Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who found the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, and then had to answer for what they meant for the plain sense of Scripture.

Author index: Galileo Galilei

• Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina — Galileo’s defence of the Copernican opinion against the charge that it contradicts Scripture, written to Christina of Lorraine, mother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1615 — the year before the Congregation of the Index condemned the doctrine. (1 note)

Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Imperial Mathematician, who found the three laws of planetary motion and made the same case about Scripture six years before Galileo.

Author index: Johannes Kepler

• An Abstract of the Introduction upon Mars — The theological part of Kepler’s preface to the Astronomia Nova of 1609, abridged and put into English by Thomas Salusbury and printed with Galileo’s letter to the Grand Duchess. (1 note)

René Descartes

René Descartes (1596–1650), who invented coordinate geometry and set out to rebuild knowledge from what cannot be doubted — and dedicated the result to the Sorbonne’s faculty of theology.

Author index: René Descartes

• A Discourse of a Method — The Discours de la méthode of 1637, in the English of 1649: the story of how Descartes came to doubt everything he had been taught and what he found he could not doubt. (8 notes)
• Six Metaphysical Meditations — The Meditationes de Prima Philosophia of 1641, dedicated to the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne and offered to it as a proof, by natural reason alone, that there is a God and that the mind is distinct from the body. (9 notes)

Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), physician of Norwich, who wrote down his own religion for himself and produced one of the great books of English prose.

Author index: Thomas Browne

• A Letter to a Friend — Upon occasion of the death of his intimate friend — a physician’s account of a patient’s dying, written to the friend who was not there, and ending in a string of counsels on how to live that Browne later worked up into Christian Morals. (1 note)
• Christian Morals — Browne’s last work, found among his papers and printed in 1716 by John Jeffery, Archdeacon of Norwich. (4 notes)
• Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial — Occasioned by some urns dug up in a Norfolk field, and turning, by way of the burial customs of every nation Browne had read of, into a meditation on death, oblivion and the resurrection of the body. (6 notes)
• Religio Medici — The religion of a physician — written about 1635 for Browne’s own use, circulated in manuscript, and printed without his leave in 1642, which forced the authorised edition of the next year. (3 notes)

John Wilkins

John Wilkins (1614–1672), Bishop of Chester and first secretary of the Royal Society, in whose rooms at Oxford the Society began.

Author index: John Wilkins

• A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet — Two books published together in 1640: The Discovery of a New World, arguing that the moon may be a habitable world, and A Discourse Concerning a New Planet, arguing that the earth is one of the planets. (26 notes)
• A Discourse Concerning the Beauty of Providence — Printed in the year of the king’s execution and offered as very seasonable to quiet and support the heart in these times of public confusion. (2 notes)
• A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer — What the gift of prayer is, why it is ascribed to the Spirit, and how far it may be attained by industry — written in the middle of the quarrel over set forms and free prayer, and answering it by teaching the thing itself. (31 notes)
• Ecclesiastes, or a Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching — Wilkins’s handbook for preachers, first printed in 1646 and enlarged in later editions: the method of a sermon, its matter, and its expression, with a long catalogue of the commentators on every book of Scripture and the authors on every head of divinity, which is what the book was chiefly used for. (2 notes)
• Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion — Left unfinished at Wilkins’s death in 1672 and completed for the press by John Tillotson. (28 notes)
• Sermons Preached Before the King at White-Hall — Three sermons Wilkins preached before Charles II in the last years of his life, on the length of days in Wisdom’s right hand, on the whole duty of man, and on the judgement of every secret thing. (5 notes)
• Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions — Fifteen sermons found among Wilkins’s papers and published ten years after his death: on the recompence of reward, on the kingdom of God as righteousness and peace, on adorning the doctrine of God, on wisdom and its companions, on moderation, and two on leaving vengeance to God. (16 notes)

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), mathematician, physicist, and after the night of fire in 1654 the defender of Port-Royal and the author of the unfinished apology.

Author index: Blaise Pascal

• Letters — Pascal’s letters on religion: to his sister Jacqueline in the first months of the family’s conversion; two written with her to their elder sister Gilberte Périer, on the union grace makes between them; the long letter to the Périers on their father’s death, which the early editions printed as Thoughts upon Death… (16 notes)
• Minor Works — The religious pieces among Pascal’s shorter writings: the Prayer to Ask of God the Proper Use of Sickness; On the Conversion of the Sinner, which some attribute to his sister; the comparison of the Christians of the early church with those of his own day; three discourses to a young nobleman on the condition of… (6 notes)
• Pensées — The notes for an apology for the Christian religion that Pascal did not live to write, found after his death in 1662 in bundles pinned together and printed by Port-Royal eight years later. (14 notes)
• The Memorial — The record of the night of 23 November 1654, written on a scrap of paper and copied on to parchment, which Pascal kept sewn into the lining of his coat for the rest of his life and which a servant found there after his death. (1 note)
• The Provincial Letters — Eighteen letters written anonymously and published one at a time during the Sorbonne’s proceedings against Antoine Arnauld: the first three defend the Jansenists of Port-Royal, and the rest turn on the moral theology of the Jesuits — probabilism, directing the intention, mental reservation — largely by the method of… (20 notes)

Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle (1627–1691), founding fellow of the Royal Society and the father of chemistry, who wrote as much theology as natural philosophy and endowed a lecture to go on arguing after his death.

Author index: Robert Boyle

• A Discourse of Things Above Reason — A dialogue between four speakers on whether a philosopher may admit that some things are above reason, and on the difference between a doctrine reason cannot reach and one it can refute. (9 notes)
• A Disquisition About the Final Causes of Natural Things — Whether, and with what caution, a naturalist may argue from the use of a thing to the end it was made for. (27 notes)
• A Free Discourse Against Customary Swearing — Written in Boyle’s twenties and published in the year of his death by John Williams. (26 notes)
• A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature — Boyle’s attack on the word Nature itself, as it was used by the Aristotelians: a wise and provident being standing between God and the world, which abhors a vacuum and does nothing in vain. (10 notes)
• Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects — Meditations made out of whatever happened to be in front of him, with the discourse defending the practice printed before them. (97 notes)
• Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God — On the distance between what God is and what a mind can hold of him, argued from the two attributes a natural philosopher meets first: his wisdom and his power. (3 notes)
• Seraphic Love — Boyle’s first published book, written at twenty-one as a letter to a friend disappointed in love, and the work he was best known for in his own lifetime — it went through six editions. (4 notes)
• Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures — Boyle’s defence of the Bible’s style, written in his twenties as part of a longer essay on the Scriptures and addressed to a friend he calls Theophilus. (11 notes)
• Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy — The first part of the Usefulness — five essays addressed to Pyrophilus on the use of natural philosophy to the mind of man: that the study of nature leads to the knowledge and worship of its Author, that it is a kind of religious service, and, in the long digression of the fourth essay, against those who would… (7 notes)
• The Christian Virtuoso — Boyle’s answer to the charge that experimental philosophy makes men irreligious: that it does the opposite, since the man who has looked hardest at the contrivance of things is the last to think them accidental. (14 notes)
• The Excellency of Theology — Written in 1665 during the plague and printed nine years later. (15 notes)
• The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus — Written in Boyle’s early twenties and published forty years later at the urging of friends: the martyrdom under Diocletian of Theodora of Antioch, sentenced to a brothel for refusing to sacrifice, and of the Christian soldier Didymus who changed clothes with her to get her out and died in her place. (13 notes)
• The Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion — Published under the initials T.E., a lay-man. (14 notes)

John Ray

John Ray (1627–1705), the father of English natural history, whose divinity lectures at Trinity became the founding book of English natural theology.

Author index: John Ray

• A Persuasive to a Holy Life — Ray’s last book, and the only one of his that is straightforwardly practical divinity: that a holy life is also the happy one, argued through every good men actually pursue — health, safety, riches, pleasure, honour, friends — and then through the happiness of the inward man and of the life to come. (14 notes)
• The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation — The book that made natural theology an English habit of mind, grown out of Ray’s divinity lectures in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. (12 notes)
• Three Physico-Theological Discourses — Three discourses on the earth’s own history: the creation of the world, the general deluge — with the question of what fossils are, which Ray was among the first to answer correctly — and the dissolution of the world by fire. (26 notes)

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who gave the world one mathematics for the apple and the moon, and spent as long again on the prophets.

Author index: Isaac Newton

• Four Letters to Dr Bentley — Newton’s answers to Richard Bentley, who was preparing the first Boyle Lectures, A Confutation of Atheism, and wrote to ask how far the Principia could be used in them. (4 notes)
• Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John — Newton spent more of his life on prophecy and chronology than on optics, and left this unpublished at his death; his nephew Benjamin Smith saw it through the press in 1733. (18 notes)
• Queries 28 and 31 of the Opticks — The two of the thirty-one questions closing the Opticks in which Newton follows natural philosophy to its end in God. (2 notes)
• The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended — Published the year after Newton’s death by John Conduitt, his nephew by marriage. (10 notes)
• The General Scholium — The close of the Principia, added to its second edition in 1713: that this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being, and what can and cannot be said of that Being from the frame of the world. (1 note)
• Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture — An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, in a Letter to a Friend: Newton’s case, argued from the Fathers, the councils, the ancient versions and the manuscripts, that the testimony of the Three in Heaven (1 John v. (3 notes)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), co-inventor of the calculus, who coined the word theodicy and wrote the book.

Author index: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

• Discourse on Metaphysics — Leibniz’s first full statement of his system, sent in outline to Arnauld in 1686: that God acts in the most perfect way, that each substance expresses the whole universe, and that minds are citizens of the City of God. (1 note)
• The Monadology — The ninety numbered propositions in which Leibniz summed up his philosophy two years before his death, ending with God as the monarch of the City of spirits. (1 note)
• The Principles of Nature and of Grace — The companion to the Monadology, written the same year: from the Monads through the principle of sufficient reason to God, the love of God, and the perpetual progress of the blessed. (1 note)
• Theodicy — The only book Leibniz published in his lifetime, written against Pierre Bayle’s argument that the evil in the world cannot be reconciled with a God at once good and almighty. (9 notes)