In the preceding pages, we have met five remarkable men; their contributions to natural theology in the latter half of the seventeenth century have been considered, and the great diversity among these works, diversity arising from differing theological convictions, methodological biases or simply the temper of the authors has been shown. What is left is to reassess the metanarrative surveyed at the beginning of this book and, coming to the present day, to consider how the questions raised in these older texts are related to conversations still in progress among philosophers and natural scientists. For seventeenth-century approaches to ‘divine Philosophy’ (as Bacon called it) take up enduring questions: Is naturalism philosophically responsible? Thinkers as diverse as Henry More and Richard Baxter thought not, as do Thomas Nagel and Alvin Planting a today – while others, such as Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, have found it to be the only responsible view. Is the application of reason to divine things theologically responsible? Like John Ray, John Polkinghorne takes seriously the danger of overstepping theological bounds, but this concern is often sublimated in the ‘scientific’ side of the literature: many of the apologetic works populating Christian bookstores take as axiomatic that Christians should boldly subject their faith to scientific scrutiny. Regarding appropriate and effective methods of reasoning about the divine, seventeenth-century works comprehend both philosophical and scientific approaches, and they argue both from natural law and from the inscrutability of natural phenomena.