ABSTRACT
The decay of nature manifested itself in particular in the rugged surface of the Earth, so obvious to any observer. According to the conception of the universe favoured by the Greek school of atomism, there was no room for design, purpose or divine agency. Lucretius spoke of a cosmic deterioration, a theme which can be followed throughout the history of cosmological thought. As Bentley was well aware, the theory of decay could be used apologetically, as an argument for God's creation of the world a finite time ago. Degenerative and dissipative processes were known by natural philosophers many years before the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics. In De aeternitate mundi contra Proclum and a lost treatise entitled De aeternitate mundi contra Aristotelem, John Philoponus, a Christian neo-Platonist philosopher from Alexandria who lived in the sixth century, criticized Aristotle's natural philosophy and sought to replace it with a system in harmony with monotheism.
