The view of nature as a property to be measured by a divine architect is consistent with the monotheistic presumption that the ultimate source of value in the universe lies not in the natural world but in God's eternal sphere. This conception leads inexorably to the desacralization of nature: it is no longer sacred in its own right, as in earlier hunter-gatherer and agrarian cultures, but merely the constructed artifice of an external creator.
Nature and body as machine
