essays on Serres.
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