The 17th-century introduction of the idea of a mechanical universe functioning like a great clockwork implied the creative actions of a divine mechanist but simultaneously distanced him from creation and could even make him seem unnecessary. Natural philosophers had to deal with this crisis, and their deepseated fears over the new growth of irreligion and atheism provided a new context. This lecture surveys the problem and some of the means used to address it by Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and others, as well as the concomitant creation of a new problem: the “God of the gaps”—an unsatisfactory image of the deity wherein he is invoked as a cause for any problem for which science has no explanation, a sort of a scientific deus ex machina.