Noo is noo come. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at www. History of Philosophy. net. Today's episode The Good Book Philosophy of Nature.

The Faithfulness of Nature to its original laws of motion, the continuance of all things as they were from the beginning of the creation,

awaken a considerate mind into a quick and lively sense of the depth thereof. There is no blemish in the Book of Nature. God never saw

it necessary as upon mature thoughts to correct and amend anything in this great volume of the

creation since the first volume thereof.

These words were written in the middle of the 17th century by the Protestant English theologian John Spencer.

Spencer's jest seems to fit his age at the dawn of the Enlightenment.

God does not intervene capriciously in the world, but has made nature perfect and unchanging.

And Spencer's polemic had contemporary political relevance.

He was arguing against those who invoked supposedly miraculous occurrences or prodigies as signs of God's

displeasure with the English government.

Yet that quotation would also be right at home in the 12th century, a time when intellectuals likewise

spoke of an unblemished book of nature.

Hugh of St Victor, for instance, remarked that the whole of the sensible world is, like a book written by the finger of God.

The metaphor goes back to antiquity and can be found in several works by Augustine.

It was the beginning of a long-running tradition, according to which the Bible

is not the only good book sent by God. Nature is another revelation of God's providential

will, so it behooves the thoughtful question to study it by undertaking

what we would call science and what the medievals, and for that matter John Spencer, called

natural philosophy.

This was a part of intellectual life from the very beginnings of the medieval age.

...