Podcast Recording

Isaac Newton's beliefs and writings about God have been misrepresented throughout history. He saw science as a way to understand God's divine order and wrote extensively about theology and prophecy. Newton considered the universe to be a divine machine, with his laws of motion and gravity being a sign of divine consistency. He believed that miracles could happen within the system of the universe and that they didn't contradict divine order. Enlightenment thinkers admired Newton's physics but rejected his theology, leading to the misconception that he pushed God out of the universe. Voltaire and Thomas Huxley further distorted Newton's ideas to argue for a secular science. Newton's rival, Leibniz, characterized his view of God as a bad clockmaker, but Newton actually believed in continuous governance and divine providence. Newton's discoveries didn't disprove divine order, but rather revealed it. Every aspect of the universe, according to Newton, was evidence of divine governance. That's Isaac Newton in his own words, calling God the architect of the cosmos. But here's the issue. Somewhere along the way, history twisted his legacy. Many think and have been told that Newton's laws pushed God out of the universe and that science replaced scripture. Both atheists and believers repeat the myth. But what if almost everything you've heard about Newton and faith is wrong? What if I told you Isaac Newton spent more time writing about God than gravity, that every equation he penned was, in his view, a divine code? Newton didn't just believe in God. He obsessed over theology, wrote millions of words on prophecy, and saw science as a way to decode divine order. So why does the myth persist? Was it a deliberate rewrite or just a convenient story? And here's the kicker. This isn't just us speculating. Historians like Rob Illis and James Forrest have dug into Newton's manuscripts and shown us the truth. Newton's religion wasn't a side hobby, it was his foundation. So strap in. We're going to dust off manuscripts, track down the origins of the lie, and meet an expert theologian who say we've got Newton dead wrong. This is the TCU History Frogcast, and today we're resurrecting the Isaac Newton you never knew. All right, so as for what Newton discovered about the cosmos, in his Principia Mathematica, Newton's work wasn't limited to gravity and the laws of motion. He basically offered the universe as a large divine machine. This isn't science against God, this is science from God. Hold on. Let's do a little rupture with that thought. Science from God? That's a total turning on its head of the whole Enlightenment project, I feel like. I mean, right. We tend to think of the Enlightenment as a project of reason, displacing religion, but Newton wasn't displacing God. He was trying to decode God's language. Exactly. And get this. His laws weren't just about physical motion, it was about moral order. Gravity for Newton wasn't just a force, it was a sign of divine consistency. The movement of the planets? It wasn't chaos, it was evidence of a rational creature. But doesn't that raise the question, if Newton, to direct this at our audience here, if Newton sees nature as a divine machine, are we misreading him to read him as a mechanizer of the universe? That he was actually not stripping the world of wonder, but was demonstrating that wonder does have structure. How would you approach that question? Huh. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Structure with sacred scaffolding. I love that. But let me push back a little. If Newton's universe is such a divine machine, is God more of an engineer than a rational being? In which case, is there space for a relationship? For miracles? That's a great question. I think that's definitely a tension. I think that Newton would argue that miracles happen within the system, not outside of or against it. That God has the right to intervene, but that intervention doesn't necessarily undo order. It exposes sovereignty, essentially. Which would explain why he spent so much time trying to calculate the means and ends of the end times with biblical prophecy. He wasn't just writing about gravity, he was trying to calculate redemption through math. Yeah, I think you're spot on there. The universe for him was like scripture incarnate and would need to be read, encrypted, and ultimately direct us back to the divine. So, as for how Newton's discoveries could be interpreted as disproving divine order, this is more Quatro's area of expertise and what he researched. So, kind of just drawing on this argument, Quatro, I just want to ask you, how do you think Newton became the poster child for secular science? Well, I think the shift began with Enlightenment thinkers who admired his physics but rejected his theology, right? It was the age of reason and people related religion to superstition. Okay, right. So, who did this? Was it deliberate or? I'd say there's a couple of main suspects. Voltaire, for instance, tried popularizing Newton's gravity in France while mocking his biblical scholarship. And then by the 19th century, Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, went further using Newton's laws to argue the universe could run without God. But one of the more influential distortions came from Newton's rival Gottfried Leibniz, also attributed to creating calculus. In their famous correspondence, Leibniz characterized Newton's God as a bad clockmaker who had to keep fixing his creation. Okay, wow. Seems like a legitimate criticism. Yeah, yeah, that was my first thought. But Newton never claimed God fixed the universe like a broken machine, which makes the argument somewhat of a straw man. Samuel Clarke's rebuttal is key here. Clarke argued Leibniz fundamentally misunderstood divine sovereignty. Where Leibniz saw God's tinkering as imperfection, Clarke countered that continuous governance improves God's providence, his exact words being, A kingdom that runs without its king would be a kingdom only in name. This wasn't about fixing flaws, but sustaining creation moment by moment. He was doing a role. What Newton called counsel in his letters to Bentley. Yet Leibniz's catchy analogy stuck, and especially among later thinkers, eager to separate science from religion. Okay, yeah. Thanks for the context. So after actually disproving the myth, which is what we wanted to make this episode for anyway, when it comes to Newton's account of the system of the world, what the system of the world described by him, readers may come to feel free to come to his conclusions. He ultimately begins by saying that it's clear the universe is far too orderly and structured to have come about in chaos. As a result, gravity begins to reveal instead of displace the divine. Scholars like Lorraine Dotson, one of our secondary sources, reminds us that Newton didn't exclude God with his math, he revealed him. So every orbit, every law was to Newton evidence of divine governance.