Evangelicals and the Rise of Science
The evangelical devotional attitude passed over into their view of the natural world as radiant with God’s presence. The God of nature and grace invited a response of “wonder, love, and praise”; this led them to perceive God as immediately present in the material world revealed by Newtonian science and described by mechanical philosophy. This is evident in John Wesley’s multifaceted interaction with science as a popular disseminator of natural knowledge, and Jonathan Edwards’s probing of the meaning of the Newtonian postulates. The attitude of worship, recalling the older “harmony of all knowledge,” was manifest especially in the Wesleyan and Edwardsian view of the spiritual senses and their profound rejection of dualism. In Charles Wesley’s poetry too we witness a devout response to the Holy Spirit’s presence in the material world. Instead of reflecting the reductionist “quantifying spirit” of the age, he responded to the world described by science with a unified sensibility.