Christianity. He also asserts that it is very reasonable to believe that man may well be simply one of many intelligent beings, and certainly not the highest before God. He wrote that humanity was fallen, and currently in a miserable state akin to probation. He concludes the introduction with his three Postulata: "The obvious or literal sense of scripture is the true and real one, where no evidence reason can be given to the contrary. That which is clearly accountable in a natural way, is not, without reason to be ascribed to a miraculous power. What ancient tradition asserts of the constitution of nature, or of the origin and primitive states of the world, is to be allowed for true, where ‘tis fully agreeable to scripture, reason, and philosophy." Book I: Lemmata Whiston begins by arguing for the existence of a human soul. He argues that the Newtonian laws of motion provide that matter may never move spontaneously, but only when acted upon by an outside force. He notes that humans, animals, and plants are able to move spontaneously, and concludes that they must be more than "mere matter," which, especially in the case of humans, he argues to be evidence of an incorporeal soul. Books II, III, and IV: Phenomena In the next sections of his book, Whiston goes on to describe his theory of the creation of the Earth, and the flood. He asserted that the Earth was originally a comet, which God formed from its initial "chaos and void" into a habitable planet. He also argued that the flood itself was caused when the Earth passed through the tail of a comet, which, it was known by that time, are composed largely of water. His analysis was very detailed, and similar ideas were promoted in the 1960s by other creationists postulating causes for the global flood, along with similarity to the ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky. However, many of them are in direct conflict with contemporary scientific understandings; and comets are not mentioned in flood accounts. References Bibliographic Information See also William Whiston Flood geology Catastrophism Immanuel Velikovsky External links and sources "William Whiston and the Deluge" by Immanuel Velikovsky "Whiston's Flood" "William Whiston, The Universal Deluge, and a Terrible Spectacle" by Roomet Jakapi (PDF) Bibliography for William Whiston at the LucasianChair.org the homepage of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University A New Theory of the