The Christian Philosopher by Cotton Mather (review)

This splendid edition of Cotton Mather's ambitious natural theology demonstrates one way Puritanism embraced the Enlightenment in Europe. The argument from design, which buttressed natural theology, depended upon empirical observation of natural processes for its assertion that God existed. Like the 'New Science' in Europe, it presumed that like effects proceeded from like causes, Isaac Newton's second rule of reasoning in the Principia. Yet, in its preoccupation with final cause, the argument from design shared more with the Peripatetics than with the experimental philosophers of the seventeenth century. As both Galileo and Bacon warned, teleology too often became tautology. Still, within the swirling cross-currents of the Enlightenment in Britain and eventually in America as well, the logical structures of natural theology often cut across religious boundaries. Orthodox clerics and heterodox pamphleteers often shared fundamental assumptions. Mather's embrace of arguments also invoked by Deists need not compromise his Puritanism.