Sveinbjorn Thordarson

'Odd Alliances' - The Journal of the Oxford University History Society (JOUHS) Colloquium 2009

Sveinbjorn Thordarson received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Iceland in 2006. After studying philosophy and the history of science at the London School of Economics 2006-2007, he completed an MSc in 18th-century intellectual history at the University of Edinburgh in 2008. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on teleology and the metaphysics of nature in Enlightenment thought.

God and the Machine Universe: The Alliance of Christianity and Mechanistic Philosophy in 17th-century England

While scholars have paid much attention to the Darwinian controversies of 19th-century England, the roots of the robust and long-standing alliance of theology and mechanism which Darwin's theory of evolution challenged has received much less attention. The second half of the seventeenth century saw the seminal development of this alliance, during which important philosophical efforts were made by Robert Boyle, Walter Charleton and other English natural philosophers to accommodate Christian theology within a framework of mechanistic and empirical science. These efforts gave birth to an uneasy alliance between English Christianity and the mechanistic philosophy expounded by practitioners of experimental science -- an alliance which would largely hold throughout most of the eighteenth century. I trace the development of this peculiarly English phenomenon and argue that natural science subtly altered and ultimately undermined the Christianity of English intellectuals by shifting the basis of their theology from a priori reasoning to a dependency on the conclusions of empricial investigation.