Abstract
By the eighteenth century few educated people would have regarded explanations that appealed to the activities of vital spirits as anything more than metaphorical, but it did not follow that mechanism and materialism were generally held to give an adequate account of nature. It was still believed that God had a direct interest in His Creation even though human beings might best seek explanations in terms of material and efficient causes. Most British natural philosophers were sincere Christians and though many were nonconformists and would not subscribe to the tenets of the Church of England, they did not doubt the basic Christian doctrines of redemption and salvation granted by a benevolent deity. By the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, French philosophers were unlikely to be Christians but the majority were still deists and believed in some higher power which ruled the cosmos.
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Notes and References
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There are some quotations and comments in Jennifer Trusted, Physics and Metaphysics: Theories of Space and Time, Routledge, London, 1991, pp. 117–18.
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© 2003 Jennifer Trusted
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Trusted, J. (2003). Arguments and Counter-arguments: The Creation. In: Beliefs and Biology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597679_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597679_5
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