Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin

The last three decades have witnessed a heated debate of the merits of intelligent design (ID) as a way to understand a number of observable natural phenomena. The present dispute has its roots in a much older discussion: that of natural theology, which has always had as its goal the discernment of design(s) attributable to God in the natural world. Despite its ongoing relevance, natural theology does not have a coherent scholarly history. Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin deftly fills that gap, analysing the argument of design during the period from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to Charles Darwin (1809-82), with a specific focus on those moments at which the rhetorical terms changed significantly.

Stuart Peterfreund is a professor of English at Northeastern University. He is the author of William Blake in a Newtonian World: Argument as Art Argument as Science, Shelley among Others: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language and the editor of the collection Literature and Science: Theory and Practice.