Newton’s God as First Cause and Physical Force Behind Nature
Part 2 in a 5-part series on how the 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement known as the ‘Enlightenment’ radically changed Christianity
Part 1: Discovering and Defining God Through the “Machine” of Nature
Part 2: (this post) Newton’s God as First Cause and Physical Force Behind Nature
Beginning with French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) and English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), and continuing with intellectuals and prominent figures to follow during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there developed a set of ideas and ideals later seen as a kind of intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. The characteristics of this material, social, cultural, and philosophical outlook have affected how people have understood God, the universe, religion, and the relationship between them to this day. During this period, the advancement of ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, mutual support, constitutional government, and separation of church and state would undermine the authority of monarchy, and of the Catholic Church, paving the way for the political revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Unfortunately, in the wake of the early modern rejection of anything that seemed to come before, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, hard at work mathematically parsing empirically observable reality, had lost touch with the abstract, intra-subjective aspect of human consciousness. An overemphasis on the sovereignty of reason and the evidence of the senses would include an empiricist understanding of religious mythos—the culturally mediated metaphors for subjective human consciousness. The logical conclusion of this limited focus would be either the rejection of religion or the rejection of science, rather than the integration of both into a greater human reality.
For more on the metaphorical rather than the empirical significance of religious mythos see my post, Bible Stories and Worship Practices Are Deeply Metaphorical.
For a discussion of science and religion see under “Facts and Reality” in Stories of Our Christian Faith are MYTHS in the Truest Sense.
Some seventeenth-century thinkers did not share this empiricist approach to theology. French mathematician Blaise Paschal (1623–62) felt that God could be found neither in nor through the mechanical universe, which was by itself godless, meaningless, and terrifying; neither through contemplation of clear and distinct ideas about God in the mind; but through the ‘heart’—the subjective core of human consciousness. A God who is merely the author of mathematical truth and order in the physical universe might preside over material improvements in the human condition, but such a God is powerless to bring any light into the darkness and pain of subjective human experience. For Paschal, the result of scientific impingement on religion could only be true atheism. For us today, it also includes the inverse result of religious fundamentalism.
Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) was the son of Jewish immigrants from Portugal. He shared Descartes’ notion of God as an idea in the mind, but for Spinoza, God was the sum and principle of natural law, immanent and inseparable from the material world itself, for which God’s creation is a metaphor. Spinoza was a pantheist for whom contemplation on the workings of one’s mind could reveal God's activity within.
But most thinkers did not share either Paschal’s or Spinoza’s highly immanent notions of God; rather, God was becoming the remote force behind impersonal nature. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author. He is considered one of the key figures of the scientific revolution. His 1687 book, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Philosophiæ Naturalis Prinicipia Mathematica), in which he formulated laws of motion and universal gravitation, laid the foundations of classical mechanics. For the first time, disparate facts observable in the physical universe were brought together in a comprehensive theory; they could all be explained by gravity.
But, a truly universal mechanics would have to account for all aspects of phenomena. Because gravity could not explain how the universe came about in the first place, Newton had to find its original cause. For Newton, natural philosophy (science) amounted to deducing causes from effects until one arrived at the First Cause; gravity could not account for the apparent design and ordered motion of the universe, so for Newton, God became essential.
Before Newton, theologians had argued that while creation (and revelation) can point us toward God, they finally show that God is ultimately unknowable. However, Newton believed that his universal mechanics could explain God’s attributes. He argued that dominion (dominatio) was the overwhelming force that controls the cosmos, and was the divine quality par excellence. In this way, God could be reduced to a kind of ‘scientific’ explanation, and given a definable function in the physical universe.
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In his correspondence with classicist and theologian Richard Bentley, Newton explained that gravity was not merely a force of nature, but the personal activity of God. Newton projected an anthropomorphized God into the universe according to human perception of physical mechanics. Inertia was an important part of Newton’s ‘proof’ for a God being needed to set matter in motion. For Newton, God as a thoughtful designer became a rational consequence of the world’s observable intricacy. Some creationists hold this view today. Newton and his late seventeenth-century contemporaries sought to counter “atheism” with this new theology based on scientific rationalism.
Before the 19th century, “atheism” did not mean disbelief in the existence of God; see Discovering and Defining God Through the “Machine” of Nature.
But Newton was no theological conservative. In his unpublished manuscript, The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology (Theologiæ gentilis origines philosophicæ), he asserts that starting with the primordial religion of Noah, nature was the true temple of God, and science was the only means of understanding the sacred. Scientific rationalism was the fundamental religion, corrupted over time with legends, false miracles, ghosts, demons, and superstitions. He privately rejected the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, arguing that they had been foisted on the faithful by Athanasius and other unscrupulous fourth-century theologians.
Through the influential thinking of Newton, Bentley, and philosopher Samuel Clarke, God became a physical force of nature. Theology threw itself on the mercy of science, which seemed like a good idea. But, as Karen Armstrong notes in The Case for God, “Where Basil, Augustine, and Thomas had insisted that the natural world could tell us nothing about God, Newton, Bentley, and Clarke argued that nature could tell us everything we needed to know about the divine. God was no longer transcendent, beyond the reach of language and concepts.”[1] A physical God rationally discoverable through nature would not bode well for maintaining such an empirically based belief in God when a later generation of scientists would find another mathematically and empirically based explanation for the beginning of the universe.
Rather than God being a great mystery connected with the mystery of our being, apprehended through the practice of faith, Enlightenment philosophers posited that God could be proven as a fact—an idea that would finally enter popular consciousness another two centuries on. Next week’s post—the third in this five-part series—is about the new Enlightenment theology of Deism held by some eighteenth-century intellectual elites, including some prominent founders of the USA.
[1] Armstrong, Karen. The Case for God. New York: Random House, 2009, pp. 207-8.