Isaac Newton #1 (His History)

Isaac Newton, known for his laws of physics and gravity, lived during a time when skeptics believed that God had retired from the universe. This led to a mechanistic worldview and the rise of deism. Newton's work influenced the American founding fathers and the Puritan fathers, but also inadvertently elevated science above the Bible. His emphasis on God's revelation in nature, rather than in the Bible, contributed to the development of deism, pantheism, and Unitarianism. Newton's pursuit of alchemy and the idea of an impersonal God further shaped these beliefs. Welcome, everybody, to GreatBibleReset.com. This is Oliver Woods, and this week we are taking a deep dive into the life of Isaac Newton. Today, the historical context in which Newton lived his life and performed his life work. Isaac Newton summed up laws of physics, motion, and gravity in his famous Principia Mathematica published in 1687. He was said to have discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head as he dozed under an apple tree on his father's farm. Well, be that as it may, his work tended to foster a mechanistic worldview from which God had supposedly retired. Skeptics began to reason that if the universe runs by mechanistic laws, then God must have withdrawn after setting it all in motion. Where is he? Even though they were not formally deists, this left men like the American founding fathers free to improvise in other areas like political theory. So here we are today, leaping from Copernicus in the last week, the man who jumpstarted the scientific revolution back in 1543 with his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, now way up to Isaac Newton and the climax of the scientific revolution in 1687. So these men served as something like bookends to the scientific revolution. They both launched what we call a paradigm shift in science, in scientific thinking. It's ironic that the scientific revolution illustrates both the wrong way and, on the other hand, the worst way to execute a biblical defense of the faith. When we look at Proverbs 26, 5 and 6, we are told, first of all, in verse 5, do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him. But then in verse 6, answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. What in the world does that mean? For the longest time, I thought these two verses are contradictory. But with a little help of coaching from the late Greg Bonson, we learn that, taken together, these two verses contain an incredibly strategic outline for a biblical apologetics or defense of the Christian faith. How so? Well, Luther and Calvin got the first part of that right, in terms of their biblical responses to the false claims of the emerging science to be the ultimate arbiter of ultimate truth. Calvin, for example, appealed to Psalm 93.1, when he said, The world also is established and it cannot be moved, and he issued this challenge, quote, Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit? End of quote. Well, unfortunately, Calvin was not equipped to answer the fool according to his folly. In scientific terms, it would showcase the inconsistency of the scientist's claim to independent knowledge. They simply brushed off his biblical assertions, because they were beginning to depart from scripture. It may not be fair to expect this of Calvin, however, since the concept of modern science had only been around for about 100 years, and it was frequently scoffed at as just a frivolous pastime. But that began to change with the advent of Newton, and spread to the New World via the vision of Francis Bacon in his sponsoring of the Jamestown Colony, and the activity of Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin a little bit later in American history. Cotton Mather departed from Calvin and enthusiastically embraced Newtonian science as proof of a creator in an evidential apologetic based on argument from design. This was a fatal mistake that was imitated by many other Christians in the ensuing years. Why is that a mistake? Don't we want to present evidence to prove our case? In this case, no, because the very process of trying to prove the authority of the Bible by extra-biblical means elevates that means to a position of authority above the Bible, and that is exactly what happened in early America. Evidence should never be used like this because it places God in the dock and encourages the unbeliever to sit in judgment of God. Evidence should always be used to indict the unbeliever. With all this evidence, how can you possibly not believe? But we need to go beyond that and show the unbeliever the inconsistency of his unbelief. One possibility would be to tell the story of Alexis de Tocqueville, who was sent to America by the French government to conduct a scientific investigation of the American prison system in 1832. So Tocqueville returned a year or so later to France with a glowing report on the American prison system, but within a hundred years, the failure of the system was becoming obvious, not to everybody, but to a lot of people. And we might also point out that less than 25% of all scientific studies are replicable in every field, that peer review is more often than not crony review with people from the same, sometimes the same room or at least the same department making the reviews, and the pressure to publish or perish in the professional realm leads to inevitable cooking of the data. Not always, but often. So this highlights the dire need for a political culture based on a covenant commitment to the law of God, summarized in Exodus 20-24, the Mosaic covenant, which calls not only for crimes with penalties, with civil penalties, but brutal honesty and social relationships, even to the point of assisting an enemy in his dominion mandate, pulling his ox out of the ditch, or his donkey out of the ditch, for example, and refusal to follow a multitude in doing evil, or testifying falsely in a dispute. So who was Isaac Newton? He lived from 1642 to 1727, he was an English farm boy who grew up to be an innovative mathematician and scientist. In spite of this, Newton had a humble, non-assuming bearing about him. He was reserved in a group. As the Cambridge delegate in Parliament in 1689, he never rose to speak. Finally, one day he stood, and the assembly fell strangely silent. Every ear was cocked, and rapt attention for whatever wisdom might fall from the great man's lips. Finally, Newton spoke. There is an open window over there, creating an uncomfortable draft, Newton awkwardly exclaimed, and I wonder if we might have it closed. And with that, he sat down. And in a statement made to have been said on his deathbed, he put his work in perspective. He said, quote, I know not what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a little boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, and now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. So what's the historical context to Newton's life? Well, he wrote under Charles II after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, and he lived past the glorious revolution of 1688. Censorship made this a static period politically, compared to Whig agitation during Cromwell's interregnum at mid-century, but science was by this time becoming esteemed, and Newton became president of the Royal Society for 25 years in London. It was modeled after Bacon's New Atlantis, a scientific elite directing government in the new world. And thus Newton's massive treatise on applied mathematics had a profound impact on the worldview of not only the American founding fathers, but the Puritan fathers a century earlier. Cotton Mather's promotion of Newtonian natural law, and inadvertently deism, certainly had a formative role in the worldview of the founders. Mather, the Christian philosopher, is an unabashed encomium to the work of Sir Isaac Newton. To Mather, Newton's scientific discoveries were irrefutable evidence of God's existence and creation of the universe. He failed to recognize that Newton's mechanistic laws served to push an increasingly impersonal God to the periphery of unbelieving thought. At the very least, they reinforced the deistic view of God as the cosmic clockmaker who wound up the universe, then stepped back to let it run on its own. And even worse, because Mather and other Christians tied belief in God so closely to Newtonian science, they inadvertently elevated the authority of science above the Bible. Later when Newtonian worldview was supplanted by Darwinism and quantum physics, the Bible went with it. So unfortunately, Newton's work contributed to the development of deism, pantheism, and Unitarianism in the following century. Newton placed almost exclusive emphasis on God's revelation of himself in nature, apart from special revelation in the Bible. For example, 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." Newton spent hours in his laboratory engaged in the unbiblical pursuit of alchemy and the philosopher's stone. Thus, Newton's God is transcendent, impersonal, and known only directly through his creation. A God who wound up the universe at the creation and has now stepped back to let it run on its own according to natural laws. This is the only context in which use of the term natural law is authentic. This perspective would also naturally tend toward Unitarianism because Christ is known only through his special revelation. The link to pantheism is less obvious, yet there was a strand of Newtonian thought, actually a reaction against Newton's impersonal God, that was pantheistic and imminent. Margaret Jacobs has traced the influence of this current on the French Revolution in 1790 in her book, Radical Enlightenment. So thank you so much for being here today. Ladies and gentlemen, please like, comment, and subscribe. Take a moment to visit the library of lectures and books at greatbiblereset.com and pick up your own free copy of Keys to the Classics, The History of Decline and Fall of Western Civilization. And for your supplement needs, go to boomers-alive.com for the Michelin Stars National Sanitation Foundation abbreviated NSF rated supplement quality. Only a handful of restaurants in any city have earned the NSF rated supplement quality award. We have incredible buys now, buy one get two free, buy one get three free deals, going on right now at boomers-alive.com and we'll see you tomorrow for a deeper dive into the teaching of the incomparable Isaac Newton, of the incomparable Isaac Newton, of the nefarious Isaac Newton. Probably not that one. All right. Thanks John. 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