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Abstract

Dutch science flourished in the late sixteenth and in the seventeenth century thanks to the immigration of cartographers, botanists, mathematicians, astronomers and the like from the Southern Netherlands after the Spanish army had captured the city of Antwerp in 1585, and thanks to the religious and the socio-economic situation of the country. A strong impulse for practical scientific activities started from the Reformation, mainly thanks to its anti-traditional attitude, which had an anti-rationalistic tendency. Therefore, in the Northern Netherlands there was no 'warfare' between science and religion and the biblical arguments leading to Galileo's condemnation were not used. Although the growth of the exact sciences and of technology in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries in Protestant circles may be partly attributed to the expansion of trade, industry, navigation and so on, this does not explain why there was also at the same time a great interest in subjects as botany and zoology, which had no immediate economic utility. There were discussions about Copernicanism and Cartesianism. So a number of astronomers and theologians rejected the earth's movement on scientific and religious grounds, but there were also those who did not reject the Copernican system on biblical grounds. In the seventeenth century there was much discussion between science and religion in the Northern Netherlands, but that discussion was not followed by censure by the Church of the State. In the Republic there was a large amount of intellectual freedom in the study of the natural sciences, thanks to practical and ideological considerations. In the eighteenth century the seventeenth century tension between science and religion changed into a physicotheological natural science. It was believed that investigations into the workings of nature should lead to a better understanding of its Creator. So Bernard Nieuwentijt in his well-known book: The right use of world views for the conviction of atheists and unbelievers (1715) intended to prove the existence of God on the basis of teleological arguments.