I love St. Macrina. As she was on her deathbed, she cheered up her little brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, by holding a Socratic dialogue with him. He later recorded this as "On the Soul and the Resurrection", as well as in The Life of St. Macrina.

Anyway, in the middle of all this, St. Greg points to how atheists of his day said automata proved there wasn't God or a soul, and St. Mac went into how automata indicated there was. Awesome moment in girl geek history.

You really can't read patristics without running into state of the art Greco-Roman science/natural philosophy. Early Christian theologians loved science, and constantly used it to explain God's design principles in other areas. This was in stark contrast to most philosophers and religions of the day, who thought the natural world was kind of haphazard, filthy, and stupid.

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Especially the gnostics and cathars and such. Bad, material world, bad.

It has been said that Darwin's theory is better evidence of God's existence than all of Behe's alleged exceptions. So St. Macrina is right there in the mainstream.

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