[3] The book is a work of natural theology, an attempt to reconcile science and religion, and incorporates extracts from related correspondence of John Herschel with Charles Lyell.

Literary critic Lanya Lamouria summarises this point thus: "rather than meddle with creation, the deity has the supreme 'foresight' to encode apparent adaptations and deviations into the universe from the beginning.

"[7] In Lanya Lamourias words Babbage reframes miracles as "events that follow preprogrammed rules that are too complex for human comprehension.

The world "is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered (...) the air we breathe is the never-failing historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air and ocean, are the eternal witnesses of the acts we have done.”[7] Scholars have argued that this inspired Charles Dickens's and his portrayal as memory as collective in David Copperfield[2] and Edgar Allan Poe, whose character Agathos in "The Power of Word" claimed that these traces can be decoded mathematically.

[8] Seth Bullock argues that Babbage's description of his difference engine in the chapter on miracles is the first evolutionary simulation model.