ABSTRACT
This chapter expresses that although the English natural theologians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were responding to a perceived threat from atheism, their main concerns were ethical rather than purely about the justification of belief. Their worries about atheism cohered with worries about Calvinist voluntarism, and the concerns were not new to the era: they have deep roots in the Platonic tradition. Their conception of reason, and the resulting natural theology, is therefore inherently ethical. The chapter highlights that the shape of English rationalist natural theology was forged by political disputes within the Anglican Church. Concerns about atheism and enthusiasm were a strong unifying bond between Anglicans of all persuasions in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Engaging in natural theology or rejecting it was an inherently political activity. Cudworth's commending of reason was in effect nothing short of a direct critique of the principles behind what was to become High Church Anglican theology.
