"[10] He played a major, if underestimated role in developing 18th-century economic discourse, influencing the Dean of Gloucester and political economist Josiah Tucker.

[13] The son of a Presbyterian linen draper, Butler was destined for the ministry of that church, and with the future archbishop Thomas Secker, entered Samuel Jones's dissenting academy at Gloucester (later Tewkesbury) for the purpose.

In 1714, he decided to join the Church of England and entered Oriel College, Oxford, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1718 and named a Doctor of Civil Law on 8 December 1733.

Remaining Bishop of Bristol, Butler was installed Dean of St Paul's on 24 May 1740, keeping the office until his translation to Durham.

During his lifetime and for many years after, Butler was best known for his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736), which according to historian Will Durant "remained for a century the chief buttress of Christian argument against unbelief.

"[17] English deists such as John Toland and Matthew Tindal had argued that nature provides clear evidence of an intelligent designer and artificer, but they rejected orthodox Christianity due to the incredibility of miracles and the cruelties and contradictions recorded in the Bible.

Butler argued that "because nature is a mess of riddles, we cannot expect revelation to be any clearer"[18] Today, Butler's Analogy is "now largely of historical interest,"[19] with the only part widely read being the section which deals with his criticism of John Locke's theory of personal identity.

"[20] Butler's chief target in the Sermons was Thomas Hobbes and the egoistic view of human nature he had defended in Leviathan (1651).

Hobbes was a materialist who believed that science reveals a world in which all events are causally determined and in which all human choices flow unavoidably from whatever desire is most powerful in a person at a given time.

The ground floor, so to speak, holds a wide variety of specific emotions, appetites and affections, such as hunger, anger, fear and sympathy.

A perfect harmony of virtue and self-interest, Butler claimed, is guaranteed only by a just God, who in the afterlife rewards and punishes people as they deserve.