documents guaranteed protection of these freedoms, and of the people’s right to experiment with and modify their government, by using an eighteenth-century version of crowdsourcing they called democracy. This was something entirely new. It was not coincidental with the scientific revolution, but, rather, a natural outgrowth of it. The liberties these founding principles afforded have in turn produced the highest standard of living, the greatest scientific and technological advances, and the greatest power in the history of the planet.
God’s Natural Law Is Reason
Among the first to seize upon the discovery of the New World were the English merchants of Jamestown, Virginia. When their party of 104 men and boys landed in 1607, they were looking for gold, but instead they wound up growing and selling something even more profitable: tobacco.
They were followed some thirteen years later by those seeking not fortune, but freedom of religion. The Puritans began to settle Massachusetts as early as 1620, forming fundamentalist enclaves in niches carved out of the “savage” new continent. They disliked the Catholic-leaning authority of the Church of England and they believed in progress and innovation, that the Bible was God’s true law, and that it provided a plan for living.
Puritanism wasn’t just a theology, it was a whole set of ideas that included taking an antiauthoritarian, experimental, empirical approach to discovering the natural laws by which God’s creation abided. In exercising his will, God did not contradict reason. Rather, he revealed himself to humans through two books: the Book of Revelation, made accessible by faith, and the Book of Nature, made accessible by observation and reason. Science was the “handmaiden” to theology, assisting in the study of “the vast library of creation” as a vehicle to religious understanding.
This thinking can be traced to that of the Islamic Mu’tazilites several hundred years before, at a time when Islam was the keeper of scientific knowledge during Europe’s Dark Ages. The Mu’tazilites’ primary ethos had been to celebrate the power of reason and the human intellect. God spoke not only through the Quran, but through his creations, so we could discern his will by studying nature. It is our intellect, not a literalist reading of an old book, they argued, that guides us toward a true knowledge of God and the basis of morality. The idea resurfaced among Puritans of the late sixteenth century, whose more prominent members had read the old Mu’tazilite books on science.
This idea that God does not contradict reason and that his laws are implicit in nature also lies at the foundation of English common law, as first set forth in Christopher St. Germain’s 1518 treatise The Doctor and Student, which relates a hypothetical conversation between a doctor of divinity and a student of the laws of England and established common law’s moral basis.
St. Germain was a Protestant polemicist during the reign of King Henry VIII, a time when a great battle was raging between the Catholic Church, which was the highest authority in all matters, and the antiauthoritarian Protestants, who promoted do-it-yourself study of the Bible and nature. In fact, The Doctor and Student was published just a year after Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on a church door. As the reform movement swept through Europe, monks were thrown out of monasteries and told to marry nuns, as Luther did in 1525 when he married an ex-nun. Adherents to Luther’s philosophy destroyed and looted the Catholic churches of the bones of their saints and other relics and jewels, condemning the objects as false idols. The truth was to be found in the Bible and in direct experience, they believed, not in the pronouncements of the pope in Rome.
This thinking required a reexamination of the world and the devising of a new order based not upon the authority of the church, but upon reason. The question at hand for St. Germain amid this upheaval was “what be the very grounds of the law of England.” He offered first that the law of God underlies reason:
The law of God is a certain law given by revelation to a reasonable creature, shewing him the will of God, willing that creatures reasonable be bound to do a thing, or not to do it, for obtaining of the felicity eternal.
He then declared that reason and natural law are synonymous:
As when any thing is grounded upon the law of nature, they say, that reason will that such a thing be done; and if it be prohibited by the law of nature, they say it is against reason, or that reason will not suffer that to be done.
Therefore, nature was knowable, and God’s will could be understood by studying nature to discern its laws. This was a powerful idea that put man into an immediate relationship with God and nature, without an intermediary authority figure. Evidence from the study of nature was to be the basis of the laws of England. To the Puritans, then, there were no conflicts in the ideas of religion, law, reason, and science. All were varying examinations of natural law.
The idea of natural law developed over the next ninety years as Protestantism flourished in England. In 1608, the great English jurist Edward Coke sought to more clearly define it. Coke was a Puritan sympathizer who spent his career working to protect individual liberty and make sure the monarchy’s arbitrary authority was circumscribed by the rule of law, an idea the Puritans very much favored.
His report, Calvin’s Case, became a foundational document in English law. In it, Coke wrote,
The law of nature is that which God at the time of creation of the nature of man infused into his heart, for his preservation and direction.
And in an oft-quoted section of his 1628 Institutes of the Lawes of England, Coke broadened this idea in an important way that for the first time turned to the crowdsourcing model the American founders would eventually adopt. Seeking to limit the caprice of the “royal prerogative” by which the king claimed the authority to do whatever he wanted, Coke argued that, while natural law motivated individual men, “an infinite number of grave and learned men” working over “successions of ages” could refine and perfect the laws derived from this initial natural moral basis. In other words, this was an early form of scientific literature and peer review, but also of the idea of the rule of law. Coke called this aggregation “artificiall [sic] reason,” which he defined as “perfect reason, which commands those things that are proper and necessary and which prohibits contrary things.”
Thus, law had a basis in physical reality through the hard-wired biological instincts of humans that God had infused into their hearts at the time of their creation, but its full force and power came from socially aggregating those insights. No one man’s authority, even the king’s, stood above it.
This science-friendly Protestant perspective—that one could establish law and understand God’s will by studying nature and, over time, aggregating and refining a body of knowledge that bound even the king—stood in stark contrast to the position taken by the Roman Catholic Church when, in 1633, church authorities denied the validity of astronomical science and indicted Galileo for heresy for simply describing what he found by observing nature.
The poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, visited Galileo at Arcetri, the hilly area to the South of Florence where he was under house arrest. Milton told the British Parliament of his visit in 1644, when protesting an order by England to make authors submit their writings first to the government for approval, and he warned them of the dangers of censorship.
I could recount what I have seen and heard in other countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their learned men, for that honor I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical [church] yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness that other nations were so persuaded of her liberty.
By the end of the seventeenth century, as Anglican clergy in London were preaching Newton’s science, Italian scientists were standing trial in Naples for stating “that there had