PHYSICOTHEOLOGY

"Physicotheology" is the aspect of natural theology that seeks to prove the existence and attributes of God from the evidence of purpose and design in the physical universe. The argument is very ancient, but it is from the Greeks that its medieval and modern forms principally spring. Socrates revolted against the materialist tendencies of earlier philosophers, and his pupil Plato sought to show that the order and harmony exhibited in the world sprang from the action of mind. Plato argued that since matter cannot move itself, motion is evidence of the presence of mind in nature. All the activity and change in the world have their origin in a supreme mind that moves itself and creates subordinate souls or gods, the heavenly bodies. The outer sphere of the universe is set in motion by the direct action of the changeless, transcendent God. Aristotle expounded more emphatically a teleological or purposive view of nature in which the members of the hierarchy of natural classes in the universe seek to realize their beings according to their stations. This perspective presupposes a rational design, a universal aspiration to fulfillment, and in one passage Aristotle describes God as the perfect being whom all things desire.

The theological aspects of Greek views of nature passed into later science and were readily translated into Christian thought. The animistic view of natural knowledge may be seen in the work of Galen (second century), for whom the processes of the human body are divinely planned. During the earlier medieval period the natural world appeared to the eye of faith to be a scene of symbols and ciphers veiling moral and spiritual doctrines. Later medieval philosophers were fond of discerning marks of providential direction in the operations of nature, and Thomas Aquinas rests one of his proofs of the existence of God upon the cooperation of all types of natural objects to make the order of the world and the pointing of that order to an intelligent author who devised it. There was abundant recourse to this argument during the later Middle Ages.

Seventeenth Century

The golden age of the Argument from Design was the two centuries following the rise of science in the seventeenth century, and it took place principally in England. The new philosophy of nature abandoned belief in the intrinsic teleology of physical objects. In place of the analogy with a creator of living organisms or an artist creating works of beauty it substituted the analogy of an inventor and manufacturer of elaborate machines. The new scientists combined faith in the sovereignty of God in nature and belief in the mechanistic bases of phenomena by conceiving the deity as the skillful contriver of instruments, a consummate engineer.

In England the doctrine was promoted by two trends of thought, the Baconian gospel of controlled observation and the revival of Greek atomism. The Baconian method inspired groups of inquirers in London and Oxford to collect a mass of detailed information in which they saw the confirmation of their religious faith; and it was the descriptions of the zoologists and botanists, such as Nehemiah Grew and Francis Willoughby, that strikingly illustrated the marvelous skill of the Creator. The second doctrine, the atomic, or corpuscular, theory of matter, incurred charges of materialism and atheism from moralists because of its association with Epicurean atomism, and in order to divide themselves from these imputations the virtuosi were intent on attaching theological conceptions to the elements of the material world. They were also acutely sensitive to the materialist dangers in the dualist philosophy of René Descartes. Neither their religion, which formed the frame of all their thought, nor their reason, which saw the marks of purpose and planning in nature, allowed them to accept the idea that the world originated in the chance combination of material atoms. Ralph Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), spoke for all the experimental philosophers when he argued at length that greater perfections and higher degrees of being cannot possibly arise out of senseless matter. The ancient metaphysics of cause, securely rooted in Christian theology, precluded any doctrine of natural evolution, and it is interesting to observe that when writers on biology mentioned the hypothesis that creatures have been produced by "millions of trials," as did John Ray, the hypothesis was dismissed with scorn. Species had been finally and completely created. There was no conceivable alternative to the Argument from Design.

robert boyle

The Argument from Design was expounded with eloquence by Robert Boyle (1627–1691). In his multifarious researches he was concerned with the evidence of benevolent and ingenious contrivance in nature and found on all sides "curious and excellent tokens and effects of divine artifice." But first we may notice the way in which he associated the atomic view of matter with supernatural power. In embracing the corpuscular or mechanical philosophy, he writes, he is far from supposing with the Epicureans that atoms accidentally meeting in an infinite vacuum were able by themselves to produce a world and all its phenomena. The philosophy he pleads for teaches that in the beginning God gave motion to matter and so guided the motions of its parts as to "contrive them into the world he designed they should compose," establishing those rules of motion that we call the laws of nature (The Excellence and Grounds of the Mechanical Philosophy, 1674). In The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666) he explains that the diversity of bodies must arise from motion and that motion in the beginning was from God, for it is not inherent in matter.

In the realm of animate nature Boyle points to numerous instances of ingenious design, such as the human eye, and he constantly speaks of organisms as engines or machines. For him an animal as a whole is an engine, and each part of it is a subordinate engine excellently fitted for some subordinate use. Here he reverts to a famous analogy that in a simpler context goes back to Cicero and even to Xenophon, the analogy of organisms and the world with clocks and watches. In Boyle's day, clocks were the most complex examples of machines available for comparison, and he takes a celebrated clock as a model of the machine of the world, the cathedral clock at Strasbourg, in which "the several pieces making up that curious Engine are so fram'd and adapted, and are put into such motion, as though the numerous wheels and other parts of it knew and were concerned to do its Duty" (The Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, 1663). The popularity of the analogy between a watchmaker and the author of nature in the following age issued largely from the writings of Boyle.

robert hooke

During the early years of the Royal Society proofs of design multiplied. Robert Hooke's Micrographia (London, 1665) disclosed the astonishing beauty and ingenuity of the minute creatures revealed by the microscope, and in his Cutlerian lectures he spoke of the divine providence that in the eye "has so disposed, ordered, adapted, and empowered each part so to operate as to produce the wonderful effects which we see."

john ray

Before the end of the century there appeared treatises by the greatest zoologist of the age that were wholly devoted to the evidences in nature of the existence of God. John Ray's The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation was first published in London in 1691, enlarged in three later editions before Ray's death in 1705, and reprinted more than twenty times by 1846. In the preface he declares that his discourse will serve to demonstrate the existence of the Deity and illustrate his principal attributes, his infinite power and wisdom. He proceeds to show the futility of attributing the world to the operation of chance events; it manifests all the marks of deliberate creation. Inanimate bodies are reviewed in order, the system of the stars and their planets, and the services performed for animals and man by water, air, fire, meteors, rain, and winds. Passing to regions of life, he ascends through the vegetable and animal kingdoms, discovering everywhere a complex arrangement of parts that contribute to the welfare of the plant or animal and to the uses of man.

Ray was too close an observer of nature to accept the crude doctrine that organisms are complex machines constructed by a divine watchmaker. His physicotheology borrowed from Cudworth the theory of plastic nature or vital force by which the growth, adaptation, and instinctive activities of living creatures are directed. This plastic virtue acts sympathetically, without reason, informing the movements of material bodies. Ray therefore diluted his physicotheology with an immaterial energy, a form of animism. But the plastic nature is nonetheless a subordinate instrument of divine providence, although it transcends the operations of local motion. Its relative independence of the immediate direction of God allowed Ray to meet a cardinal difficulty in the Argument from Design; he could accept the aberrations of nature without making the Deity responsible for them. Faced with this problem, Boyle has preserved his mechanistic view of creation by asserting that the irregularities we find in nature may serve ends that lie concealed in God's unsearchable wisdom.

Ray presided over the subsequent course of the Argument from Design, and theologians drew freely on his Wisdom of God in Creation. They studied also his Three Physico-theological Discourses (London, 1692), which supports the biblical narratives of the creation, the deluge, and the final dissolution of the world by arguments from natural philosophy.

isaac newton

The appearance of Isaac Newton's Principia in 1687 had provided the argument with a great deal of new material. Natural theology became absorbed by the cosmology of the Principia, and preachers and poets acclaimed the almighty hand that "poised, impels and rules the steady whole." Newton's great treatises offered at many points notable arguments for the belief that the universe is the work of an intelligent being; indeed, Newton told Richard Bentley that in writing the Principia he had had an eye upon arguments for a belief in a deity, and in the Opticks he declared that the main business of natural philosophy was to deduce causes from effects until we arrive at the First Cause, which cannot be mechanical. In the General Scholium added to the second edition of the Principia and in the Queries of the Latin translation of the Opticks (1706), he set forth the religious conceptions that underlay his mathematical physics of the universe. Why is it, he asks, that all planets move the same way in concentric orbits? What prevents the stars from falling on one another? And, with a glance at the evidence of Boyle and Ray, how, he asks, did the bodies of animals come to be contrived with so much art? Whence, in short, arose all that order and beauty that we see in the world? Does it not appear that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, and omnipresent, who created the world?

For Newton, however, the admirable system of nature was not imposed by the deity upon an infinitely complex material mechanism; immaterial forces were introduced into the heart of the mechanism of nature. Newton asserted the atomic theory of matter in the manner of Boyle: It seemed probable that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, but the forces that cause the particles to cohere and to form larger bodies are immaterial. It is not the business of experimental philosophy to discuss the nature of these forces, but it is clear that they provide the world with its structure and order. They could not have arisen from chaos by the mere laws of nature; the wonderful uniformity of the planetary system, for example, must be the effect of choice and must proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

Other fundamental principles of Newton's system of physics are associated with theology. Absolute space is immovable, homogeneous, indivisible, and distinct from matter; like other thinkers of the time, Newton accorded space some of the attributes of God. He described infinite space as the boundless sensorium of the omnipresent God, whereby he perceives all things. Motion also presupposes a metaphysical agent, for if the motion of moving bodies is derived from the impact of bodies already in motion, some other principle was necessary for putting bodies in motion in the first instance and for conserving the motion of those in movement. The agent must be an all-powerful immaterial being, for pressure is constantly brought to move bodies throughout the universe. Furthermore, the variety of motion is always decreasing because at every impact between bodies, some motion is lost. It must be renewed by an immaterial power.

Eighteenth Century

The natural theology of Newton crowned the Argument from Design, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century the main stock of theory and of evidence on which the argument relied had been provided. Numerous writers repeated and enforced the case pronounced by John Locke that the works of nature everywhere sufficiently evidence a Deity. Prominent among those who vindicated the conclusions of the great men of the seventeenth century were the Boyle lecturers in the series instituted in Boyle's will with the purpose of confuting atheism. The lectures were inaugurated in 1692 by Richard Bentley, a renowned scholar who corresponded with Newton while preparing the lectures. In his letters to Bentley, Newton maintained that there are many features of the universe that cannot be explained in terms of mechanical principles, and he went on to assert that the cause that constructed the planetary system cannot be blind and fortuitous but must be one very skilled in mechanics and geometry. Bentley faithfully reported these opinions in the lectures.

clarke and leibniz

The second Boyle lecturer was the celebrated Samuel Clarke, who delivered the course called "A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God" in 1704, an excellent survey of the accepted picture, with some fresh touches. His famous correspondence with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on natural theology was published in 1717; he probably received advice from Newton in composing his replies, and the letters further reveal Newton's position on such important topics as the divinity of space. But the vital interest of this correspondence is the conflict between Leibniz's conception of nature as mechanical, determined, self-sufficient, and self-perpetuating and the doctrine, defended by Clarke, of God's providential guidance of the world. Leibniz rejected the Newtonian contention that God corrects aberrations of the cosmic order, such as certain inequalities of planetary motions, as a watchmaker cleans and mends a watch—a view that implies that the creation of the system was imperfect and that God is lacking in foresight. Clarke, on his part, accused Leibniz of restricting the liberty of God to act as he will, independently of the laws of nature; indeed, but for his constant intervention, the world would lapse into chaos. The doctrine of supernatural intervention began to recede from the physics of astronomy and found its home before the end of the century in the realms of geology and biology.

joseph butler

The deists, in their war against revelation, caught at the notion that God, having created the world in the distant past, had left it to the action of the laws of nature. Deism provoked a stream of hostile pamphlets and treatises, but orthodox churchmen who opposed deism continued to harp on law, order, and design and the divine artificer. The greatest of these apologists was Bishop Butler. The Analogy of Religion (1736) shows that he had closely studied Newton, but his natural theology rises above that of other writers of the age in its candid recognition of the defects of nature, which he ascribes to our ignorance of God's purposes.

Another Boyle lecturer was William Derham, whose Physico-theology (London, 1713) and Astro-theology (London, 1715) rehearsed the testimony of Ray and of Newton at prodigious length, with some superficial reflections of his own. Many other utterances must be passed over. It is interesting to observe the large number of writers who discussed Clarke's (and Newton's) theology of space.

david hume

In the later years of the eighteenth century, natural theology encountered the penetrating criticism of David Hume, although few scientific theologians were shaken by it. In the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, Hume exploded the logic of the Argument from Design, especially in the form in which it was presented by the disciples of Newton, such as the Scottish mathematician Colin Maclaurin. Hume confronted the analogy between the maker of a machine and the maker of the world with the point that while scientists like Nicolas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei made fruitful use of reasoning by analogy, the associations between cause and effect that provided the material of their arguments were derived from observation. The inference from machines and their makers to a world and its maker is not parallel. Order, arrangement, or the adjustment of final causes is not by itself any proof of design, but only insofar as it has been seen to be produced by design; since we have no experience of the invention and production of a world or of nature, we cannot maintain that an orderly universe must arise from thought or art. For all that we can know a priori, matter may contain the source of order within itself.

Hume attacked this argument by a reductio ad absurdum. If we are confined to speculative, a priori explanations of the origins of the world, they can lead to disturbing conclusions. Some natural philosophers have found nature to resemble an organism, a vegetable or an animal, and its origin ought to be ascribed to generation and vegetation rather than to reason or design. When the analogy with the manufacturers of machines is pressed, we might infer that several deities combine in contriving and framing the world. Hume now introduced fatal evidence against the belief in a benevolent Creator. The curious artifices of nature embitter the life of every living being. "The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children." Faced with these difficulties the defender of traditional doctrine in the Dialogues is compelled to admit that belief in a beneficent Creator of the world cannot be rationally sustained. The sources of such a belief are "temper and education," and the defender of the Argument from Design falls back on utilitarian supports; belief in divine design promotes morality.

Nineteenth Century

Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion failed to confound the deep-seated prepossessions of the natural theologians, nor were they discomposed by the refutation of the Argument from Design by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

william paley

At the turn of the century the argument was revived in William Paley's Natural Theology (1802). It marks the apotheosis of the analogy between a watch and a natural object, opening, in fact, with the discovery of a watch lying on a heath. The instrument must have been made by a being who comprehended its construction and designed its use. If we suppose that the watch contains a mechanism by which it can produce another watch (a supposition that exhibits the deficiency of the mechanical analogy), our admiration of the maker's skill will increase. Paley proceeds to describe numerous examples of natural contrivances, drawn from anatomy, physiology, botany, and entomology: the eyes of fish, animals, and men, the construction of the ear, the webbed feet of water birds, the elongated tongue of the woodpecker, and a catalog of other instances. These marvels of adaptation prove the existence of a superhuman designer, God. As for the suffering that nature displays, Paley attempts to minimize the spectacle; the pain of animals, he thinks, is exaggerated, and their happiness outweighs their pain. Even venomous bites and the preying of one species on another are shown to be necessary features of benevolent design.

bridgewater treatises

Leading men of science in this period duly acknowledged the action of divine providence in natural phenomena. In geology John Playfair and Sir Charles Lyell discovered in the adjustment of the strata of the earth to the accommodation of living creatures clear proofs of divine foresight, and James Prescott Joule saw in the interconvertibility of natural forces evidence of the sovereign will of God. The most sustained defense of the Argument from Design was advanced in the Bridgewater Treatises of the 1830s. Eight men of science, four of whom were clergymen, were chosen to discharge the intentions of the earl of Bridgewater to explore "the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation." These writers added a wealth of new information from astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy to the old theses of Ray and Derham, and they outstripped Paley in showing how all aspects of nature have been thoughtfully arranged for the comfort of the world's inhabitants and especially for man. John Kidd, Regius professor of medicine in the University of Oxford, in On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man (London, 1833); Peter Roget, secretary to the Royal Society, in On Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered in Relation to Natural Theology (London, 1834); and William Buckland, professor of geology at Oxford, in On Geology and Mineralogy (London, 1836), showed how climates have been fitted to the character of the various races of humankind, horses invented for man's transport, minerals for his adornment, and water for his ablutions. In short, much of the reasoning of these writers recalls that of the lady who praised the goodness of the Creator in causing a great river to flow through the main cities of Europe.

Sir Charles Bell, the most distinguished physiologist of the time, in his The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (London, 1833), argues that species were successively created to fit the conditions of geological epochs, changes in their anatomy being deliberately shaped to meet the circumstances of the creatures' life. Man is the center of a magnificent system, which has been prepared for his reception by a succession of revolutions affecting the whole globe, and the strictest relation is established between his intellectual capacities and the material world. The celebrated William Whewell, in his Astronomy and General Physics considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London, 1833), makes play with the ambiguous sense of the word law, a common procedure among scientific theologians of the period, confusing the idea of uniform sequence with the idea of legal and moral law; the confusion arose from Whewell's demonstration that the laws of nature, terrestrial and celestial, provide evidence of selection, design, and goodness. The tenacity and ingenuity with which the scientists vindicated the sovereignty of God over nature are illustrated in Charles Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (London, 1837), where by means of his calculating machine he proves mathematically that miraculous interruptions of scientific laws can be predicted, and that the Being who called the laws into existence must have chosen them with the breaches of continuity in view.

The Bridgewater Treatises marked the final stage of the general confidence of men of science in the old natural theology, although religious thinkers long continued, and still continue, to appeal to it. However, when the treatises appeared the classical form of the Argument from Design was weakening. Whewell had difficulty in understanding the bearing of cosmology upon the support and comfort of sentient creatures, and geologists, led by James Hutton and Lyell, were abandoning the view that there had been sudden changes in the crust of Earth, occasioned by the mediation of God. The catastrophic picture of geological change was yielding to the uniformitarian view in which the laws operating at present could in the slow process of ages have caused all the changes of the past. The range of natural law in time and space was being extended, but the scientists failed to account for the processes by which fresh species had originated, and faith in the periodic agency of the Creator was encouraged.

charles darwin

Charles Darwin opened a notebook on the transmutation of species in 1837, and in the unpublished "Essay on Species" of 1844 he proposed the machinery by which new species might result from the natural selection of fortuitous variations. The notion of special creations, he recorded in his private notebook, explains nothing, and the Essay concluded with a forceful reductio ad absurdum of the Argument from Design. The Origin of Species (1859) brought a wealth of material to substantiate the theory of natural selection in the evolution of species and in adaptations of the organs of living creatures to their circumstances, and it is interesting to see Darwin using the same examples that Paley did to show evidence of contrivances resulting not from purpose but from chance. By abolishing both transcendent and immanent teleology, Darwin undermined the ground on which physicotheology had stood since the seventeenth century. Yet in the last chapter of the Origin Darwin himself assumed a First Cause, though not a beneficent one, and he declared in 1873 that the impossibility of conceiving that this great and wondrous universe arose through chance seemed to him the chief argument for the existence of God. In the end, however, Darwin became a complete agnostic, as is shown most clearly in the unexpurgated edition of his Autobiography (first published in 1958).

j. s. mill

In his Three Essays on Religion, published posthumously in 1874, J. S. Mill allowed some value to the Argument from Design, for the world contains marks of deliberate contrivance, and our experience of such devices is associated with an intelligent mind. Mill here seems to have exposed himself to Hume's objections against arguing from cases within the world to the world as a whole. But Mill recognized many features of the world that are incompatible with beneficent design, and he thought that God may be a limited Being circumscribed by matter and force. Mill maintained that if Darwin's doctrine of evolution were shown to be valid it would greatly weaken the evidence for the work of a divine intelligence in nature.

support from scientists

Other scientists contrived to fit the theory of natural selection into the frame of divine purpose. Samuel Houghton, a fellow of the Royal Society, described expressions of supernatural intentions in his book Principles of Animal Mechanics (London, 1873). Another book that exercised great influence was Professors P. G. Tait and Balfour Stewart's The Unseen Universe (1875), in which it was contended that science upheld the ideas of religion on the transcendental world and its connection with the physical world. A succession of eminent scientists proclaimed that nature is the sacred book of God. The most popular and, it must be added, most muddle-headed work that applied evolution to theistic principles was Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883). The tendency of these scientific writers was to assert the view that Darwin's theory had deepened and widened the belief in the operation of purpose in nature, a view that was characterized as misplaced zeal by those who stood more closely to Darwin's findings.

A number of physicists of the period also employed classical versions of the design argument. The Celestial Engineer was reinstated by O. M. Mitchell in his widely read The Orbs of Heaven (4th ed., London, 1853) at the middle of the century, in which, after the manner of Newton, the deity is invoked to secure the stability of the solar system. It was a notion of the earlier apologists that the identical character of the fundamental materials of the physical world in all parts of the natural order indicated the action of an intelligent maker. The idea had been adopted by Sir John Herschel in his Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), and it was now revived by the greatest mathematical physicist of the age, James Clerk Maxwell. At the meeting of the British Association in 1873, he pointed out that every type of molecule in the universe is identical with every other type; a molecule of hydrogen, whether it occurs in Sirius or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time. No theory of evolution accounts for this identity, for the molecule is not subject to change. Its similarity to other molecules proves that it is the product not of chance but of design. It is a manufactured article, and because they are the work of a Creator, the foundation stones of the material universe remain, whatever catastrophes may occur in the heavens. Even the argument from miracles reappeared in the Natural Theology (London, 1891) of a later mathematical physicist, Sir George Stokes: "If the laws of nature are in accordance with God's will, he who willed them may will their suspension." Stokes assumed that God's action in nature cannot be detected within the laws of physics but by interventions from beyond. Natural Theology embraces the arguments of physicotheology in the period.

A monumental exposition in a modern setting of the Argument from Design appeared in Philosophical Theology (London, 1928–1930) by F. R. Tennant. Recent discussions of the argument have abandoned the old mechanical analogies and have dwelled on the evidence for various types of vitalism in biology. On these views evolution is guided no longer from outside but by directive activities within organisms. In the human psychosocial phase of evolution these self-directed activities point toward moral ends; history becomes the education of humankind in the fulfillment of God's design. Teleological doctrines of this kind have drawn support from philosophers such as Samuel Alexander and A. N. Whitehead, who contend that the universe is informed by an immanent nisus to divinity. Present theological discussions, however, ignore natural theology, and for contemporary linguistic philosophers the Argument from Design possesses no validity whatsoever and is logically and morally indefensible, although it may serve to heighten religious emotions.

See also Alexander, Samuel; Atheism; Atomism; Boyle, Robert; Butler, Joseph; Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Clarke, Samuel; Copernicus, Nicolas; Cudworth, Ralph; Darwin, Charles Robert; Deism; Descartes, René; Epicureanism and the Epicurean School; Galileo Galilei; God, Concepts of; Hume, David; Kant, Immanuel; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Locke, John; Materialism; Matter; Maxwell, James Clerk; Mill, John Stuart; Motion; Motion, A Historical Survey; Newton, Isaac; Paley, William; Plato; Socrates; Teleological Argument for the Existence of God; Tennant, Frederick Robert; Thomas Aquinas, St.; Whewell, William; Whitehead, Alfred North; Xenophon.

Bibliography

In addition to original works mentioned in the text, the reader may consult the following works as guides to the immense literature on the subject.

Adams, Robert. Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation. 12 vols. London, 1833–1836.

Burtt, E. A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925.

Carré, M. H. "The Divine Watchmaker." Rationalist Annual (1965): 83–91.

Clark, Ronald. The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea. New York: Random House, 1984.

Cohen, Bernard, and George Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Newton. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Cohen, I. B., and H. M. Jones, eds. Science before Darwin. London: Deutsch, 1963.

De Beer, Gavin. Charles Darwin. London: Nelson, 1963. Bibliography.

Flew, Antony, and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. New Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York, 1955.

Gillispie, Charles C. Genesis and Geology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951.

Hodge, Jonathan, and Gregory Radick, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Hooykaas, R. Natural Law and Divine Miracle. Leiden: Brill, 1959.

Hurlbutt, R. M., III. Hume, Newton and the Design Argument. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.

Jolley, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Koyré, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957.

LeMahieu, Dan. The Mind of William Paley. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.

Metzger, Henri. Attraction universelle et religion naturelle chez quelques commentateurs anglais de Newton. Paris, 1938.

Mossner, E. C. Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

Norton, David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hume. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

O'Connor, David. Hume on Religion. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Pendelhum, Terence, and Ted Honderich, eds. Butler: The Arguments of the Philosophers. London: Routledge, 1985.

Pilkington, Roger. Robert Boyle; Father of Chemistry. London: Murray, 1959.

Raven, C. E. John Ray. Cambridge, U.K., 1950.

Raven, C. E. Natural Religion and Christian Theology. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1953.

Redwood, John. Reason, Ridicule, and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on Its History, Philosophy and Religious Implications. New York: Routledge, 1989.

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Sargent, Rose. The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Strong, E. W. "Newton and God." Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (2) (April 1951): 147–167.

Westfall, R. S. Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958.

Westfall, Richard. The Life of Isaac Newton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Young, Robert. Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Meyrick H. Carré (1967)

Bibliography updated by Christian B. Miller (2005)