Genesis and the Chemical Philosophy: True Christian Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

The creation story in Genesis is a crucial datum in Western thought. From late antiquity to the early modern era, scripture was understood to contain sufficient knowledge about all subjects, from morality to the secrets of nature, making the creation story in Genesis a source for ideas about natural processes and matter. Michael T. Walton's study concentrates on the rise, maturation, and decline of the Genesis-inspired chemical philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The chemical philosophy was a spiritualised approach to nature developed by Paracelsus, Gerhard Dorn, Oswald Croll, Thomas Tymme, Heinrich Khunrath, Robert Fludd, Jean Baptiste van Helmont, and others who undertook a Christian reformulation of chemistry for the purpose of producing useful results, especially efficacious medications. Paracelsus and his heirs believed that observation and laboratory work, if undertaken by true Christians, would reveal God in nature. Although scholars and historians of science will find the book of interest, it is also designed for a general audience. Many readers are aware of the relationship of the Bible and science only through modern controversies about evolution and creationism. Walton provides a timely historical perspective on the formation of science in a religious context. An epilogue reflects on the phenomenon of the late-twentieth-century revival of biblical science.