VOLUNTARISM AND EARLY MODERN SCIENCE

The notion that divine voluntarism played a central role in the development of the empirical sciences is now commonplace amongst historians of the early-modern period. In a 1934 issue of Mind, M. B. Foster first proposed a link between the voluntary activity of God, the contingency of the created order, and the requirement that science be empirically based.1 In the 1960s, in what was the first of a number of influential articles on the significance of medieval voluntarism, Francis Oakley also drew attention to the impact of this view of the Deity on the natural and political philosophy characteristic of modernity. At that time Oakley made this observation about certain developments in medieval theology: “This was the beginning of that fruitful stream of voluntarist natural law thinking, which, although it made its way with profound effect into the ethical, political and scientific thought of the modern world, has attracted less than its due share of attention from the historians of these subjects.”2 Since then, a number of historians have taken up Oakley’s challenge and elaborations of his thesis are to found in many authoritative accounts of early modern science.3 So firmly entrenched has this thesis become that in a recent revie