Science and Technology

Wesley has been variously portrayed as an Enlightenment or ‘counter-Enlightenment’ figure, and his thinking embodied both faith and the use of God-given human reason. The chapter highlights Wesley’s relation to the Enlightenment through the ‘intersectional lenses of religion, rationality, and science’. In his time the cosmos was increasingly viewed less as an enchanted and inexplicable mystery, and more the result of knowable and predictive, unexceptional laws of nature. In response, Wesley did not join either of the camps of empirical disenchantment or supernaturalism. He was both open to scientific discovery and technological developments and rooted in the belief that creation is a divine expression of God’s presence and will. Wesley lived during an age of transition from natural philosophy to modern or natural science. His writings make various references to contemporary natural philosophers, such as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, George Cheyne and John Hutchinson. His interest in science was rooted in genuine curiosity on the one hand, and in the desire to understand the physical world as an expression of God’s creativity and will, in order to equip preachers with knowledge on how ‘the heavens declare the majesty of the Lord’ as they engaged in ministry.
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