ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a suggestion as to why the ideas in seventeenth-century medicine were disregarded in the otherwise comprehensive anti-atheistic literature of that time. It argues that the unusual interest shown in current medical theorizing by Henry More and Ralph Cudworth should alert us to the fact that their concerns were somewhat different from those of their fellow theologians. The Cambridge Platonists were concerned not only to refute atheism but also to reject the dominant Calvinistic emphasis on voluntarist theology. Natural theology was developed, therefore, in order to prove the existence and attributes of God and the immortality of human souls by recourse only to reason and the phenomena of the creation. Proofs of the immortality of the soul were held to be crucially important elements in this natural theology since the fear of post-mortem punishments was regarded as the only guarantee of morality and, therefore, of social and political stability.
