 Doing things step by step, fairly quickly, and with moderate success, was quite enough to excite Boyle’s admiration for the Almighty and, though he had certainly read Descartes’s Principles (in which Descartes remarks explicitly that although God could have let things work their way from a very different initial state to the present world, in fact God started the world off in medias res), it is quite possible that the alternative did not strike him as likely: he was not, after all, a mathematician, or even a mathematical  physicist.[39]