of the bones, the camel's stomach and the hedgehog's armor. In April 1630, Descartes wrote three letters to the father Mersenne, which exposed for the first time his Creation Doctrine. Descartes affirmed God creates the eternal truths and the material and extended world with a uninterrupted, free and voluntaristic work. This conception was subsequently developed in the fifth and Sixth Replies to the objections to his meditations. Descartes was influenced by the Francisco Suarez's view on primitivism and divine realism, for which the connections between properties of the real world (e.g. 'being a man' and 'being an animal') belong immutably to the essence and intellect of God the Creator from ever and forever, and therefore aren't created by Him. Carl Linnaeus, in the 18th century, established a system of classification of species by similarity. At the time, the system of classification was seen as the plan of organization used by God in his creation. Later, the theory of evolution applied it as groundwork for the idea of common descent. Religious arguments In 1650 the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, published a monumental history of the world from creation to 70 A.D. He used the recorded genealogies and ages in the bible to derive what is commonly known as the Ussher chronology. This calculated a date for creation at 4004 BCE. The date was widely accepted in the English-speaking world. In 1696, William Whiston published A New Theory of the Earth, in which he proposed an account of the creation of the world. He grounded his argument in the following three Postulata: 1) The obvious or literal sense of scripture is the true and real one, where no evidence can be given to the contrary. 2) That which is clearly accountable in a natural way, is not, without reason to be ascribed to a miraculous power. 3) 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. Whiston was the first to propose that the global flood was caused by the water in the tail of a comet. The English divine William Derham (1657–1735) published his Artificial Clockmaker in 1696 and Physico-Theology in 1713. These books were teleological arguments for the being and attributes of God, and were used by Paley nearly a century