Nature for many writers becomes what God had been for Christianity. Nature is conceived of as an actively benevolent agent; nature is a legislator for our good. Diderot, who often thinks of nature in this way, is thereby forced to pose the problem of how nature, being so benevolent and powerful, can permit the occurrence of evils, in a way that precisely parallels the problem raised for Christian theologians by the occurrence of evils in a universe created and ruled by an omnipotent and benevolent deity. And in so doing Diderot reveals more plainly than do others the way in which nature itself
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