The oddness of Isaac Newton
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
A negative result is still a result.
To people with the 'Magicians Mindset' as Keynes might put it, the world has a rational soul underlying it which can be teased out by careful study of all things. If you're a Christian and start with this prior belief, then it makes perfect sense that you should expect your theological studies to inform your understanding of the natural world and your understanding of the natural world to inform theological studies. This is a mindset where metaphors and abstract connections are not of the human mind. Rather, they represent features of the territory showing us God's divine authorship of the world.
Another good book that outlines some of this is Hall's The Secret Teachings Of All Ages, which discusses the essentially Aryan (Indo-Iranian) thesis that all theological traditions discuss the same underlying esoteric doctrine which itself descends from one civilization. Having been written in 1928, Hall speculates Atlantis. (Naturally, you should take this text with perhaps more than just a grain of salt.) As far as I know the modern version of this thesis usually places the ultimate originating civilization in India.
https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Alchemy-Lawrence-M-Principe/d...
https://archive.org/details/The_Secret_Teachings_Of_All_Ages...
Also, "The Secret Teachings Of All Ages" sounds quite similar to the perennial philosophy.
"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" is just the golden rule restated as a physical law. Newton starts from the assumption that the physical world follows a moral law because it was created and is animated by god and everything else follows from and is in accordance with that belief.
No, it's closer to lex talionis stated as a physical law.
Which I guess is also religious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion
Translation from google: "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction"
If the golden rule is: do unto others as you would have them do unto you and you restate that as if it has force of law then you get:
Whatever you do to others will be done to you.
And then that moral law is generalized to all things to make the physical law:
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Also, it could be argued that the use of actio (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/actio) implies a rational agent, not an abstract principle.
It could also be pointed out that the "law" itself is just metaphysical twaddle. There is no empirical basis for this "law" and it makes no sense at all unless taken as a principle based on established authority.
The modernized version of the law is "When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body."
The extent of revision required to make the "law" even vaguely scientific demonstrates how unscientific the original was.
The guy was a Renaissance Man through and through. It would be weirder if a guy with his level of genius and accomplishments wasn't interested in such a wide range of subjects and only was interested in a few subjects.
And by interest I don't necessarily mean that he has to excel at everyone one of them the way he did with physics and mathematics, but rather, to be intrigued enough to study them.
It's not just modern education/history. It's said that history is written by people who either love or hate someone or some event. Also, history has innate biases of the writer. It's why we focus primarily on western history while arabs, indians, chinese, etc have their own version of history. All history throughout history is peppered with half truths and embellishments or sometimes outright propaganda.
> I never knew Newton was a staunch Arian before today, much like how I never knew that Pythagoras was a strict vegetarian, or that Socrates had a hatred of democracy
Or how columbus was an absolute genocidal butcher along with being a great discoverer. Or how genghis khan and the mongols were extremely cosmopolitan/egalitarian/merciful as well as been brutal conquerors. Or how the soviet union was at the forefront of the workers, lgbt, women's rights movement while being a horrific totalitarian nightmare. Or how Mao united a divided and brutalized china and freed china from european colonization while also starving tens of millions of chinese.
Depending on where you grow up and what history you are taught, you'll only see a particular snapshot. It's only when you make the effort yourself that you get to see the larger picture rather than the one framed by others.
Not sure why you didn't add some example pertaining to the U.S. such as:
"Or how the United States promotes freedom of expression while locking up over 1% of its adult population."
No way. Source? I am almost certain this is wrong.
If Newton couldn't distill any worthy insights after a lifetime of study, then there mustn't be anything to find.
I mean reading the scriptures allegorically, or as poetry or with the 'right brain' can be a valuable thing to do, but to parse them too finely seems like the wrong way to go about it.
I'm curious how you would define that. As far as I understand, Newton's life was definitely colored and shaped by his theological pursuits-questioning their 'worthy'ness is raising the more fundamental argument of faith.
Jordan Peterson is making a go of it these days.
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_New...
> Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.
FWIW I'd disagree with this definition. To give a really simple example: believing in an intelligent creator based on design in nature. That's not "no evidence". Holding to a naturalistic theory of origins that explains apparent design by a long sequence of chance occurrences is equally a faith commitment.
> Over coffee with one of these chaps i'll never forget his saying "Well, there's my professional system of belief, and there's my personal awareness, and I strive to keep them separate at all times." Just for the record, i couldn't manage to do that.
I agree there. One of the underlying causes of the scientific explosion around the Renaissance is the idea that the universe follows rules and can be understood, and it's because it's created by God that motivated many Christian scientists like Newton, Kepler, Pascal, and others to believe that we can fruitfully explore and understand its workings. It's bizarre to me that someone would try to hold in mind a universe where different aspects are actually at odds with each other.
Edit: for instance, here's an example of Kepler's motivations for scientific discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler#Christianity
I agree that modern science still requires faith as much of what we believe is inherently difficult to definitively prove. What I'm struggling to understand is how you can say that these competing theories require an equal faith commitment. By what measurement? How are the competing theories equally plausible? I actually agree when you say that the complexity of nature is "not 'no evidence'" and would add that the notion of an intelligent creator was probably the most plausible explanation available when the notion was conceived. However, plausibility has to be reevaluated and compared in the face of contrary evidence supporting other plausible theories, and I simply can't see how the competing evidence can be judged as supporting equally plausible theories.
Either scripture itself was written down by intermediaries or you're already presupposing the existence of deities. (Those deities also require an explanation or you really are just talking about faith without evidence.)
Except that this doesn't answer the question: how this intelligent creator came to exist?
Religious people either react furiously to this question or do the equivalent of "I can't hear you", scientific people look for an alternative theory.
However, this doesn't imply that there's "another realm of truth" inaccessible to empirical demonstration, or that one ought to subscribe to some supernatural dogma. That's a separate definition of faith. The religious aspect is so baked into the usage of the word that we have to be careful that it doesn't get a free ride in on the back of a non-religious definition.
I don't think it's correct to cordon off "truth" as being only that which can be empirically learned. That leaves us with phenomenon like true love and the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.
If anything is in a separate realm, I'd argue it's scientific truth. That's not to demean it, rather it's a higher, superior realm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_thought#The_three_tradi...
Science also uses induction and so relies on the future being essentially the same as the past, which is not a given. see David Hume.
An important caveat is this: a modern scientist accepts nothing without supporting evidence except, of course, the principle that "one should not accept anything without supporting evidence", which is itself taken without question as an axiom, a dogma. If it were possible for someone to live a life entirely free of assumptions, that person would have absolutely no access to objective knowledge, period.
And we must not forget to mention the various metaphysical assumptions that modern day science-philophers will often try to sneak past you while claiming to be objective.
Still doesn't say anything about is vs. ought, but that's a whole other can of worms.
I've yet to meet a scientist who does not take something on faith (need not be tied to religion). And I've not met a devout person who at times required data.
Which is why a religious scientist or a skeptical theologian is nothing worthy of notice (at least if you spend time with the two camps).
Neither could Newton. Actually your comment made some things about Newton's work clearer to me. I would say that for Newton his research into orbits (and Principia is mainly a book about orbits) was no different than his work on the Christian origin. All of Newton's work is religious. This is what Newton wrote in his Optics:
God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable movable particles. (Isaac Newton, Optics, 1704, Book III, page: 375)
This quotes reveals two things. 1. Newton considers himself to be a prophet who is privvy to the way God created the world. And this idea was enforced later by Newton’s disciples. The idea being that, god created the world for Newton to discover (god created newton and all was light...) 2. That this is secretely Newton’s zeroeth law. Because Newton’s entire doctrine is based on the dogma of atomic materialism. Without the assumption of the doctrine of atomic materialism Newtonian edifice falls apart.
This quote clearly shows that when Newton was researching orbits he believed he was unraveling the secrets of god’s work. He was doing religious work and not what we would call “physics” today.
But Newtonian mythology is so strong that even otherwise enlightened people consider a blasphemy to question Newton and even to mention his name without the qualifier “genius”. A previous commenter who wrote something similar
>It is more than just a passing interest. There would be no Newtonian physics without religion.
was heavily downvoted.
I agree with the main idea but it is very misleading to call what Newton was doing “physics” because he was not. There was no such discipline at the time.
I'm unaware of any conflict between any religion and science in its strictest sense; that is, a reproducible phenomena backed up with expirementsl evidence.
Its a fallacy to think that use of scientific tools to support a historical theory makes the theory scientific.
And this is all ignoring the fact that human emotions and experiences are not immaterial 'spiritual' things that are not open to objective study.
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/86-FREEZE-FRA...