Since the Reformation, then, people influenced by the Calvinist tradition have been taught to regard the world as a lit stage where natural wonders regularly transpire. From Francis Bacon’s meticulous study of seventeenth-century science to young Jonathan Edwards’s analysis of flying spiders on his father’s Connecticut farm, from Cotton Mather’s experiments with smallpox vaccinations to Annie Dillard’s fascination with the 1,356 living creatures in a square foot of forest topsoil—they knew that praise is a matter of studying in minute detail the footprints of God in the world.
