The concept corresponds to the early Greek philosophical belief that humans, as part of a coherent universe, are capable of understanding the design of the natural world through reason.
Greek philosophers, however, lacked a new vocabulary to express such abstract concepts as "necessity" or "cause" and consequently used words available to them to refer metaphorically to the new philosophy of nature.
Among the three traditions inspired by Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras, the Aristotelian corpus became a pervasive force in natural philosophy until it was challenged in early modern times.
Greek philosophers inadvertently left the upper world vacant by abandoning ancient ties to free-acting, conspiring gods of nature.
It is presumed, however, that Greek thought denied the existence of a natural world where causality was infinite, which gave rise to the notion of "first cause", upon which the order of other causes must rely.
Despite their rejection of pagan thinking, the Church Fathers benefited from Greek dialectic and ontology by inheriting a technical language that could help express solutions to their concerns.
[10] As Peter Harrison observes, "In the application of the principles of pagan philosophy to the raw materials of a faith, the content of which was expressed in those documents which were to become the New Testament, we can discern the beginnings of Christian theology.
"[11] Eventually, Church Fathers would recognize the value of the natural world because it provided a means of deciphering God’s work and acquiring true knowledge of Him.
[12] What the Church Fathers needed, and did not inherit from the early Greek philosophers, was a method of interpreting the symbolic meanings embedded in the material world.
According to Harrison, it was Church Father Origen in the third century who perfected a hermeneutical method that was first developed by the Platonists of the Alexandrian school by which the natural world could be persuaded to give up hidden meanings.
[14] St Augustine suggested that Nature and the Bible were a two-volume set of books written by God and filled with divine knowledge.
[15] By the twelfth century, a renewed study of nature was beginning to emerge along with the recovered works of ancient philosophers, translated from Arabic to original Greek.
According to Harrison, the twelfth century marked an important time in the Christian era when the world became invested with its patterns of order—patterns based on networks of likeness or similarities among material things, which led to a pre-modern knowledge of nature.
As a source of revelation, the Book of Nature remained moored to the Christian faith and occupied a prominent location in Western culture alongside the Bible.
When the word scientist began to replace the term natural philosopher in the 1830s, the most talked-about scientific books in the UK were the eight-volume Bridgewater Treatises.
These books, funded by the last Earl of Bridgewater, were written by men appointed by the Royal Society to "explore the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of Gd [sic], as manifested in the Creation".
In contrast, the emerging disciplines of psychology and sociology led others to see religious belief as a temporary step in a society’s development rather than a central and essential element.