The Calvinist International
In the fictional story of the Fall into Modernity (coming soon as a Netflix Original Series), Sir Francis Bacon sometimes plays the role of a big baddie for banishing formal and final causality from natural philosophy (i.e. science; what he calls “physic”). Never mind the benefits this has for, you know, the progress of ACTUAL […]
Many of John Calvin’s references to Aristotelian cosmology occur during his later years, representing his mature theology. Christopher Kaiser has shown that Calvin viewed the universe through the lens of Aristotelian natural philosophy. He accepted such ideas as the concept of natural place (the earth is the center of the spheres due to its weight), […]
Edward Reynolds, in the Preface to his A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1647) gives a brief apology for the use of pagan learning and natural knowledge in this Christian treatise. Reynolds was a puritan preacher, sometime bishop of Norwich, but a conformist Presbyterian by persuasion. He was preacher at […]
Reflecting upon the ongoing conversation with Feser, Hart, and others, I remembered my own little essay on natural law. It does have one simple mistake: I didn’t really explain Aquinas’ taxonomy of laws correctly. Otherwise, I do think it gets to the basic issues. The “old” natural law position does not deny the religious nature […]