Ho boy is there ever!. This rabbit hole goes so, so much deeper than most people realize, in a way that tends to get missed because the primary missing link between the two—post-Restoration English Nonconformity—has mostly gone forgotten in popular history.
As just a teaser, for instance—Bayes’ Theorem was co-authored by two Nonconformist clergymen, Thomas Bayes and Richard Price. The latter became interested in it in part because he thought it proved the existence of God, which for him also implied that human progress was the unfolding of divine providence on earth building into the Second Coming. He gave sermons along these lines in favor of the American and French Revolutions, and the latter of those was the specific event that Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in response to: he is the “Dr. Richard Price” addressed in that essay.
Ho boy is there ever!. This rabbit hole goes so, so much deeper than most people realize, in a way that tends to get missed because the primary missing link between the two—post-Restoration English Nonconformity—has mostly gone forgotten in popular history.
As just a teaser, for instance—Bayes’ Theorem was co-authored by two Nonconformist clergymen, Thomas Bayes and Richard Price. The latter became interested in it in part because he thought it proved the existence of God, which for him also implied that human progress was the unfolding of divine providence on earth building into the Second Coming. He gave sermons along these lines in favor of the American and French Revolutions, and the latter of those was the specific event that Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in response to: he is the “Dr. Richard Price” addressed in that essay.