Thomas Baker was a learned antiquarian and fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, who argued against pluralism and its claim that God would not create lifeless worlds. In his Reflections upon Learning (1699) he wrote:

"... there is more Beauty and contrivance in the Structure of the Human Body, than there is in the Glorious Body of the Sun, and more perfection in one Rational immaterial Soul, than in the whole Mass of Matter... There cannot then be any absurdity in saying, that all things were created for the sake of this inferior World, and the Inhabitants thereof, and they that have such thoughts of it, seem not to have consider'd, who it was that died to redeem it."