ABSTRACT
The implications of scientific advance for Christian theology are often reduced to a plausible but simplistic formula: as natural phenomena, formerly explained by the will of a deity, were increasingly understood in mechanistic terms, increasingly brought within the domain of natural laws, so the belief in an active, caring Providence was eroded until the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob became nothing more than a remote clockmaker. On this view, the relationship between Enlightenment philosophy and the so-called “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century is straightforward. Eighteenth-century freethinkers simply drew out the implications of Newtonian science, rejoicing in what human reason had achieved, celebrating the power of new empirical methods, questioning (in the spirit of John Locke) whether there was any privileged route to knowledge either through intuition or revelation. It is a view often substantiated by reference to Voltaire, as keen to popularize Newton’s science as he was to denounce the “priestcraft” of the Catholic clergy. And Voltaire was certainly not alone in preferring the rational deity of the Newtonian universe to the whimsical, interfering deity of the Old Testament who, on Voltaire’s satirical reading, was so bereft of moral sensibility that he had commanded the prophet Ezekiel to eat his barley bread cooked with shit. 1
