ABSTRACT
Calvinists were by far the most enthusiastic writers of the genre of natural theology, in which the author examines the evidence in nature of the existence and attributes of God. In the United States, Reformed Protestants would lay the foundations for the science of ecology. The most important American Puritan-scientist, however, was Cotton Mather, whose work enlisted science for Calvinist orthodoxy against the skeptical Enlightenment. Mather evinced an early interest in science and in college considered a career in medicine before choosing the ministry, as had his father, three uncles, and grandfather. If Calvinists wandered in the woods to commune with the spirit of God while they studied his works, their theology also promoted ecological holism. They looked out on an organismic world, not a mechanistic or clockwork universe. Calvin was certainly no scientist, but his doctrine of an active God in an active creation of mutually interacting parts had profound implications for the work of Reformed scientists.
