God, was man's own creation-formed and sustained, and thus altera- ble, human beings acting autonomously," says Wood. Meanwhile, Enlightenment science fostered the belief that causes and effects in human affairs could be discovered, as they were in Newtonian physics. Faced with King George Ill's declarations of good will and such shock- ingly hostile developments as the 1765 Stamp Act, colonial leaders assumed that British officials were conspiring against them.
Ironically, Woods observes,...