Justified True Belief

(●) He found the single law that holds a falling apple and the moon, and he spent more of his working life on Scripture and alchemy than on physics. + Ask most people what Isaac Newton did and you will get the apple, the three laws of motion, and perhaps the prism. All of that is true. In one book published in 1687 he showed that the fall of a stone in an orchard, the orbit of the moon, the paths of the comets and the rise and fall of the tide are four faces of one force, and he wrote the force down as an equation that worked. Nothing in the history of science has ever been more successful. For two centuries afterward, to do physics at all was to do Newton’s physics. What almost nobody knows is what filled the rest of his desk. When his papers were finally sorted and sold at auction in 1936, the buyers found chest after chest of manuscript that had nothing to do with mathematics: commentaries on Daniel and Revelation, a reconstruction of the floor plan of Solomon’s temple, a history of the early church councils, a study of the manuscript evidence behind particular verses of the New Testament, and a great deal of alchemy. The economist John Maynard Keynes bought a large share of it and sat down to read, and the reading unsettled him. Out of it came a lecture calling Newton not the first of the age of reason but the last of the magicians. That verdict is too neat. The shock behind it was real, though, because Keynes had gone looking for the founder of modern physics and met instead a man who treated the whole world as a riddle set for him to decipher, the Scriptures and the metals and the planets all together. Keynes died in April 1946 before he could deliver the lecture, so his brother Geoffrey read it for him that July at the Newton tercentenary in Cambridge, the three-hundredth-anniversary celebration of his birth, held four years late because of the war. The theological papers alone run to well over a million words and the alchemical papers to about as many again, and he considered all of it one enquiry: one God, one world, one set of records, all of it open to patient study. His dates come in two versions, and both of them are right. England still used the old Julian calendar in his lifetime, so he was born on Christmas Day 1642 by the reckoning of his own village and on 4 January 1643 by the calendar much of Europe had already adopted; he died on 20 March 1727 by the English count and 31 March by the continental one. That is why reference books disagree about his birth year. There is a second thing to carry into the story, and it does more work than the calendar does. He believed, privately and with all his heart, that the doctrine of the Trinity was a fourth-century mistake. He never said so in public, and it is the hinge of his life.

(●) 1642 AD: Born fatherless at Woolsthorpe on Christmas Day, which was already 4 January 1643 on the continent, and handed to his grandmother at three when his mother remarried. + His father was also called Isaac Newton, a reasonably prosperous yeoman farmer in Lincolnshire who could not write his own name. He married Hannah Ayscough in April 1642 and was buried in October. The son arrived on Christmas Day 1642 by the English calendar, which was already 4 January 1643 on the continent, premature, in a stone farmhouse at Woolsthorpe that still stands, and the family did not expect him to live. He was three when his mother married again. Barnabas Smith was the rector of North Witham, a mile and a half down the road, and he wanted Hannah but not the boy. So Hannah moved to the rectory and Isaac stayed at Woolsthorpe with his grandmother Margery. Whatever that did to him it did not heal quickly. In 1662, as an undergraduate, he wrote out a list of his sins in a private shorthand that nobody could read until Richard Westfall deciphered it in 1963. Among the childhood entries, in the same list as stealing cherry cobs from Edward Storer and calling Dorothy Rose a jade, sits this, in his own spelling: "Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them." Smith died in 1653 and Hannah came back to Woolsthorpe with three more children. He went to the grammar school at Grantham, seven miles off, boarding with an apothecary named Clark, and the neighbours remembered the machines rather than the Latin. He covered the walls of the house with sundials and drove pegs into them to mark the half hours. He flew kites at night with paper lanterns tied to their tails and frightened the countryside. At about sixteen his mother pulled him out of school to run the family farm, and he was so hopeless at it, so plainly not paying attention, that the schoolmaster Henry Stokes and his uncle William Ayscough talked her into sending him back. In June 1661 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a subsizar: a student who paid his way by waiting on the wealthier undergraduates, fetching and carrying, eating what they left. He also lent small sums at interest to the men he was serving.

(●) 1665 AD: Plague closed the university, and in twenty months at home he built the calculus, pulled sunlight apart, and first compared a falling apple with the moon. + The official Cambridge curriculum was Aristotle, and Newton largely ignored it. He filled a notebook with headings of his own instead, under the title Quaestiones quaedam Philosophicae, “Certain Philosophical Questions,” and taught himself the mathematics of Descartes along with the new experimental philosophy, which meant settling questions about nature by building an apparatus and trying it rather than by working out what Aristotle had said. Nobody at Cambridge was lecturing on that. He took his degree in 1665 without distinction. Then the plague reached Cambridge, the colleges scattered, and he went home to the farm and stayed there, apart from one short return, until the spring of 1667. He was twenty-two. In those months, working alone with no library to speak of, he set down the basic rules of what he called the method of series and fluxions and we call the calculus; he pushed a prism into a beam of sunlight and showed that white light is not pure but a mixture that the glass sorts by how far it bends each colour; and he did the arithmetic that compared the force pulling a stone toward the ground with the force needed to keep the moon in its orbit, and found they answered to the same rule. He was also reckless. To test how the eye itself shapes what it sees he slid a bodkin, a blunt needle, between his eyeball and the bone and pressed, and he stared at the sun until he had to sit in the dark for days. The apple is not a legend, though it has been polished. In April 1726, an old man in Kensington told the story to his friend William Stukeley over tea in the garden, and Stukeley wrote it down: they were sitting under some apple trees, and Newton said he had been in just this situation when the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple always come down perpendicular to the ground, he had asked himself, and not sideways or upward. No apple hit him. What happened was a question, in an orchard, that took him twenty years to answer properly. Cambridge reopened, he was elected a fellow of Trinity in 1667, and in October 1669 Isaac Barrow stepped down from the Lucasian chair of mathematics and Newton was appointed in his place, on Barrow’s recommendation. Newton was twenty-six.

(●) 1672 AD: A paper on light and colours made him famous across Europe and set Robert Hooke against him for life. + Telescopes in those days gathered their light through a lens, and they all smeared coloured fringes around the stars. Newton knew why, because the prism had told him: a lens bends the colours in a beam by different amounts, exactly as the prism does, so it can never bring them all to one point. A mirror has no such trouble, since it throws every colour back at the same angle. So he ground a curved mirror and built a telescope around it. The instrument was about six inches long and it outperformed instruments many times its size. Barrow carried it to the Royal Society in London, where it caused a sensation, and in January 1672 they elected the unknown Cambridge professor a fellow. Weeks later they printed his first paper, on light and colours, in the Philosophical Transactions. He expected the argument to end there, because he thought he had proved it. Instead he got objections, and the loudest came from the Society’s own Curator of Experiments, Robert Hooke, a brilliant and prickly man who felt that Newton had walked over ground Hooke had already crossed. The exchange turned poisonous and stayed poisonous for thirty years. It also taught Newton a lesson he never unlearned: publishing gets you contradicted by people who have not done the work. He began to hold things back. The most famous sentence he ever wrote comes out of this quarrel, and it is not quite the compliment it is usually taken for. Writing to Hooke in February 1676, in a letter of elaborate courtesy between two men who disliked each other, he said that if he had seen further it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. Hooke was short and stooped. Whether Newton meant the barb is anyone’s guess, and scholars have argued it both ways for a century. What is certain is that from the early 1670s onward the man who had just become the most admired natural philosopher in England spent the bulk of his working hours on two subjects he showed almost nobody: alchemy, in a shed with two furnaces in the grounds of Trinity, and the text and history of the Bible.

(●) 1675 AD: Rather than take holy orders he obtained a royal exemption, having concluded in private that the Trinity was a fourth-century corruption. + A fellowship at Trinity came with a clock attached. Within seven years of taking his Master of Arts a fellow had to be ordained a priest of the Church of England, and Newton’s seven years were running out. Ordination would mean subscribing again, publicly and by name, to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the first of which confesses the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to be one God, three Persons, of one substance, power and eternity. He could not do it. He had spent the previous two years reading the Greek Fathers, the early Christian writers of the eastern church, along with the acts of the councils, which are the surviving records of what the bishops argued and decided when they met, and the manuscript history of particular verses. He came out where the bishops at Nicaea in 325 had refused to go. That council had been called to settle this exact question, whether the Son is God in the same sense the Father is, and it answered that he is, of one substance with the Father, and condemned the men who said otherwise. Newton judged that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Messiah, the Word and the Lamb, the one Mediator, worthy of worship as the Lamb who was slain, and not God. The Father alone, he held, is God Almighty. He believed the fourth-century church had smuggled the contrary doctrine in, that Athanasius of Alexandria was the chief of the smugglers, and that some of the plainest proof texts, the verses a reader reaches for to settle the question in a sentence, had been tampered with in the copying. He wrote all of this out, at length, for the rest of his life, and published none of it. Denying the Trinity in print was dangerous when he began, and after the Blasphemy Act of 1697 it was a crime. So in February 1675 he went to London and petitioned the king for a dispensation, an official exemption, from the requirement to be ordained, and Isaac Barrow, by then Master of Trinity and a chaplain to Charles II, is thought to have spoken for him. He does not seem to have said why he wanted it. It was granted in April, and more than granted: the exemption was drawn to cover whoever held the Lucasian chair, so that its holder need never take orders. His friends noticed the shape of it. Years later his own protégé William Whiston, who succeeded him in the chair, said the antitrinitarian thing out loud and was expelled from the university for it in 1710. Newton did not lift a finger for him.

(●) 1687 AD: A visitor’s question about planetary orbits produced the Principia, and the heavens came under one equation. + In August 1684 the young astronomer Edmond Halley rode to Cambridge with a question that three of the best minds in London had failed to answer. If the sun pulls a planet with a force that weakens as the square of the distance, what shape does the planet’s path take? Newton said at once: an ellipse. Halley asked how he knew. Newton said he had calculated it. He could not find the paper, promised to redo it, and sent it on a few months later as a nine-page tract, De motu corporum in gyrum, “On the motion of bodies in an orbit.” Halley understood what he was holding and would not let it go. Over the next two and a half years Newton wrote the tract into three books, working, an assistant remembered, until two or three in the morning, forgetting meals, occasionally setting out for the dining hall and turning back halfway because a thought had caught him. The Royal Society had spent its publication money on a book about fish and could not pay for it, so Halley paid, out of a not very large income of his own. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the mathematical principles of natural philosophy, came out in July 1687. What it does is join two worlds that every previous physics had kept apart. Since Aristotle it had been obvious that the heavens run by one set of rules and the earth by another: things up there circle forever, things down here fall and stop. Newton showed there is one rule. Every body attracts every other body with a force proportional to their masses and falling off as the square of the distance between them, and from that single statement, plus his three laws of motion, he derived Kepler’s planetary orbits, the flattening of the earth at the poles, the wobble of its axis, the two daily tides, and the return of the comets. Halley used it to work out that a comet he had tracked would come back in 1758, long after his own lifetime, and on Christmas night of that year it came back. Hardly anyone in Europe could follow the mathematics, and Newton had meant it that way: he told William Derham years later that he had made the book abstruse on purpose, to keep from being baited by little smatterers in mathematics. It did not matter. Everyone could see that it worked.

(●) 1696 AD: He left Cambridge for the Royal Mint, and spent his last thirty years running England’s money and its science. + The years after the Principia were not easy ones. He sat in Parliament for the university in 1689 and made no mark. In September 1693 something broke: he went weeks without sleeping, wrote wild accusing letters to Samuel Pepys and John Locke, and then wrote to Locke again three weeks later, embarrassed, explaining that he had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight. He recovered his composure by the end of the year but not his old appetite for the work. In March 1696 he was made Warden of the Royal Mint and moved to London. The post was meant as a sinecure, a salary attached to almost no duties, a comfortable perch for a distinguished man at the end of his career. He treated it as a war. England’s silver coinage was in ruins, clipped and counterfeited, and the recoinage had to be pushed through while the country was fighting France. Newton went after the forgers himself, in person, in the taverns and prisons of London: between June 1698 and December 1699 he took more than a hundred depositions from witnesses, informers and suspects, and he built the files with the same patience he had brought to the moon’s orbit. Counterfeiting the coin was high treason, and the sentence for treason was hanging. The most notorious of them, William Chaloner, had petitioned Parliament accusing Newton of running the Mint incompetently. Newton convicted him, and Chaloner was hanged at Tyburn in March 1699 after writing to beg for his life. Newton was made Master of the Mint at the end of that year and held the office until he died. Public honours followed, and by now they came easily. He was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703, the year Hooke died, and was re-elected every year for the rest of his life. The next year he published the Opticks, in English rather than Latin, which is one reason it became the more widely read of his two great books. In April 1705 Queen Anne knighted him at Trinity College, the place he had entered forty-four years earlier as a servant to richer boys. One thing in those years he could not leave alone. He spent them in a long and ugly fight with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over which of them had invented the calculus first, and he behaved badly in it and knew it: as President of the Royal Society he appointed the committee that was to judge the dispute, wrote its report himself, published it in 1713, and then published an anonymous review praising it. Both men had in fact invented the calculus independently, and the notation the world uses is Leibniz’s.

(●) 1727 AD: He died at eighty-four, refused the last rites, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. + He kept working. The second edition of the Principia appeared in 1713 carrying the General Scholium, four new pages at the very end in which he said, for the first time in print, what he thought the book implied about God. A third edition came out in 1726, when he was eighty-three. From 1722 he was suffering badly from bladder stones and handing his duties to others, most of them to John Conduitt, who had married his half-niece Catherine Barton. He presided over his last meeting of the Royal Society on 2 March 1727 and took to his bed soon afterward. He died eighteen days later, on 20 March by the English calendar and 31 March by the continental one, having refused the last rites of the Church of England: a final, silent, entirely consistent act by a man who had spent fifty years declining to affirm a creed he did not hold. He left no will. His body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster, and on 28 March they buried him in the Abbey, among the kings, with the Lord Chancellor and two dukes and three earls carrying the pall. Voltaire was in London that spring and never got over it. Newton’s countrymen, he wrote in his Letters concerning the English Nation, "honour’d him in his Life-Time, and interr’d him as tho’ he had been a King who had made his People happy," and he set that beside the way France had treated Descartes. No man whose only claim was that he had understood something had ever been buried in England like that.

What He Taught

(T1) The same causes are at work everywhere, so one law of gravity covers the apple, the moon and the tide. + Drop your keys. They fall straight down, and you would be astonished if they did anything else. Now look at the moon, which has been going round the earth for as long as anyone has been watching and shows no sign of falling on us. For two thousand years those were regarded as two different kinds of event, governed by two different physics, because the heavens were made of different stuff and obeyed different rules. Newton’s claim is that they are the same event. The moon is falling, continuously, toward the earth; it simply has enough sideways motion that it keeps missing. Fire a cannonball hard enough from a high mountain and it will not land at all, it will fall around the world and hit you in the back. The force that curves its path and the force that takes your keys to the floor are one force, weakening in proportion to the square of the distance, so that at ten times the distance it is a hundredth as strong. He checked the number against the sky. The moon sits about sixty times further from the earth’s centre than we do, and sixty times sixty is thirty-six hundred, so the pull on it should be about one thirty-six-hundredth of the pull on us. That is what the sky shows. In the first second of its fall a stone in an orchard drops sixteen feet; in the same second the moon drops about a twentieth of an inch. Behind the physics sits a principle he stated flatly at the head of Book III, and it is the reason the argument can be made at all. Nature does not use one set of causes here and another set there. Fire in a kitchen grate and light from the sun are the same thing. If we could not assume that, no experiment done in Lincolnshire would tell us anything about Saturn, and there could be no science of the heavens at all. Newton took the uniformity of nature as a working rule; the Christian tradition he had read since boyhood took it as a consequence of there being one Lawgiver over the whole of it.

(Q) "Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes. As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets." + Source: Newton, Principia, Book III, Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy, Rule II (Motte translation, 1846 revision). Four homely examples, chosen on purpose. A man and a dog breathe for the same reason; a stone falls the same way on both sides of the Atlantic; the fire in the grate and the sun burn alike; and light bounces off a planet as it bounces off the ground. Grant that, and the sky is no longer a separate country (T1).

(T2) Whatever cannot be drawn out of the evidence has no place in experimental philosophy. + Think of a good mechanic. She tells you the car will not start because the fuel pump has failed, and she can show you why she thinks so. A bad mechanic tells you a story about the deep nature of fuel pumps. Newton wanted physics done the first way, and his contemporaries found it maddening. Here is what maddened them. He had shown that bodies attract one another across empty space according to an exact rule, and he had refused to say what does the attracting. The reigning explanation of the day was Descartes’: space is packed with invisible whirlpools of fine matter, and the planets are carried round like corks in a bathtub. It was a picture you could hold in your head, and it was wrong. Newton had an equation you could check against the sky, and no picture at all. Pressed for one, he wrote the three Latin words that became his motto, hypotheses non fingo: I frame no hypotheses. A hypothesis, in his sense of the word, is any story about causes that has not been squeezed out of the observations, and his rule was that such stories have no place in what he called experimental philosophy, which is his name for physics done from evidence and from nothing else. Say what the evidence shows. Where it stops, stop. The discipline of it is worth noticing, because it cuts both ways. Newton was perfectly willing to say in print that the arrangement of the solar system points to an intelligent Maker (T3), and he was not willing to say what gravity is, though he had private guesses. The difference was not that one conclusion was religious and the other scientific. The difference was that he thought the first one followed from what could be observed and the second one did not.

(Q) "But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phænomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phænomena is to be called an hypothesis." + Source: Newton, Principia, Book III, General Scholium (Motte translation, 1846 revision). The General Scholium is a short closing essay Newton added to the second edition in 1713, twenty-six years after the book first appeared, partly to answer the complaint that he had explained nothing. This is his answer: he has established that gravity acts, and how much, and where, and he declines to invent a mechanism to please anybody.

(T3) The arrangement of the solar system is not the sort of thing mechanical causes could have produced. + Newton is careful about where he puts the weight, and it is easy to miss. He is not arguing that gravity needs God to explain it. He is arguing about the starting conditions, and the argument has a shape worth following. Gravity, left to itself, pulls things straight in. It will not put a planet into a stable ring. To get an orbit you need exactly the right sideways shove at exactly the right distance, and you need it for six planets and ten moons, all of them travelling the same way round, all of them in nearly the same flat plane, like plates spinning on a tabletop. Then look at the comets, which he had spent years tracking: same solar system, same gravity, and they come in at every angle, in wild stretched loops, going both ways round. The comets are what gravity alone does. The planets are not. So the neat flat clockwork of the planets is not something the force can be credited with; something set it up. Richard Bentley, a young classical scholar who had just preached the first of a new lecture series in defence of religion and was readying it for the press, wrote to him with questions about all this, and in four letters of 1692 and 1693 Newton answered bluntly: the motions the planets now have could not have sprung from any natural cause alone but were impressed by an intelligent Agent. Two honest observations belong beside that. The first is that Newton was proved wrong about a related point. He thought the planets tugging on each other would slowly wreck the system, so that God would have to set it right from time to time, and a century later Pierre-Simon Laplace showed the wobbles cancel out over the long run and the system is stable on its own. That specific gap closed. The second is that his central question did not close with it. Why the initial conditions of a physical system should be so finely arranged that anything interesting happens at all is a live question still, and the modern arguments from the fine-tuning of physical constants are recognisably Newton’s question asked one level down.

(Q) "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." + Source: Newton, Principia, Book III, General Scholium (Motte translation, 1846 revision). The sentence directly before it lists the evidence: the planets circling in concentric rings, in one plane, all the same way round, and the comets running through the same space in every direction. The contrast between the two is the argument, and this sentence is its conclusion. He goes straight on to say that if the fixed stars are the centres of other systems like ours, they must be under the same dominion.

(T4) God is known as a Lord who has servants, not as a metaphysical necessity. + There is a way of talking about God that a philosopher can reach and a worshipper cannot use. Call it the Necessary Being, the ground of all things, that on which everything else depends. It is not wrong. It is just that nobody has ever knelt to a ground. Newton saw this and said so in the most read theological paragraph he ever wrote. Start with a plain point about grammar. “God” is a relative word, like “captain” or “landlord”: it describes a relation to somebody. You can say my God, the God of Israel, the God of gods; you cannot say my Eternal, or the Infinite of Israel, because eternity and infinity are properties, not relationships. So deity is not a quality God has, the way a mountain has height. It is a dominion, an exercised lordship over servants who are actually there. And this is why, Newton says, we do not merely admire him: we adore him, because adoration is what servants owe. Then comes the edge of the argument, and it is sharper than it looks. A first cause with no dominion, no providence and no purposes would not be God at all. It would be Fate, or Nature: a name for whatever happens to be so. The distance between the God of Scripture and the impersonal Absolute of the philosophers is exactly the distance between a Lord and a law. Newton is often filed as the patron saint of the clockmaker God who winds the world and walks away, and it is worth registering that he explicitly refused that God. He also refused to make the point out of nothing: what we can know of God from the world, he says, is his contrivances and his purposes, and of his substance we have no idea at all.

(Q) "We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes: we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature." + Source: Newton, Principia, Book III, General Scholium (Motte translation, 1846 revision). “Final causes” is Aristotle’s term for the purpose a thing is for: the final cause of an eye is seeing. Newton is claiming that the world shows purposes, that purposes imply a purposer, and that a purposer who governs is owed worship rather than mere admiration. The paragraph ends by insisting that talking about God from the appearances of things belongs to natural philosophy and is not an intrusion into it (T3).

(T5) Prophecy was given so that fulfilment could be recognised afterward, not so that readers could become prophets. + Anyone who has sat through a confident chart of the end of the world, with the dates pencilled in and the newspapers held up as proof, knows the shape of the thing and knows how it ends. The date passes. The chart is redrawn. Fewer people come next time. Newton spent more of his life on Daniel and Revelation than on optics, and he was withering about exactly that habit. Setting dates, he said, is the standing folly of interpreters, and the damage it does is not to the interpreter but to the Scriptures, which are brought into contempt every time a prediction fails. His own view of what prophecy is for turns the usual assumption around. It was not given to let anyone see the future in advance. It was given so that when the events arrive the fit can be recognised, and God’s providence, rather than the cleverness of the interpreter, is what stands vindicated. He then did the arithmetic anyway, which is the human comedy of the thing, and he knew it. In a manuscript now in Jerusalem he took the period Daniel gives as twelve hundred and sixty days, counted each of those days as a year, which is how Protestant interpreters of his day read such numbers, and started the count at 800, the year Charlemagne was crowned in Rome. That lands on 2060. What he wrote next is the part almost never quoted: it may end later, but he saw no reason for its ending sooner, and he mentioned the figure not to assert when the end would be but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are always predicting it. He finished the passage by quoting the two texts that govern the whole subject, that Christ comes as a thief in the night, and that it is not for us to know the times and seasons which God has kept in his own hand (Acts 1:7; 1 Thessalonians 5:2).

(Q) "The folly of Interpreters has been, to foretel times and things by this Prophecy, as if God designed to make them Prophets. By this rashness they have not only exposed themselves, but brought the Prophecy also into contempt." + Source: Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, Part II, chapter 1 (1733). Spelling as printed. The sentences immediately following give his alternative: God gave the prophecies not to gratify curiosity by letting men foreknow things, but so that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own providence be made manifest to the world (T5). The book was published six years after his death.

(Q) "When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beleife of a Deity & nothing can rejoyce me more then to find it usefull for that purpose." + Source: Newton to Richard Bentley, 10 December 1692 (Newton Project, normalised transcription of the manuscript; his own spelling). Bentley was thirty, a classical scholar of formidable reputation, and had been chosen to deliver the first Boyle Lectures, a series founded in Robert Boyle’s will for the defence of the Christian religion. He had built the last of his eight sermons on the Principia, and while he was preparing them for the press he wrote to their author to check that he had understood it. This is the opening of Newton’s reply, and it says as plainly as he ever said it that the book was written with an eye to the belief of thinking men in a God. What Bentley did with the permission is the next part of the story.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The century after him turned his physics into the leading argument for God, from Bentley’s lectures to Paley’s watch. + Richard Bentley preached the eighth Boyle Lecture in London in 1692 and published it the next year, and it did something new: it argued from a working, tested, mathematical physics to the existence of God, with the physicist’s own letters in hand. The world was not a self-winding machine, Bentley said; it was an arrangement, and arrangements have arrangers. Within a generation this had become the standard English case for theism. Others took it up at once. Samuel Clarke, Newton’s closest theological ally, gave the Boyle Lectures himself in 1704 and 1705 and translated the Opticks into Latin so that the rest of Europe could read it. William Derham, a country clergyman with a telescope, followed with Physico-Theology in 1713 and Astro-Theology in 1715, patiently cataloguing the fit between creatures and the conditions they live in. Their line of argument runs straight to William Paley, whose Natural Theology of 1802 opens with a man crossing a heath who finds a watch, and who reasons that a watch implies a watchmaker as a stone does not. Behind Paley’s heath stands Newton’s solar system. The design argument in that form took a hard blow from David Hume and a harder one from Charles Darwin, and few Christian philosophers now run it in Paley’s biological version. What survived, and is argued by people like Robin Collins and John Polkinghorne, is Newton’s narrower question: not why living things fit their surroundings, but why the physical setup permits anything at all. The gospel does not stand or fall with either. What is worth seeing is that the whole tradition, in both its strength and its weakness, begins with a set of letters that a young preacher’s questions dragged out of a reluctant man in 1692.

(†) Leibniz answered that a God who has to repair his own machine is a poor workman, and the quarrel set the terms for every later argument about the gaps. + In 1715 and 1716 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke exchanged five letters each, passing through the hands of Caroline, Princess of Wales. Clarke was writing for Newton and consulting him throughout, so the correspondence is effectively Newton against Leibniz on God and the world, conducted by proxy while both men were still alive. It is one of the great theological debates of the age. Leibniz opened with a jab. According to the English, he said, God has to wind up his watch from time to time, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; a workman who has to repair what he made is a workman with less skill than one who does not. God’s wisdom, on Leibniz’s view, is shown by a creation that needs no correction. Clarke shot back that a world running on for ever with no further involvement from its maker is the notion of materialism and fate, the position the deists had already reached by allowing a Creator at the beginning and no God at work in anything since, and that Leibniz was arguing providence out of the creation for the sake of a compliment. Both men were partly right and the argument has never really stopped. Leibniz saw, correctly, that appealing to God to fill a hole in the physics puts God at the mercy of the next generation’s physics: Laplace closed Newton’s hole a century later, and the God who had been holding the planets steady had nothing left to do. Clarke saw, also correctly, that a God defined as the one who never interferes has been quietly retired. The modern objection that Christians reach for a “God of the gaps” is Leibniz’s point, still in circulation, and the modern reply, that a doctrine of creation is a claim about why anything exists rather than a rival to any particular mechanism, is Clarke’s point, refined.

(†) Christians have kept him as the standing evidence that modern science was not built by men at war with belief. + The idea that religion and science have always been enemies is younger than it sounds. It was given its shape by two American books, John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in 1874 and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896, and historians of science have spent the last fifty years dismantling it. The man who founded modern physics is the plainest single piece of counter-evidence available. He thought the study of nature was a way of learning about God, said so in print at the end of his masterwork, and spent more of his life on Scripture than on optics. That has to be said carefully, because it can be said dishonestly. Newton was not an ordinary churchman and would not have passed a doctrinal examination at any point after about 1673. Producing him as a witness for orthodox Christianity is a mistake. What he is a witness to is narrower and still worth a great deal: that the mathematical study of nature grew up inside a Christian understanding of the world, on the assumption that the universe is the ordered work of one rational Lawgiver and therefore worth searching for laws in, and that its greatest practitioner regarded his physics and his theology as one continuous enquiry. The habit of mind he modelled has outlasted his particular arguments. Show your working. Do not claim more than the evidence carries. Say “I do not know” when you do not know. Those are Newton’s rules for natural philosophy (T2), and they turn out to be good rules for anyone making a case about God as well.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: he denied that Jesus Christ is God, and he hid it behind oaths he did not believe. + Newton’s own papers, published only in the last century, make his position plain. In the twelve articles he drew up for himself, the first reads that there is one God the Father everliving, omnipresent, omniscient, almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, and one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Christ, on this account, is the Son of God, the Word, the Lamb, worthy of honour and of a worship of one kind; the Father alone is God Almighty and is to be worshipped as such. He built the whole structure on one verse: "yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist." (1 Corinthians 8:6) Three things have to be said, and in this order. - He was right about one manuscript. In a long letter to John Locke in 1690, the Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, he traced the history of 1 John 5:7, the clause about three bearing witness in heaven, and showed it was absent from the Greek manuscripts and had entered the Latin text late. He was correct. Modern critical editions of every stripe agree with him, and the clause is gone from the ESV, whose 1 John 5:7 and 8 name three witnesses only, the Spirit and the water and the blood, as it is gone from every other translation working from the earliest evidence. His instinct there was the right one: purging the truth of what is spurious is a service to it, not an attack on it. - The doctrine does not rest on that verse. This is where the argument breaks down. Take 1 John 5:7 out entirely, as scholarship has, and the New Testament still says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1); still has Thomas fall in front of the risen Christ and say "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28); still says of Christ, "For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily," (Colossians 2:9); still records Jesus requiring "that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father." (John 5:23); and still baptises into the one name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). Newton read 1 Corinthians 8:6 as excluding the Son from the one God. Paul, in that very verse, is taking the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4, the confession Israel said morning and evening that the LORD our God is one, and setting the Father and Jesus inside it, which is the opposite of a demotion. The fourth-century councils were not inventing a doctrine; they were putting a fence around what the church had been reading, praying and baptising into since the beginning. - He kept it hidden, and let others pay. He subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles to take his fellowship, obtained a royal exemption rather than be ordained, held the Mastership of the Mint and the presidency of the Royal Society under a settlement that assumed his conformity, and refused the sacrament on his deathbed. Whatever one thinks of the danger he was in, and the danger was real, William Whiston said in public what Newton believed in private and lost his chair for it in 1710, and Newton stayed silent. He was not gentler with a rival than with a friend: in the calculus dispute he chose the committee that judged his own case, wrote its verdict, and reviewed it anonymously. None of that touches the physics, and it is not offered as a reason to think less of the Principia. It is the reason he cannot be produced as a Christian witness without a large qualification, and the reason the church has always had to receive him the way it received Plato and Aristotle: gratefully, and with its eyes open.