Abstract

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there was a close connection between natural philosophy and theology. However, this connection was neither essential nor intrinsic, but was open to discussion and negotiation, and natural theology played an important role in these negotiations. While there is already a great deal of literature concerned with natural theology from two distinct academic disciplines—history of science and history of religion—neither set of literature has adequately grasped the nature of the tradition, leading to conflicting claims about its historical origin. In addition, the close connection between natural and revealed theology evident in the works of orthodox Christians in early modern England has been frequently overlooked. This thesis, then, is a contribution to discussions of the relations between theology and natural philosophy in early modern England. Its main purpose is to develop and test a theoretical model of natural theology, designed to overcome some of the limitations of existing approaches. According to this model, a tradition of natural theology only emerged in England in the seventeenth century, due to the theological and natural philosophical turmoil of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, although it was not without precedents. This tradition of natural theology was apologetically focused, providing arguments in favour of religious doctrines originally derived from revelation. Natural theology was a dynamic discourse, which may be represented by the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, in which resources chosen from natural philosophy and theology were combined and refracted according to the pre-existing views of the practitioner as well as the contextual challenges to which he was responding. By employing a variety of resources from both natural philosophy and theology, natural theology could function as a kind of mediator between these two neighbouring traditions. This model will be tested against a range of historical case studies that represent the moments in the historical trajectory of natural theology at which output of the discourse became more concentrated, due to renewed upheaval within and between theology and natural philosophy.