This chapter explores the implications of the new status of belief by reconsidering traditional arguments for the existence of God. If disbelief in the supernatural was not a live option before the appearance of modern secularity, what was the point of articulating proofs of God’s existence? This chapter shows that the so-called classical proofs performed a very different function to the one that they were later to assume, being more akin to spiritual exercises than logical arguments constructed from neutral premises. Crucially, one of the central ‘proofs’—that based on universal consensus—involved an appeal to the ubiquity and universality of religious belief. The demise of this ‘argument’ in the early modern period signalled a major change in how belief in the supernatural came to be understood, indicating that the burden of proof was shifting from unbelievers to believers. This was accompanied by a new conception of natural theology, understood as an enterprise that could provide support for religious belief on rational grounds alone. The changing status of natural theology and proofs for God’s existence correlated directly with the appearance of a new notion of belief and the requirements for its justification.

In addition to the ‘architectonic’ sense in which the faculty of judgment allows a transition from understanding to practical reason, Kant argued for a logical (or teleological) and an aesthetic transition. In the latter, the pleasure of taste is assigned the role of promoting, moral feeling. Although this is a standard 18th-century view, it takes on a deeper significance against the background of Kant’s moral philosophy after 1785. In later works, Kant is explicit that a being that possesses theoretical reason and the ability to set itself purposes could still be a merely natural being; a special (‘aesthetic’) receptivity for moral feeling must be added to those capacities in order to qualify such a being as one with practical reason. I suggest that Kant’s realization of this pivotal role played by moral feeling is the reason for his emphasis on the importance of any aesthetic preparation that can promote moral feeling.

The novelty in Kant’s conception of the highest good in the third Critique is not limited to its form, namely, that of an ethical community. Kant refers to his earlier conception of the highest good as having a reality only insofar as it is a necessary object for us. However, in the third Critique, the highest good must be also the end of nature. I argue in this chapter that it is the role of reflective judgment to represent nature as aiming toward the realization of the highest good in the world, so that it is no longer sufficient that we intellectually “conceive” its possibility but that we can also perceive it as furthered by nature. In this way, the highest good and the Idea of God as the object of moral Glaube receive a special kind of realism, which I will refer to as “moral image realism” (MIR).

This chapter examines natural philosophy in the early modern period (roughly 1600-1800), focusing on three areas: 1) the so-called mechanisation of nature, which presents a rival understanding of the natural order to that of medieval Aristotelianism; 2), the rise of experiment and laws of nature as tools for the knowledge of nature; 3) the emergence of new theologies of nature and new methods of biblical interpretation, which develop in concert with wider changes in natural philosophy. The chapter demonstrates how early modern thinkers inherit and transform the natural philosophy of the medieval Latin tradition, producing new philosophical and theological accounts of nature that are sufficiently comprehensive to rival the Christian-Aristotelian framework of the Middle Ages.

Telemann’s numerous compositions for the Christmas season reflect important changes in the understanding and celebration of the feast day throughout his prolific career. The early Christmas cantatas are influenced by an understanding of the feast that combined Lutheran mysticism with a language emphasizing the personal relationship between Christ and the believer through the physical/corporeal as well as emotional concepts: love, heart, desire, and so on. Telemann transferred this language to musical compositions featuring highly emotional melodic lines, often employing musical topi (such as sigh figures) that were familiar from pietist songs and operatic love arias. In his later works, especially in the cantata Die Hirten bei der Krippe to a text by Ramler, the focus shifts from personal emotionality to a divine encounter in nature. The pastoral sphere, influenced by the physico-theology of the time, replaces love arias from the earlier works. This chapter traces developments both in Telemann’s music and in theological discourse around the middle of the eighteenth century. It is not the understanding of Christmas that changes but rather the communicative function of emotion and affect both transforms and shifts throughout Telemann’s lifetime.

Telemann’s 1756 vocal composition Der grosse Name Gottes, commonly called Donner-Ode, is based on the poetic paraphrase of Psalms 8 and 29 by J. A. Cramer. Both the poetry and Telemann’s music convey the sense of the sublime that was a prominent theme in late eighteenth-century aesthetics. Whether or not the work was a response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, its theology is in accord with an orthodox Lutheran belief in God’s providence and omnipotence. While it was written late in Telemann’s life, the ideas are continuous with the early influence of physico-theologians, who regarded the natural world as part of a divine plan in which even destructive events such as storms and earthquakes had a benevolent purpose. Hamburg was a strong center for physico-theology in the early eighteenth century, and Telemann was personally connected with several adherents of this direction of thought, among whom the best known is Barthold Heinrich Brockes.

Natural philosophy was often seen as a means of reading the “Book of Nature” written by God’s creative act, and therefore must be seen against the background of religion. Older commentary has examined how post-Reformation confessional divides affected the moral and spiritual project of “Physico-Theology.” Some intellectual historians have suggested that there was something that could be described as the confessionalization of early modern physics. Other intellectual historians have argued that the homogenizing pressure of confessionalization was much less successful, both in popular culture and in natural philosophy. This chapter aims to advance these controversies by contrasting general confessionalization claims with case studies that examine whether and how particular contents of natural philosophy were shaped by theological concerns specific to different Christian denominations. These case studies analyze the influence theories of special providence had on cosmology, the problems that doctrines of the Eucharist raised for matter theories, the persistence of moral interpretations of natural particulars in natural histories, and the methodological foundations of eclectic natural philosophies. The upshot of these considerations is that confessionalization led to a much lower degree of homogeneity in natural philosophy than has been supposed.

Scholars have often cast puritans as doom-mongers fixated on an imminent and retributive apocalypse, but they were interested in the creation of the next world as well as in the destruction of this one. Writing about the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ’s saints prophesied in the book of Revelation, puritan authors evaluated the political and material means through which a new, improved earth could and would take shape. Since the Congregationalist church in New England did not have an official position on the subject, the writers discussed in this chapter (Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, and Samuel Sewall) could use the millennium to explore the latest thinking about a broad range of topics, including the relationship between the soul and the body, the impact of the Fall on the planet’s orbit, and the geopolitics of global peace. Giving this speculative propensity its due corrects the modern tendency to see millennialism as an intellectual dead-end. While the authors in question believed that their predictions would (broadly) come true, their writings performed a function comparable to that fulfilled by the modern genre of science fiction: interrogating the limits of present-day life through visions of possible futures.

This chapter explores a crucial transition in the understanding of infinity during the eighteenth century. Originally a divine attribute, against which the finite is reduced to insignificance (e.g., in Baroque poetry), the infinite becomes a feature to be embraced within the finite world itself. Together with developments in science and mathematics (e.g., the invention of the calculus at the end of the seventeenth century), other cultural spheres played a crucial role in normalizing the ‘anomaly’ (T. S. Kuhn) of the infinite. Chief among them were ‘physico-theology’ and religiously inflected poetry (especially Heinrich Brockes), which celebrated the divine within the grandest and minutest aspects of creation, and Pietism, which explored feelings of the sublime in nature and the soul (especially Friedrich Klopstock).