Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Isaac Newton
WHITE: Well, he believed that there was no real difference between science and religion. This is a later construct that we've created in modern times, really.
He thought that he could reach God, or could achieve some sort of closeness to God by studying nature, and he would look anywhere that he could to find those secrets. He wasn't restricted by just mathematics, or just experiment. He would look anywhere. And he even delved into the occult and spent most of his life researching alchemy, which then of course was considered occult.
ZWERDLING: So, Newton looked at the world and said there are forces at work here that you can predict mathematically and, far from disproving the notion of God, it just proved that God has done such marvelous work that something like gravity can exist.
WHITE: Exactly, yes. He was worried, quite rightly, that his ideas would be too radical and that he would get into trouble with the church, for example, and he made it very clear that God was behind the movement of planets, that they moved by a mechanical process that he was unraveling mathematically, but that God set them in motion and God oversaw the whole thing.
*
Newton's Interest in religion and theology
Newton found time now to explore other interests, such as religion and theology. In the early 1690s he had sent Locke a copy of a manuscript attempting to prove that Trinitarian passages in the Bible were latter-day corruptions of the original text. When Locke made moves to publish it, Newton withdrew in fear that his anti-Trinitarian views would become known. In his later years, he devoted much time to the interpretation of the prophecies of Daniel and St. John, and to a closely related study of ancient chronology. Both works were published after his death.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
