A few thoughts about this:

• Puritans generally certainly were not what the American stereotype suggests. There were many very bright people among them who were trying to understand the world in a realistic way. But the average Puritan was not focused on scientific discovery any more than the average member of any church or citizen of our communities is today. The average Puritan was just stumping along through life like the rest of us, trying to make a living and be a good person by his or her lights.

• Jonathan Edwards was not necessarily a typical Puritan, and he was a complicated person. He lived his whole life within the bounds of the 18th century, which inevitably puts a large gap between him and the first precisians in early 16th century England. Inevitably they thought in very different ways.

• Edwards was fascinated by the expansion of learning about the world in his time and put enormous intellectual energy into trying to integrate it with his Christian faith. Exactly what this meant at different times of his life has been debated. It has become clear that he was not the kind of wilderness prodigy or savant that Perry Miller suggested at the beginning of the current flowering of Edwards scholarship, but it is equally clear that he was interested in such things from an early age.

• A place to start with figuring out Edwards and his relationship to his time is with George Marsden's biography, Jonathan Edwards: A Life.