The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  no doubt his scientific writing, in manuscript, would continue to grow, and would be shown to a few friends and colleagues. While a few might have suspected the full range of his genius, none could have been quite sure. His results would probably have leaked out piecemeal, or have been independently discovered over the years by other scholars. Eventually, long after his death, his papers would come to light and would show that Newton had anticipated much of the science of a later age.22

  Johann Sebastian Bach signed his musical compositions with the letters “SDG”: Soli Deo Gloria—“to the Glory of God Only.” Newton’s deepest impulse was to do his mathematics for the glory of God only. If he had been left to himself, he would likely have followed that path. But Edmund Halley’s intervention made him famous, enriched our world—and probably divided Newton’s soul.

  When he was writing the Principia, Newton believed his work would help exorcise the demons of atheism. As has been noted earlier, he wrote to Richard Bentley on December 10, 1692: “When I wrote my treatise about our System [of the world] I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity & nothing can rejoice me more then to find it useful for that purpose.”23

  Frank Manuel tells us Newton’s scrutiny of nature was directed almost exclusively “to the knowledge of God and not the increase of sensate pleasure or comfort. Science was pursued for what it could teach men about God, not for easement or commodiousness. . . . To be constantly engaged in studying and probing into God’s actions was true worship and fulfillment of the commandments of a warden.”24

  As Newton himself put it near the end of the Optics:

  And if natural philosophy in all its parts, by pursuing this method, shall at length be perfected, the bounds of moral philosophy will also be enlarged. For so far as we can know by Natural Philosophy what is the First Cause, what power He has over us, and what benefits we receive from Him: so far our duty toward Him, as well as towards one another, will appear to us by the light of Nature.25

  In The Clockwork Universe, modern-day author Edward Dolnick sums it up beautifully.

  Newton had ambitions for his discoveries that stretched far beyond science. He believed that his findings were not merely technical observations but insights that could transform men’s minds. The transformation he had in mind was not the usual sort. He had little interest in flying machines or labor-saving devices. Nor did he share the view, which would take hold later, that a new era of scientific investigation would put an end to superstition and set men’s minds free. Newton’s intent in all his work was to make men more pious and devout, more reverent in the face of God’s creation. His aim was not that men rise to their feet in freedom but that they fall to their knees in awe.26

  They should fall to their knees in recognition of the fact, among so many others, that it was impossible not to see in the design of the universe the handiwork of a designer God. This “argument by design” was proof of God’s existence, and it seemed to Newton and his contemporaries that every day the new sciences revealed more examples of the order, beauty, symmetry, and purpose apparent all around us. Newton wrote in “A Short Schem of the True Religion”:

  Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowels) & just two eyes & no more on either side [of] the face & just two ears on either side [of] the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two forelegs or two wings or two arms on the shoulders & two legs on the hips one on either side & no more?

  The bilateral symmetry of birds, animals, and humanity alike could only have arisen from “the counsel & contrivance of an Author.” 27 And the presence of a designer God was as obvious beyond the Earth as it was upon the Earth; Newton wrote in the Principia that “this most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”28 Astronomers were discovering that the stars were vastly more distant from each other than the planets were from each other. Flamsteed and Hooke put the nearest star at 648 billion miles away; Huygens thought the distance was 2.25 trillion miles.29 Newton regarded these vast stretches of space as a further argument from design for God’s existence; he explained that “lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, He hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another.”*58 30

  For two centuries scholars believed that Newton was a Deist. The Deists believed that, having created the universe and set it in motion, God withdrew from his creation for all eternity; God was, in the mocking words of the philosopher Leibniz, an absentee landlord.

  Today we know Newton believed God intervenes from time to time in his creation to make adjustments. Newton and his peers called this divine interventionalism special providence, while calling the Deist notion of a caretaker God general providence. It’s not inaccurate to say that Newton believed in miracles; God’s sending a comet to Earth to trigger the Noachic Flood and remake mankind was one such miracle. This divine flexibility seemed to Newton to be yet another argument from design for God’s existence.

  With the coming of the Age of Enlightenment, the argument from design began to crumble. The complexities and contradictions of the universe became more and more apparent to physicists, mathematicians, and geologists, and that process continues. Today, scientists don’t believe a design factor is woven into the fabric of the universe. They believe we live in an optimal world—that is, the best physically and mentally possible for us—among many possible worlds, all formed randomly. Life on Earth is a freak phenomenon, the result of a sequence of chemical actions so rare that it is unlikely they have happened twice in the observable universe. Impeccable design is the result of a near-infinite series of random attempts and failures, one finally taking hold because it indispensably and effectively furthers the survival of our species. (God is not necessarily excluded from this process; Spinoza and Einstein believed God works through blind chance to achieve incredible fertility of form and invention, these being achievable only through many degrees of freedom.)31

  Plutarch writes:

  Gone is Newton’s sacramental view of the universe, which was itself only the final flickering expression of that mighty power of creation which men call God and that helped sustain them through the first few millennia of their existence.

  If Isaac Newton had returned to Earth in 2017, what would he have found? How would he have thought?

  He would have been shocked and horrified to discover that the human race had devised not one, but two means of destroying itself, and that, in this very year of 2017, both these means, having been held in check so far by man, were on the brink of becoming uncontrollable.

  On July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated at the Manhattan Project’s Almogordo bombing site in New Mexico. It lit up the night sky with a fireball four times hotter than the center of the sun. Watching, project supervisor Robert Oppenheimer recalled with a pang the words of Shiva in the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

  The successful test was followed by the dropping of A-bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This ended World War II. But the horrific death toll that resulted—80,000 in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki, with thousands more deaths to come by radiation poisoning—sparked a heated debate over the use of atomic weapons that has not died down to this day. In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb. Both the United States and the USSR were soon stockpiling hydrogen bombs. As of 2017, thirty-four nations had laid claim to the possession of a nuclear arsenal. Some of these countries don’t seem entirely responsible; the world’s greatest fear today is that a rogue state with unstable leadership, such as North Korea under Kim Jong-un, will accidentally or intentionally launch an A-bomb and trigger a worldwide nuclear holocaust.

 
As early as 1960, scientists began to notice that waste materials were collecting in the world’s oceans. By century’s end, it was apparent that the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil had also clogged our planet’s atmosphere, and Earth’s temperature was slowly but surely rising. “Climate change” and “global warming,” though not accepted by everyone, had become household words.

  By December 2016, global warming had taken on such menacing proportions that Noam Chomsky, the eminent political dissident, linguist, author, and professor emeritus at MIT, warned today’s young people that they will soon be “facing problems that have never arisen in the 200,000 years of human history—hard, demanding problems. You in particular, and all the rest of us, will be in there struggling hard to save the human species from a pretty grim fate.”32

  Chomsky’s words were prompted by the United States’ refusal last fall to sign off on the COP 22 climate-change agreement that would commit the global community to a unified assault on global warming.

  Isaac Newton had expected the world to end, and to us he and his millenarian colleagues seem to have looked forward to the end with almost the same unseemly eagerness. But Newton, touring the polluted cities of the world beneath the murky glimmering of a sun growing hotter every day, surely hadn’t expected that mankind, no matter how corrupt, was fated to die by its own hand. It would have been inconsistent for him not to believe that it was the failure to read prophecy properly that had brought us to this sorry pass—which prophecy we will leave for Newton scholars to guess at. Newton would have realized that neither a comet’s flight past the Earth nor a comet’s plunge into the sun would be the cause of the upcoming apocalypse, but, rather, the technologies born, albeit with many steps in between, from his own science. He would have thought that the benefits that those same technologies had bestowed upon the Earth—antibiotics, space flight, computers, a thousand more—hardly compensated for the destruction of all those who were now enjoying them.

  All this would have been devastating for Isaac Newton. It would have seemed to him that his whole life had been a travesty, not to say a tragedy. He had wanted his equations to bring man to God; instead, they had brought man to the brink of destruction. Writing the penultimate chapter of his “History of the Corruption of the Soul of Man,” (the last chapter would be devoted to the Apocalypse), he would have ascribed man’s present-day predicament to a general, overarching cause, idolatry—our persistent tendency to put other gods between ourselves and God. It was the same cause he had ascribed to all the other fallings away of man from God he had recorded in his “History.”

  We live in an age that is rapidly abandoning religion, and today idolatry seems to us a trifling thing. We don’t understand why it’s such a problem for God. Why does He need us to worship him? Doesn’t he exist whether we believe in him or not? Isn’t he, being God, sufficient unto himself?

  It would take a cathedral full of theologians to answer this question. Suffice it to say that for Newton, Christianity consisted basically in worshipping God and loving our fellow man and woman. But mankind finds it difficult to worship God; our deity is without earthly attributes, is unknowable—is so other, so beyond, that we can’t get our imaginations around him for very long and quickly tire of the effort. Jesus, on the other hand, is easy to worship. He is one of us, and we can identify with his trials and tribulations. And that gives rise very quickly, says Newton to the idolatry that is Christ worship.

  But worship is essential, if for no other reason than that the world does not have to end tomorrow and perhaps not for a very long time. Pursuing his heartbreaking trek through the world of 2017, deploring mankind’s folly, he would have believed that the apocalypse still had to come. But he would also have believed, even in that eleventh hour, that in the short term mankind could save itself from self-destruction. He proposed a method of worship that would make it easier for ourselves. God should be worshipped for his activities in themselves, and not for himself alone—for his activities we can feel and see and hear and taste and touch.

  Dobbs tells us that, in a sermon against idolatry in all its forms, Newton argued that

  it is for His actions that God wants to be worshiped, His actions in “creating, preserving, and governing all things.” To celebrate God for His essence is “very pious” and indeed it is “the duty of every creature to do it according to his capacity.” But those attributes spring not from the freedom of God’s will “but from the necessity of His nature.” And so he must be worshiped for his actions in the world.33

  We shouldn’t worship God for being that which he had no choice but to be, but for what he has chosen to do. From the point of view of humans, God’s greatest activity is to have created the Earth and sustained it in its creaturehood.

  We’ll recall that Newton’s God was a God of special providence. He can intervene and make changes in his divine plan even as it is unfolding. In the remarkable document in which he explains God’s “Preamble to the Prophetic Visions” in Revelation, Newton seems to be implying that the course of God’s future history as set down in the Book of Revelation can be changed. He writes: “It [God’s preamble] was done in prosecution of the main design of the Apocalypse [John’s Revelation], which was to describe & obviate the great Apostasy.”34

  Obviate means “to remove.” It’s difficult to understand what Newton is saying here, but it seems to be that the Great Apostasy can be ended—that we can undo the corrupting effects of the doctrine of the Trinity on our lives—prevent the Apocalypse from happening, if only we will worship God, for to truly worship God alone is to overcome the doctrine of the Trinity.

  It would be wonderful to believe that Newton intended his equations to raise the consciousness of mankind, that he wanted to expand our souls. It would be wonderful to believe that he wanted to harness within us the energy the Pythagoreans called the music of the spheres; that he saw man as potentially a being of great power and that it was that potential power that he wished to harness.

  And in fact his goal was indeed to restore man and the world to that state of paradisaical being that man had enjoyed in the world before the Flood.

  But that worship had to be sustained as the world grew older, and Newton thought it had been sustained through the system of temples that we have talked about so often in this book. The key here is that these antediluvian houses of worship embodied in their design God’s primal activity of creating the solar system; they are meld of planetarium and cathedral. The ancient Egyptians remembered them and “built temples in the form of the solar system and derived the names of their gods from the order of the planets. As such, the ancient religion was modeled on the understanding of the heavens and Newton occasionally referred to the Ancients’ astronomical theology.”35 All his life Newton searched for the lost religion of the prytaneum. Newton sometimes called this ancient lost religion “astronomical theology.”

  Perhaps Newton, returned to Earth and looking around at a world on the verge of extinction, would have suggested we build temples that, embodying in their design God’s primal activities, somehow resembling our planet itself in their construction, were dedicated to worshipping God through his activities in nature. It may seem to us moderns that just worshipping God will do little to staunch the ecological disaster in which we find ourselves. But Newton would have thought differently: that the true worship of God would draw out of us right action, action conducive to the proper healing of our planet—action like a united front against global warming.

  Whatever the case may, we may be certain that Newton, returned to our world, would have issued a statement somewhat like the following:

  Beware the anger of the Earth. You are violating that which sustains you. It cannot continue.

  That is Isaac Newton’s warning to mankind.

  APPENDIX A

  NEWTON’S PROPHETIC HIEROGLYPHS

  Beasts = armies whereby kingdoms are usually founded and upheld (armies being wild beasts by definition, called beasts because of their pugn
aciousness)

  Court = parcel of ground exempted from the general possessions of the people for sacred purposes

  Dens and rocks = buildings (and ruins of buildings)

  Dragon = hostile king

  Earth = inferior people (commoners)

  Eating the flesh of a scorpion = receiving the wealth of an enemy

  “Eating the flesh of my people” and flaying skins = military exaction and oppression

  Eye = knowledge

  Heads = successive parts of a kingdom

  Heaven = the throne, court, honors

  Herbs and other vegetables = men

  Horn = more than one horn denotes “collateral parts of a Kingdom or of that head of it upon which they grow. . . . If the Horns Heads & Body of a Beast be considered strictly according to their relation one among another, the horns as being the most exalted member will chiefly respect Kings or successions of them, the Heads the Nobles & great men & the Body the rest of the Kingdom. But becaus a King is sometimes put for his Kingdom, thence it is that a horn is also sometimes used in the same signification.”

  Idols = men (idolaters)

  Insects (for example, locusts) that destroy herbs and other vegetables = men

  Mountain = a city and more especially the head city, as Jerusalem or Babylon

  Snake = smaller-rank persons (this from Achmed)

  Stars, great = nobles

  Stars, rest of the = whole world

  Teeth = great men and soldiers

  Wild beasts, because they prey upon men = armies

  Wilderness = an Abomination (such as the destruction or desecration of the Temple at Jerusalem) spreading over Christian world

  Woman = church