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Chapter 3 - Chance, Lots, and Games

from Part II - Expanding the Explanatory Scope of Natural Causality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

Peter N. Jordan
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This chapter looks at chance-based gambling activities like dice and lots. Early modern Protestants thought gambling through such instruments was a widespread societal problem. This chapter analyses competing accounts of how these activities should be understood. It focuses on Thomas Gataker’s deployment of a more naturalistic alternative to the supernaturalistic approaches that some of his fellow Protestants, such as James Balmford, were using to fight back against the problem. Gambling activities may not seem like the other kinds of phenomena in nature studied elsewhere in the book, but to early modern thinkers they involved very similar causal mechanisms to many other kinds of occurrences in nature. They therefore shed considerable light on how Christians at the time thought about and explained many kinds of phenomena in nature.

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Chapter
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Naturalism in the Christian Imagination
Providence and Causality in Early Modern England
, pp. 49 - 71
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Chance, Lots, and Games
  • Peter N. Jordan, University of Oxford
  • Book: Naturalism in the Christian Imagination
  • Online publication: 30 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009211970.005
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  • Chance, Lots, and Games
  • Peter N. Jordan, University of Oxford
  • Book: Naturalism in the Christian Imagination
  • Online publication: 30 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009211970.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Chance, Lots, and Games
  • Peter N. Jordan, University of Oxford
  • Book: Naturalism in the Christian Imagination
  • Online publication: 30 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009211970.005
Available formats
×