In the seventeenth century the Roman Catholic theologian Nicholas Malebranche proposed that nature’s evil and inefficiency were not created by god but by natural processes. Simply put, Malebranche said that god preferred to use simple though imprecise natural laws rather than a long sequence of complicated miracles that would be needed to achieve perfection. Malebranche was by no means the first thinker in history to argue for theological naturalism—the belief that god wouldn’t have intended for this world so it must have arisen naturalistically. In ancient Greece the Epicureans believed that randomly swerving atoms created the world. As Lucretius put it: Read more