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How Did Seventeenth-Century Colonists View Nature?

A cascade of novelty swept across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. New continents, new peoples, new plants and animals, new religions, and new ideas caused some thinkers to reconsider the basic nature of the world and the place of human beings within it. Building on discoveries made in the sixteenth century by Copernicus and other astronomers, Galileo insisted, for example, that the earth did not rest at the center of the universe, but instead moved around the sun, demoting the globe and its inhabitants from the hub to an outer orbit. Isaac Newton, to take another example, invented the mathematics of bodies in motion—calculus, familiar to students for hundreds of years afterward—and worked out the theory of the invisible force that governs all matter—gravity. These and other scientific advances seemed to some to contradict Christian ideas about God’s sovereignty and much else. Was gravity just another name for God? Or was gravity the way God chose to order creation? Newton and most other seventeenth-century scientists believed that God created gravity and the rest of the natural order much like a watchmaker built a complex mechanical clock. Setting the clock in motion, God then stepped back and allowed the universe to operate by natural laws like gravity that did not need his constant supervision or intervention.

Settlers in seventeenth-century New England and the middle colonies lived thousands of miles and a mental world away from centers of advanced scientific thinking in London, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere in Europe. Seventeenth-century colonists believed they and the earth stood at the center of God’s vision, and that God constantly intervened in the world to express his pleasure or displeasure with humans’ behavior. Violent thunderstorms, destructive winds, hail, floods, droughts, disease epidemics, and much else that we might consider acts of nature, seventeenth-century colonists interpreted instead as signs of God’s anger that people were not living up to his expectations. New Englanders in particular searched for evidence that God was punishing them for falling short of his biblical commandments.

God also sometimes rewarded colonists for obeying his divine laws. A Connecticut man, for example, reported that “we have had of late, great stormes of rain & wind, & sometimes of thunder and lightning, whereby some execution hath been done by the Lord’s holy Hand, though with sparing mercy to mankind.” The storms killed nine oxen, seven hogs, and a dog, but a nearby family of children left alone by their parents suffered “no hurt to any of them, more than amazing fear.” We might believe these children were lucky, having avoided harm by accident or coincidence. But colonists saw the children’s safety as a “remarkable providence,” an instance of God’s gracious protection of his precious loved ones. Puritans welcomed remarkable providences as reassuring evidence of God’s satisfaction that they were fulfilling the obligations of their holy covenant, at least temporarily. When a bolt of lightning stunned another colonist, God’s divine intervention shielded him and he survived unhurt, as did the Bible he was carrying under his arm, which was “left untouched” by the lightning except for the “whole book of Revelation [which] was carried away.”

Colonists stayed alert to any unusual happening: a strange cloud formation; an unusual noise in the night; an ominous comet streaking across the sky; the “monstrous” birth of a calf with two heads or, worse, of a deformed human fetus. Colonists referred to such events as “wonders” that signaled God’s awareness of every detail of their lives. Wonders seemed to be omens of God’s judgment, but it was often difficult to decipher whether an omen meant God was angry or pleased. Overall, signs of an angry, vengeful God seemed to predominate, worrisome evidence to many colonists that they were failing—individually and collectively—to win God’s favor. But another interpretation of wonders worried colonists even more. Maybe that two-headed calf or fiery comet was the work of Satan, whose powers for evil always warred against colonists’ desires to live in godly ways.

Wonders and remarkable providences revealed seventeenth-century colonists’ view of nature as suffused with mysterious, supernatural power. To them, nature was not a Newtonian clock set in motion by a distant God, but an enchanted environment that God and Satan battled over constantly, storm by storm, comet by comet. Colonists could try to align themselves with God and reject Satan, but they could scarcely comprehend, much less alter, the mysterious forces that governed nature and themselves. The orderly, harmonious, and law-abiding nature posited by a Newtonian “watchmaker God” made no sense to seventeenth-century colonists. Instead, God watched and cared about every second of the lives of every creature on earth. They mattered to him, and, if they knew what was good for them, he better matter to them lest their chance for salvation slip away for all eternity.

Questions for Analysis

Summarize the Argument: According to this essay, how did seventeenth-century colonists’ views of nature differ from those of leading European scientists?

Analyze the Evidence: What does the colonial reaction to “wonders and remarkable providences” discussed in this essay reveal about colonists’ view of nature? How might leading European scientists of the era have interpreted these events differently?

Consider the Context: How might life in the seventeenth-century colonies have influenced colonists’ views about nature and themselves? Why might colonists and European scientists have had such contrasting views of God and nature?