Isaac Newton: Laws of motion from the law of God | Stephen Meyer on the Scientific Revolution

why there why then we had many sophisticated cultures before then the Romans built roads and aqueducts the Chinese had gunpowder and block printing the Egyptians built pyramids lots of sophisticated cultures prior to that period of time when suddenly you get figures like Johannes Kepler and Galileo and Robert Bole and then as we're going to talk about Newton and many many others this period that historians have dubbed the Scientific Revolution was in fact quite revolutionary well I'm here today with my good friend Steven Meyer uh I've known Steven for about uh six years and we've we've uh overlapped in many ways Stephen actually has a PHD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge in the UK he also got his master's degree in the philosophy of science and history from Cambridge and prior to that he he had majored uh in the US in in uh physics and geology and he worked as a geophysicist for several years before he went back to Cambridge to get his his uh uh Masters and PhD and today we're going to pick up this topic of Isaac Newton I had one other recent video about Isaac Newton and uh uh there seemed to be a lot of interest in it and then after that I found out that my good friend Steve is an expert in Isaac Newton I think having done a lot of writing about Isa is Newton and he can tell us more about that and right now Steve is is serves he's at The Discovery Institute and he's the director for the Center for Science and culture and he's also a senior research fellow there so um Steve I'm going to just turn it over to you and just tell us something about Isaac Newton and then I'll get into more specific questions well I should disclaim your description of me as an expert I did a lot of work on Newton in my Master's Degree and I wrote quite a lot about his U his work in uh my my new book Return of the god hypothesis and I I think that might be a good place to start because uh in the first couple chapters of the return of the god hypothesis I explain that um that many historians of science have come to the conclusion that uh that what we call the Scientific Revolution was a consequence of judeo-christian thinking that there were that that science arose in a a Western Christian Mill you for Christian and indeed biblical reasons some of the some of those reasons going back to the the Hebrew Bible the the a huge Jewish contribution to the rise of modern science and some coming from ideas that were developed in late medieval uh Catholicism in the great universities like Oxford and the University of Paris and uh and then also the reformers had a had a role there was a kind of a uh an ecumenical if you will uh Jewish Catholic Protestant um set of influences that helped give rise to modern science and one of the one of the ways that historians of science have sort of come to this is that there was a famous question posed by a Marxist historian of science named Joseph NM and he was asking the question well why did why did why did science arise in its modern form with its distinctive systematic methods of investigating nature in 16th and 17th century Europe why there why then we had many sophisticated cultures before then the Romans built roads and aqueducts the Chinese had gunpowder and block printing the Egyptians built pyramids um you had uh in in the lots of sophisticated cultures prior to that period of time when suddenly you get figures like Johannes Kepler and Galileo and Robert Bole and then as we're going to talk about Newton and many many others this period that historians have dubbed the Scientific Revolution was in fact quite revolutionary there was a very systematic approach to to investigating nature that arose then and when when people when historians have looked at that period they say they've they've noticed that the material conditions of for doing science uh existed in many cultures but what shifted what what the the what was the difference that made a difference was the presuppositions that people had about nature and about the relationship um between God and nature so for example a key idea was the idea of intelligibility this was the idea that if you studied nature there were patterns and Order and design that could be re that nature would re reveal if it was studied carefully and systematically why could we understand nature well the answer was that our minds had been made were made in the image of the same God who made the the natural order in the first place so we were made in IM the image of God therefore we had the capability of understanding the rationality the order and the design that God had built into nature there was a principle of Correspondence that our rationality could perceive the rational way that God had made the world and so that confidence in the intelligibility of nature gave rise to an experimental approach there was also this deep conviction that that because God was a god of order that the that nature was an orderly system and yet it was also an orderly system that was the consequence of God's choice this was sometimes called the voluntarist tradition in theology that God was a free agent he was Creator he made nature in an orderly way but he could have made it in a lot of different ways Newton discovered that gravity behaved according to an inverse Square law but it might have been an inverse Cube law or it might have been just a a specifically linear relationship between um mass and acceleration or whatever the forces were and so you had to go the point was you had to go and look Robert Bo Robert Bo said we shouldn't uh try to uh deduce what God must have done but we must go and look and see what he actually did do so there was in Greek science and in the early period of the Middle Ages a tendency to uh do armchair philosophizing about nature rather than developing sophisticated and and rigorous methods of empirical investigation and historians have linked that impulse towards empirical investigation to this idea of contingency that God could have made nature in a different way nature was a created order but it could have been ordered differently so we can't just deduce what the the Creator must have done we' got to go and look so for centuries coming out of Greek science there was the idea that that the perfect motion was a was a was spherical and so for centuries the uh the the the Greek and subsequent cosmologists assumed that the the Motions of the planets were perfectly spherical it but Kepler took looked at the data same data that people had for a long long time and said wait a minute instead of having circles within circles within circles this can all be explained much more simply as an ellipse why can't I mean God could have made an ellipse let's go so let's go and look and the the impulse to investigate empirically was a direct consequence of this idea of a contingent created order so you had three key assumptions that gave rise to modern science that historians have identified as far as in the presuppositional philosophical realm the first is that nature is intelligible by the human intellect second that nature is orderly because God is a god of order but thirdly that nature is also a contingent order because God is was perfectly free to make nature in whatever way he pleased so this was something that historians have identified and Newton kind of flows in that in that train of thought he's a he's a a figure of his time in that he's he is deeply informed by theological assumptions and a and his theological framework in the in the in the science that he pursues what I take for granted as a scientist but but there there's no reason why I should take it for granted is exactly what you're talking about that the science is consistent if I do it in my laboratory someone else can get the same thing done in their laboratory if they're following the same prescription that I've written and if it doesn't work in somebody else's laboratory then one of us had some other condition operating this is so firm that that uh um uh we we we immediately perceive if if another person is not getting the same result then either I didn't report something because uh I overlooked reporting it or I didn't know it was operating or they haven't reproduced my conditions but it should interfering condition or or factor of some some kind but the underlying assumption you're right is the Assumption of the uniformity of Nature and that was an assumption that came right out of judeo-christian the ology in fact there's a fantastic article that I read when I was in grad school called The Genesis of the concept of natural law by an historian science named Edward zilsel and he shows that the concept of the laws of nature there is a there is a notion of natural law that you find in in Greek and Roman thinkers but it's primarily one that applies to the moral realm it's the idea that there are there are moral principles that can be known that are natural to man that can be known by reason and you get this in the stoics you get this in the Greeks but the idea of laws that govern uh the natural order is something that you find first in the Hebrew Bible you find it in the Book of Job for example you find it in the book of Jeremiah and as the reformers in particular are rediscovering uh the the biblical doctrine of creation as they're as they're uh again emphasizing the Primacy of scripture they're discovering some of these ideas from the Hebrew Bible and this ends up informing their their approach to science the concept of the laws of nature is something that's that's critical and uh to the Scientific Revolution and it's understood by the scientific you know these early scientists they were called natural philosophers at the time that there are laws of nature because there is a Divine lawgiver there that God is as the book of Hebrews says sustaining the universe by the word of his power so the regularities we see in nature the regular conqu course of nature is a consequence and was in their view a consequence of divine action that this is a way that God is holding the universe together these regularities are manifestation of his of his character as a god of order his consistency and of his power and so this this was the concept and it was an explicitly biblical idea this idea of laws of nature that something is responsible for these regularities that we see so then as the scriptures clearly reveal that when there's certain Miracles God has now gone outside his normal working and that's what makes it miraculous so there's there's two types of of Miracles God can use for bring bring on a storm a lightning storm well lightning storms can occur naturally or lightning storms can occur if God wanted it to occur at a certain time in a certain moment and then there's another type of Miracle where Jesus walks on water for example or his resurrection from from the dead where he intercedes uh uh with something that's totally unusual uh uh and then and then uh uh but it's in those instances where he reveals to us those are unique occasions or those are sparse occasions and so we can have total Reliance on the reliability of things unless God has chosen to move outside of that where he reveals that in the scriptures yeah for a special purpose the the U medieval theologians had a distinction that captures what you're saying they talked about the potena absoluta the the absolute or Fiat power of God which is manifested in biblical Miracles and the potencia ordinata the ordinary power of God which is manifested in the regularities of nature which are what which we normally see and biblically speaking Miracles are always are are only detectable because people are aware of the this ordinary the ordinary regularities people often say well these were the they of course people believed in Miracles back then they didn't know about the laws of nature well they knew about the the the ongoing regular Concourse of Nature and it was precisely because of that that they could recognize something was wondrous which is the the root of the word miracle something that's that's different I also it's um just it's an interesting thing to Riff on a little bit if you don't mind but I take the view that Miracles are not actually violation violations of the laws of nature they are rather instances of agent causation the in this case the Divine agent acting within the Matrix of of the of natural law and let me let me illustrate um you may remember the milans oil drop experiment in physics where you get you the the physicist um gets a oil drop he puts an electrostatic charge on it causes it to to levitate and you might think oh well that's a violation of the law of gravity well no the law of gravity is acting on the oil drop but there's a counterv force because of the electrostatic charge and the field it's in that's causing it to to levitate so there's so there's a force pulling down and a force pulling up the law of gravity has not been violated what's happened instead is that the experimentor has introduced some other causal factors in opposition to the law and the two things are operating at the same time so biblical miracles in a similar way are not one more example if uh I I am at a pool table and about to hit a shot and if someone knows the laws of momentum exchange and has knows the exact initial force that I'm going to apply to the the billiard ball you could calculate where where the balls will go um but if at the moment I take the shot someone shakes the tap then all bets are off it isn't a violation of the law of momentum exchange that the balls don't go where they were calculated to go because there's an interfering condition now that's been introduced by an agent and in my view a Biblical Miracle is an instance where God as the Divine agent is acting as an agent within the Matrix of natural law that he otherwise sustains and upholds he's not violating the laws of nature he's acting as an agent in the same way we do when we cause something unexpected to happen because we in as it were enter the experiment and so you if you take for example the the The Parting of the Red Sea in the book of Exodus The Exodus text very carefully describes God's action in those terms it says that for and the Lord caused an East Wind to blow he enters the natural order and acts as an agent within that he's not violating the law of gravity as soon as he ceases to cause the winds to blow the waters come back down so it's um I think there's a sometimes a misconception about what a miracle is it's not a violation of natural law it's it's God uh introducing a new event or causal factor into that Matrix okay let me ask you specifically about that though the scriptures say that it was like the water was like walls on either side of them what do we do with that God caused a very powerful East Wind to blow okay um there is a there is a a point at which you know the the the force would be sufficient to hold the water apart um it the idea is that the scripture very specifically attributes the event to an action of God not to a violation of the laws that we normally see at work but to to a special action okay tell tell me the action of Jesus walking on water don't know but he I mean gravity was still working on the disciples in the boat right yeah well pet Peter was able to defy it for a few minutes he was exerting some sort of force in contradiction to gravity that gravity didn't stop working in the rest of the world when this was happening right right yeah yeah yeah so so it it's our God is amazing of special Divine action something that God is doing something he's he's not saying oh suddenly the universe is chaotic you know and you know you don't have the the planets start to fly off from their um out out of their orbits the everything is being constant but God is acting within that Matrix tell tell me something about about Newton's early life give us first of all the the time period so that we know where where Newton lived the time period and something about his early life that that may have uh established his his interest in in the scriptures yeah it's a f he he has a fascinating life he's born in 1642 the same year that Galileo died and one one Wag has said that it was as if someone of that genius needed to be on the planet at all time so Galileo dies Newton's born later in the year on Christmas day um he's he's he he's conceived earlier that year but his father dies before he's born and one of the things you can see in Newton's theology is that he's very very attracted to God the father he's the and so this is the the father plays a huge role in his theology we'll get back to that I think later in any case um he's a sickly child it doesn't look at first as if he's going to survive but he does and then at the age of three his mother enters into a marriage of convenience and the man who marries her makes a condition of her coming to live with him that uh that she uh leave young Isaac behind with relatives and he's raised in his village um not by his mother until the The Stepfather dies at age 11 his mother comes home for a time and then he's sent off to a grammar school um and there he studies he's somewhat um uh undistinguished IND distinguished as a student except he has a facility for making machines and he's he's boarding with an apothecary and so he's learning about putting together mixtures of various substances and chemicals and and he makes various kinds of homemade machines and eventually the Headmaster at his school recognizes that he really has uh quite a genius and so they exercise influence and he's off to Cambridge at the age of 18 um so that's that would be 1662 his tutor at Cambridge is a man named Isaac Barrow and Barrow is the first older of the Lucasian uh chair of mathematics and physics at at Cambridge Stephen Hawking who died recently was the holder of that same chair passed through many hands by that time in any case Barrow tests Newton on math in mathematics In 1664 he would have been at Cambridge about two years by that time and finds that he's actually somewhat deficient he doesn't he hasn't had any uid he hasn't had geometry but he does have some aptitude now the remarkable thing to me is I've kind of reviewed some of the biographical details of his life is that Newton then has this uh Anis marabous they call it the his miraculous year the plague comes to London in 1666 and Cambridge gets shuttered and and students are sent home and he sent home to his um town ship Lincolnshire and in and he works in his family home for a year and sometime between 1664 when he's found to be deficient in mathematics by his tutor Isaac Barrow and 1666 he has mastered the whole Corpus of Western mathematics from the Greeks with their geometry all the way through deart with analytical geometry which sets him up to make the biggest of the first of his biggest breakthroughs which his his development of the calculus and his abil and with that the you know whole idea of of of measuring the area under an irregular curved surface which was a problem that had Bes seted mathematicians from the Greeks all the way through to to deart so both the the first um inklings of both his integral and differential calculus or developed in in that year 1666 when he's working on his own in his family home that that's that's almost like things shut down for Co and he had to go home and it was exactly a CO you know he's locked up for covid exactly um the other thing I should mention about uh well two other things during that same year he also sketches out his ideas about universal gravitation which he then does not publish until 1687 which is the year the pipia is published and it's not until he let me let me just just back this up a little bit so when he deres calculus so Mo most of us take this in senior year in high school or freshman year in college and and uh he doesn't take these classes he derives it somebody had to derive it first and so so so he deres this yeah he invents he invents or I mean some many mathematicians say he would he discovered it you know he discovered it right he discovers calculus and and and and uh so what how old is he at this time well it's 1666 so he's 24 years old amazing okay and two years prior he's found to be he's found in need of Remediation in in in basic mathematics okay I mean it's extraordinary it's really extraordinary and his tutor Isaac Barrow interestingly and this is something I just discovered was tutored by John Ray now John Ray along with Robert Bole is one of the two founders of what what is known as uh uh British natural theology Ry wrote a book called the wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation he was a botanist he was also the founder of modern botany and he had this great two volume set I've got an early edition of the first volume and um Rey was the tutor of Isaac Barrow and so he inculcated into Barrow the conviction that nature properly understood reveals the reality and attributes of God that's the idea of natural theology that nature tells us something about God we can learn about God from studying nature and this expresses another one of the convictions of these early founders of modern science the idea of the two books nature is intelligible because it's like a book it's been just as just as God has revealed himself through scripture and we can read and understand scripture because we've been made in His image and he's communicating to us in language and we're creatures that use language because we are uniquely Made In His Image and there's this emphasis on the word that God communicates through the word but he also communicates through his works and his works are uh almost an intelligible word it's almost like a a separate language like in Psalm 19 where it says the heavens declare the nature or the the glory of God and they they pour forth speech it says in the psalm and these so the founders of modern science this is coming out of not only it's not this isn't an idea that just starts in the 16th and 17th century you find this in aquinus you find it in those those theologians in the late medieval period so but it's a it's a a founding idea of modern science and Barrow picks this up from his tutor uh Ray and then he in turn inculcates this with Newton so Newton is very much influenced he's the grand his Grand tutor was John Ray the founder of British natural theology the idea that you could the the wisdom of God is Manifest in the works of creation so when when Newton publishes his great pipia or principia depending on how you like your Latin pronounced what he's talking about is the principles that God built into nature that can be expressed mathematically that reveal in in turn his rationality so the the pipia is a as my Cambridge supervisor told me uh it was a theological project from beginning to end and he reveals that later in in 1713 when he writes the uh the general scholium which is a theological epilogue to the prinkipia that's published 26 years after the the the the prinkipia itself so uh and here's the fun thing that I just learned we have a new study center in England and we purchased a property our Institute Discovery Institute purchased a property in Cambridge from my old College St Catherine's St Katherine's was the college we learned since purchasing of the of of the great John Ray and so there's some interesting things coming full circle because of course modern the modern theory of intelligent design is a form of natural theology so so when when did he start becoming so enamored with the Bible was this is this in his as child as a child or is it early teen years or was it there at Cambridge well very early on because you have to um remember the context here the 16 or the 17th century I recently heard a talk by Oz Guinness who said the 17th century was was a Biblical Century it was a century of the Bible you see it in the scientist like like John Ray and uh Robert Bole Isaac Newton you see it in in the poets like John Dunn uh you see it in the politics because this is the century where there's the English Civil War and there's the idea of of the theological or the political philosophy of some of the theologians the Scottish reformer uh Samuel Rutherford writes the book Lex Rex which is the idea that the law is King that even the king must be under the law and so this whole push towards putting the making the king accountable and the push towards parliamentary democracy which creates the conditions of the English Civil War and eventually the Glorious Revolution in 1688 um is is all a manifestation of an outworking I would say of the Protestant Reformation which is this kind of rediscovery of the scripture as the basis of of of Christian uh practice and and and so Newton is uh a young man at the time the English Civil War is going on and that's you know the forces of the part the the parliamentarians who are low Church Protestants looking to scripture as their basis of authority versus in this case the high Church uh Catholics who are still in believing in the divine right of kings and you have this kind of tension so Newton is coming of age in a time when the Bible is very much in the center of public discourse and the Puritan theology that is in many ways behind the the English Revolution is also the theology that he's exposed to as as a very young man and so he's he's he's reading the scriptures as a young person even as he's inventing machines and eventually then learning mathematics and he's already by by the time he's developing his the his ideas about gravitation thinking about them in the context of a natural theological project he wants to reveal the reality of God through what we would call his science what was called then as natural philosophy and no doubt he's in that the in you see the influence of Isaac Barrow and through Barrow the influence of John Ray this is interesting to me so he's trying to to reveal more about the script through his work through his work in the Natural Sciences correct well correct and remember that by the end of his life he had written over a million words of theological or biblical commentary he wrote more on the Bible than he wrote about the heavens about science and yet he wrote the Optics you I mean he had the first breakthrough uh theories and work experimental work on un light uh he invented the binomial theorem the calculus U he developed the three laws of motion he developed the um universal gravitation which to me is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of science because it induced this huge controversy which we can talk about but um you know he's tremendously productive scientifically but he was if anything more interested in theology interesting interesting let let me pivot for a moment and just not a complete outlier Jim in the history of science with your joint interests in both the Bible and science no I've I'm learning that I'm not a complete outlier at all there's there's actually a lot of people that that share this um uh there's there's people that mock it but they it's usually because they they they don't understand much it says let me ask you this um what's what's the role of design in Newton's work and and how how did he make these design arguments well that very good question the the these early founders of modern science Kepler in particular uh Robert Bole um uh John Ray and and many others presuppose there is a design in nature uh and you see this in the metaphors they use to design to to describe nature they describe nature boil describe nature as a great clock a great like the the clock tower in strawberg and it was highly regular and orderly in its in its function but there were mechanisms that you could you could discern and discover and that that explained those regularities but if there was underlying the regularities of nature there were mechanical processes then clearly there must have been a designer in the same way that there was a designer of that great clock in strawberg so the nature as a clock is a metaphor that presupposes design but Bole also discovered things that allowed him to develop design arguments in fact Ted Davis the terrific historian of science at Messiah Co College who's written both on Bole and Newton says that in in many ways uh Bole is the founder of the Contemporary intelligent design movement that his his way of reasoning about nature is very much like those of us who are advocating for intelligent design today wow um Kepler same thing he presupposed design but then he found evidence of design in the in the beautiful way in which the planetary system had been put together Newton and so did did they have some descriptions about how this H H how you recognize what is design versus something that that occurred by Randomness they did but they were slightly more intuitive than for example the kind of rigorous development of of design detection criteria that you find in the work of someone like our colleague William demsky who I think is in a way cracked the problem but you find in in Newton some very persuasive design arguments uh in the in the Optics he argues for the design of the eye be because of the way you can because of the way upon careful study you perceive it is possible to perceive that the eye was put together in anticipation of the chromatic properties of light that it's a beautifully intricate mechanism but it seems to anticipate the way light light behaves and so there's a there's a a correspondence that he thinks suggests that a third party has been involved that a mind is necessary in the most famous line in the in the general scholium to the prinkipia is the design argument he makes about the stability of the solar system and there he says that this most beautiful system of sun planets and comets could only proceed from the council and Dominion of an intelligent and Powerful being now what what he is arguing here and this is often Mis understood many people have claimed that he was guilty of a god of the gaps argument that he invoked God to um correct an instability in the in the in the orbits of the planets um and I can we can talk about that because I've scoured the prinkipia looking for a place where he invokes special Divine action to fix the planetary system he does he does nothing of the kind he actually says it's it's stable across a vast track of time there's no need to invoke special Divine action to correct the system but he invokes Divine action to explain the origin of the system it's a it's an initial condition fine-tuning argument that he's making that you can't account the the balance of the planets the stability of the system of whole is exquisite it's improbable in the extreme when you consider all the different ways the forces could have interacted and and therefore allowed the planets to fly off into uh an unstable or or random in random ways so it's very much like the fine-tuning argument that that physicists are making today about the the the the initial conditions of the universe and the the laws and constants of physics that they're incredibly improbable and yet they there there the specific uh Arrangement or values of those parameters are absolutely necessary to an uh a significant functional outcome and so you have a kind of uh so it's it's a it's a persuasive but fairly intuitive design argument that he makes in both the general scholium and then in the in the Optics let me turn now to some controversies there's there's several controversies that have Arisen in uh Newton's life uh tell me about this controversy over gravitation well this is the big one um he he publishes the pipia in 1687 it's interesting I was when I was doing my Master's year in Cambridge it was 1987 and there were posters up all over town about the 300 year anniversary of the publication of the pipia and I was as a physics student always very annoying to my my uh major professors because I I had had a lot of philosophy I was taking a lot of philosophy at the same time and I would I always felt I didn't understand what was being presented in the physics classes I was getting good grades on the tests but I I didn't feel I really understood it so I would say but you know they tell me about some physical phenomenon I say why does that happen and then they'd say well they give me some deeper explanation I said but that's equally mysterious why does that happen and I kept asking the why you I was like that annoying three-year-old in your neighborhood why why why finally one of my Prof professors who had himself had a lot of philosophy of science took me aside and he said okay I get what's going on with you he said when you say why and I give you an underlying mechanism and then you say why again and say well but why does that work that way and and I give you an underlying force and then you say why again and I say we don't know why that's just the phenomena that is the point that's when you can stop asking why okay because that means nobody else understands why either so I and so I took a deep breath oh so I'm not the only one I thought I was crazy so I get to Cambridge and in my first semester I'm taking a course on the history of physics and it's the first time after a four-year Physics degree that I start to feel like I really understand what's going on in physics because as you tell the story of how one Theory gave rise to another you actually are put in the minds of the scientists and why they came up with different concepts like when the things that hit me was you know understanding Einstein's gonan his thought experiments when I learned relativity I was just told about the M Michaels and moay experiment and then an equation was given and I thought well okay I see sort of how it describes things and I can put the numbers in and crank it out and get the right answer but how did Einstein ever come up with the idea of special relativity well it turns out he had these highly intuitive thought experiments anyway I digress same thing was true with with Newton gravitation I was learning about the controversy over gravitation here's what happened Newton formulates his famous inverse Square law the force of gravity is inversely propor is proportional to the the the mass of the of one body times the mass of another the sun interacting with the moon for example or the and then but inversely proportional to the distance between them squared so we've got the Earth or the moon affecting the tides on Earth Earth but they're separated by a distance and the force of gravity is proportional to the the two masses the moon and the and the and and the Earth of time multiplying them together divided by the distance between them squared and that's where the rub came in because the distance between them means that there's no physical interaction we get so used to this we don't even think about it if I used to do this in class I I think about it as a chemist we I live in that world yeah yeah I drop my pen it falls I drop my pen it falls but there's nothing pushing the pen it and the the Moon is I forgot in the distance I used to know it but it's quite a long ways from Earth and as it moves it affects the Water Mass on the planet even the land mass is that there's a there's a tidal action how is that Force transmitted well there's no pushing and pulling and the at this time in the history of science the so-called mechanical philosophers like Robert Bole and uh and godfried liet and others uh deart these early scientists were getting rid of the old medieval way of explaining things and replacing it with a Reliance UNP pointing to mechanisms we explain things by mechanical action so you know we with Robert Bo's got his gas law well what explains PV equals nrt pressure is proportional to temperature times volume well it's that there are core pusles of gas that are interacting with each other in certain ways and so okay uh as things get hotter they jiggle faster and that explains pressure increases you've got a mechanism that's the point and that's superior to the old evil way of explaining things where if you said um I'm going to give you opium and it's going to put you to sleep why does the Opium put you to sleep because it has a dormitive virtue it has a sleep inducing virtue why does it put you to sleep because it has the ability to put you to sleep the mechanical philosophers the early scientists thought that's totally circular that doesn't explain anything that's just renaming the there that's just naming the as the cause it's just taking the effect and then renaming it and calling it The cause here's an important question why would anyone believe that a man named Jesus died and rose from the dead if you don't believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ send an email to tour drjames to.org and we'll set up a meeting and I will tell you about why I embrace the resurrection of Jesus Christ why does uh bread nourish because it has a nutritive a nutritive virtue so the mechanical philosophy comes along and says we're getting rid of those Scholastic they call them Scholastic occult properties this was just unintelligible word salad Scholastic occult we're gonna get rid of unintelligible word salad we're going to point to actual physical mechanisms to explain the behavior of natur of the natural world okay big advance in our way of doing science and then Newton comes along and and he has this elegant mathematical proof that the same forces that are causing the bending of orbits in space are causing the or causing the same Force that's at work in Space by which we can describe the bending of orbits is the for is the forces causing things to fall on the Earth but then that's a but then there's a problem as he as he describes that mathematic ically you've got this inverse Square term which implies that the force is being transmitted through a distance without any physical interaction and the mechanical philosophers whose theory he's critiquing he's critiquing a a theory of gravity that has mechanical interaction it's called The Vortex Theory and dekart was a proponent of this was the idea that there's this this invisible substance but it's a physical thing called ether and it's pushing the planets around like uh a swirling vortex in your bathtub if you drop a stick you know in in the toilet and flush it it's going to spin around and around because the water's pushing the stick that's what they thought was causing gravity before Newton and he starts he starts the prinkipia with a famous line he says that the theory of vortices is beset by many difficulties and then he and then he enumerates them and comes up with this new theory of gravity but it's a theory that involves action at a distance and this makes the mechanical philosophers um react and very vigorously and and so give me more detail how did how did he Envision this force between two bodies at such a great distance when you can't see anything what what is what is the the force that that's that's what the controversy is about so he has a great rival and that's God godfried liet liet invents the calculus independently in in 1684 Newton has invented it probably in that first that great miraculous year of 1666 but he doesn't publish anything about it until he uses the calculus to help explicate his theory of gravity in 1687 and so you can see right away there's going to be what we call a priority dispute between the two men and this is very intense and it it lasts for until until liet passes away it's it's so that's in the backdrop but liet is also a committed mechanical philosopher someone who thinks that proper scientific explanations should involve pushing and pulling physical interaction and so he he critiques Newton's Theory and he has a specific objection he says it's bringing occult properties back into science well an occult property is one of these Scholastic naming games so what causes what causes uh gravitational attraction Sir Isaac says uh says uh liet although probably Isaac Newton isn't hasn't been kned yet but he says so what's causing it and uh here's the problem if I take my pen and I drop it I used to do this with my students I I drop my wallet in class I say what's causing this to fall and they'd say well gravity and I'd say okay great you're all good sign what what is gravity and it's well it's it's it's what causes things to fall it it's it's well okay so what's causing the Thing to Fall gravity what is gravity it's the thing that causes things to fall um so you you you have a circular naming game again we've got gravitational attraction as the effect and we're going to explain it by renaming the effect as its own cause gravit gravitational force um and Alan says that we have not Advanced now now this is taking us back to the Scholastic word game Scholastic alal properties either that he says or you're making recourse to a Perpetual Miracle because the one thing you're not doing you're is you're not positing a material interaction there's no pushing and pulling the Earth is not pushing the Moon the Moon is not pushing the water on the earth so you you there's three options you can have Scholastic word games you can have a mechanical explanation as befits a scientist or a proper mechanical philosopher or you might be saying I hope you're not saying this Newton but you might be saying that God is constantly at work creating generating gravitational attraction between the bodies that you're describing with your math so what was the outcome so no mechanical explanation Newton in a in a in a in a very sustained discourse it's fascinating it's called the the the liess Clark correspondence Newton did not Dain to directly engage liet he wrote he gave a colleague uh Samuel Clark his uh arguments and then Clark wrote them in letters to to liess and they went back and forth having an argument about this in letters in letters fascinating that's that's better than in discussion because now we have it recorded they didn't have all there your listeners is a fascinating thing to get to to get your hands on some of the the Deep discussions that are taking place between proponents of intelligent design and theistic evolutionists are actually already uh being argued in this correspondence it's very interesting in any case um the correspondence goes back and forth and the one thing that's that's clear Newton is not affirming is a mechanical explanation when press he says hypothesis non fingo which means in the Latin was I don't Fain to know a cause I don't I I I don't offer a causal explanation but what I can do he says is I can describe grav gravitational motion or attraction with with mathematical Precision that's what we often do yes to this day that's what we do to this day and with all the fundamental forces of physics strong and weak nuclear forces electromagnetism and gravitation we do not have mechanistic explanations for what causes those forces that's a problem that's with us today in science we haven't gotten around that um Einstein replaced Newton's ideas about gravitation with the idea of uh the idea that massive bodies cause a curvature of space so a mass changes empty space now we also have ideas of gravitons but gravitons are massless particles and they're not pushers they're pullers they're they attract so we we really haven't gotten away from this mystery that the fundamental forces of physics cannot be explained by underlying massive mechanical systems they're not that sort of thing but we do have precise mathematical descriptions for how they affect nature you know back when nanotechnology there started really coming Ming forward I had to interact with physicists and just simple operations thinking about simple things we didn't understand each other because we used different terminology and and uh so two two bodies two electrons you take two electrons and you try to push them together and they repel and as chemists we talk about this as electrostatic forces electrostatic forces and so you have these two negative charges and they repel physicists were talking about virtual photons the virtual photon is going from here to here and then from here to here and and uh um so it's the same effect but neither of us had a good physical description that could make the other party satisfied and then we both both realized neither of us has a good physical description to this we were just naming it by the terminology that that had come about in our field yeah positive and negative charges in in chemistry are essentially metaphors right yeah you know we we Define those ideas by operationally by what they do but we don't really know what is causing the the action itself not in a me not in a materialistic or mechanistic sense and and so okay so uh Newton is very clear I'm not proposing a mechanistic explanation liit then thinks he's got him over a barrel and and so he presses the argument well if not that then isn't aren't you returning to Scholastic word games and Newton says no because I'm offering a ma a precise mathematical description of what always happens and that's an advance to science the Scholastics couldn't do that but then that still leaves unanswered what is the cause in his correspondence with because he doesn't want to be accused of scientific heresy of not having a mechanism and how many of us have been asked well what's the mechanism for intelligent design um he he he demures and says hypothesis non fingo but then in private correspondence with a man named Bishop Bentley who is preparing the f a um a lecture on natural theology that was that was um commissioned by Robert oil Bentley asks him well what what do you think is is the cause and and because he says Bentley is basically says the way I read you is you're saying that this is an instance of of divine action that God is constantly at work and Newton and I I go through the some of the letters in this and and Newton essentially reveals that yeah that's how he he's thinking of it too I'm very glad you're saying it this way because that's my view as well and when I was when I was writing two long essays on this with my cabridge supervisor my Master's year he he told me two things he said if you miss Newton's theism you've missed everything and secondly that that Newton's view of the cause of gravity was in his words constant Spirit action that gravitational force because there's no there there there's no material explanation for it but it must have certain attributes it must be capable of ensuring that gravitational force is orderly precisely describable by mathematics that it acts instantaneously at a distance and that it's acting everywhere throughout the Universe and there's only one immaterial agent who could be responsible for that and that that's God Almighty was he positing then a god of the gaps well it is a gap there's no possibility of a materialistic explanation it's so he's positing a best explan nation in this case um he's not positing a gap to fill our understanding of how nature works in the sense of what are the regularities he's not saying um he he's positing an ultimate explanation for the laws of nature themselves the fundamental laws are not explained materialistically therefore they there must be something immaterial that's responsible that has certain attributes which only God possesses but there there are occasions where we we later find more details about these sorts of things that stumped us previously and then there's new discoveries and we learn more of course and people always say that Newton's theological views were a science stopper you know that they accuse him of being but there's been no scientist more productive in the history of science IAC Newton and and they were a science starter this framework what you could call not not a he had he developed design arguments which were a form of natural theology how nature points to God and in a way his argument or at least the way his um colleague Bishop Bentley made the argument for him was a natural theological argument but what Newton also had was a Theology of nature he had a a set of presuppositions about how God interacted with the natural world that informed and motivated His science such that many historians of science have said that his PR ipia was an expression of a theological project he was trying to show through his mathematical work the underlying order uh and indeed mathematical order of nature reflecting the mind of the great geometer the great uh The God Who who worked through U through these mathematically describable regularities yeah and and just so people can understand I mean there there there's still so much mystery around some of the basic things that we consider in science what John Lennox always likes to throw out is he'll say so what is energy and right away people will give a a description mathematically but he says but what is it what is it and then it people are stumped it's you're stumped we find many quantities fundamental quantities in physics operationally by what they do is a good example we use kul's law to describe you know Electro electrostatic interactions but what is actually producing the interactions we know not hypothesis non fingo and so Newton was the first to recognize this and I think that's that's something very deep and when you say well he did he did invoke and I think he I think he did in he was he was subtle in public about this more explicit in private but he invoked God as an ultimate explanation never precluding the need for more and more proximate explanations because there's always another layer you can pull back as to how nature is working Newton's law Newton's inverse Square law was eventually replaced with a more comprehensive concept of gravity with with uh with Einstein's formulation of general relativity but there's still an occult element in general relativity how is it that a massive something causes a curvature to spatial nothing I mean space is not a physical well we can it's a physical quantity but it's not physical in the sense of a massive thing moving something instead it's rather it's altered by mass but it is not a mass so how can we give a mechanistic explanation for the curvature of space when when when space a mechanism always involves a massive body well a massive body is doing something to space it's still very mysterious you know this whole idea like I said of a virtual Photon think about that explanation it's a virtual Photon and and and so it it it's really quite nondescript and uh uh but these are the terms that are thrown around today what about what about dark matter I mean you think about these things that that you know 85% of of the matter that's out there might be what's called Dark Matter we cannot detect it we have no means today of detecting it but we assume it's there because of a difference because of something missing so we assume it must be there now that's not to say that we one day won't know but there's a lot of mysteries in science that that when you get to the core of it we named an effect we see an effect and we posit the existence of something which if it existed would help us explain the effect we see so much of science is indirectly inferential in that we we we uh have to posit unobservable entities in order to explain observable phenomena and we affirm provisionally the existence of those unobservable entities uh on the basis of their explanatory power so that that's another way in which science is much more mysterious than people realize um I had a there's also a category ER that a lot of us physicists will make um I'm not a PhD physicist just did my undergrad so maybe I'll I'll I I don't know whether to to blame the physicist or to or to include myself in this but it's an easy easy thing to fall into we we talk about the laws of nature as if they were causing things to happen but if you look at Einstein's inverse Square law it doesn't cause gravitation gravitational attraction or cause gravitational force it describes the amount of force that will be present given the other parameters that we can specify it it it's descriptive and to say that the the law of gravity is causing something to happen is a category mistake it'd be like saying that the longitude and latitude lines on the map cause the Himalayan Mountains to rise no they may help us locate where the Himalayas are on the map but they don't cause anything on the map to happen they're descriptors not causal entities and and physicists repeatedly follow into the the the the Trap of talking about the laws as if they were causal rather than descriptive just a quick reminder this organization is run totally by volunteers but we do have to pay for the production work if you could help us out by going to give. Jesus and science.org we'd appreciate it or you can click in the description box below if you can't give we certainly understand but please just give us a thumbs up and click subscribe thank you I see what you mean you there there's so much out there when you begin to think of it so for example sound sound is so so the airwaves are getting pushed and that is then impinging Upon A a little bar inside my ear that's causing it to vibrate but there really is no sound there there's a there's a wind that's causing this this this pushing of air is causing this vibration the sound is in my own mind in my own brain there there's there's so when the tree falls in the woods does it make a sound if there's nobody there to hear it actually the sound is is a construct of the brain of our mind or of the physical gray matter the brain because of that little vibration in that's been pushed by Airwaves but all of these descriptions these are these are something that that are in the brain so there's so much we don't know or that we don't appreciate mechanical action there at least in so far as the vibration is impinging on the bones in the ear right but then those bones produce an electrical uh an electro electromagnetic signal which the Mind interprets at the interface of the mindbrain the mindbrain interface and then we experience something but our experience of sound is in some way wholly disconnected from Vib the vibrations of the stuff you know so it's I I remember getting to interview when I was very early in my career Sir John Eckles The Great Brain physiologist and he was a mindbody dualist um and he believed that the the the brain was an instrument of thought that the Mind used and that there was this mysterious there was a mystery at the interface between conscious experience and the Brain which is sending these signals so in he used this example that you just used of the of U the of um sound coming to to the eardrum or light coming to the optic nerve and he says so it's tapping away at a particular frequency and eventually it goes to it stops and it and and the mind interprets that at some place and I remember getting my eyes examined in the you know the the the optomologist office and I was asking him about well how how how the Vision Works and and then I said okay that's really cool he showed me the structure of the eye and the optic nerve and where the signal went and I said okay yeah but where's the picture and he said what do you mean I said where's the picture where's the thing we see and he said nobody knows that so yeah yeah so let me let me let me kind of shift this a little bit you know I had a I I had one other uh interview with with a a a gentleman from from Europe up about Newton and and uh this is where I first learned about uh how much Newton had written surrounding the Bible and one of the things that he asked is is uh that that we he brought up that that he had said that there was not an Orthodoxy uh with Newton that that uh um specifically did he believe in the Trinity or or in in this case was he an Aryan and so Define for us what Aryan means and uh just just unpack that for us because I know that when when I saw that I I it it it was was a bit interesting and and I just want want to get your Insight since you've read so much yeah Newton was a very deep thinker he was an original thinker and he had he wrote over a million words about theology or biblical interpretation I have his commentary on the Book of Daniel and it's actually an extraordinary piece of work he knew Latin he knew Greek he knew Hebrew and uh so it's a very sophisticated biblical exegesis he was at the top of his game in that field as well um there the the there's been a long-standing controversy about whether or not his and I'm going to bring up just a definition of arianism to help our discussion but whether or not he was an Orthodox Christian or a heterodox Christian or a heretic um and there was a there was a a 4th Century heresy defined by the C Council of niia known in within the history of Christianity um called aryanism and aryanism is the heresy that declared that Christ is not truly Divine but a created being according to uh and this was propagated by an alexandrian uh that would be an Egyptian um uh uh Theologian named AR Aras at the time now it's a really complicated question in Newton because he wrote so much and his thinking about theological questions developed over time and so let me back up with a put putting the discussion in a broader context you often hear about Newton being the the uh founder of the new Ian mechanical system and people claim that he was a mechanist in his philosophy of science well we've already seen that isn't true because his most foundational contribution to science the the prinkipia developed a non-mechanistic cosmology a non-mechanistic way of understanding the the this the Universe um he was a mathemati if you will he he he thought you could describe things mathematically without uh bringing in without always providing mechanistic explanations and there's a terrific historian of science uh Ted Davis who's written a wonderful short article or scholarly article called new Newton's rejection of the Newtonian worldview uh or the Newtonian mechanistic philosophy so Newton though he was claimed to be a mechanist he wasn't a mechanist people have said he was a deist he certainly wasn't aest because he believed that the laws of nature revealed God's constant Spirit action God didn't just act at the beginning he was constantly involved in upholding the universe by the word of his power so defin for us deist deism is the idea that God created the universe at the beginning and then let it run on its own like a great machine okay it's closely related to the the mechanism idea um and and God had nothing more to do with the universe after he created it well Newton thought that God was was holding the universe together by the word of his power in the general scolum he said in in God in all things move and are and have their being so he has this idea of a constantly sustaining the constantly sustaining creative power of God so he's not a deist he was also said well then then uh that but he was that but he wasn't a Christian well I have his book on on on Daniel and much of it has to do with Daniel's prediction in chapter nine of the timing of the coming of the Messiah and he spends chapters explaining how Daniel's prophetic timetable was conf was fulfilled by the coming of Jesus Christ so he's some kind of a Christian but the question is did he believe that Christ was divine was or Andor created well it turns out um and I can read a quote he clearly believed that Jesus was was divine that he was that he was um partaking of of the deity along with the Holy Spirit and God the Father um let me just this was just we're we're doing a film treatment on Newton right now and um so where are you reading from this is just this is just from a treatment this is um from the new Newton Corpus he says uh so this is just one line um uh from the Yehuda manuscript number 14 in the new Newton Corpus he says so there is Divinity in the father Divinity in the son and Divinity in the Holy ghost and yet there are not three divinities but one Divinity so by saying there is but one God the father of all things I am not depriving the Son and the Holy Ghost of divinity well that sounds like that's that's pretty clear that's pretty clear that sounds like he believes in in in the Divinity of Christ and The Trinity now let me tell you just since you invited me to do the interview I've done a deep dive and there's two articles that your listeners might want to get a of if they would like to do a deeper dive on this subject and it's pretty fascinating precisely because Newton did write so much on Theology and secondly because his theology was such a prime motivator for his science the two are it's all one project in his mind he's trying to understand reality which for him includes the God who created it okay so there are there there is um some things that that we can attest because of the Newton's writings he certainly believed in Christ as the Messiah he believed that Christ was the savior he beli believed that Christ was the Divine mediator between God and man he believed that Christ was worthy of worship and he believed that Angels were not he did however in the in the 1670s um seemed to affirm that Christ was created by the father so unlike the Aryans who believe that Christ was uh created and not Divine in the 1670s in his early writings on theology he seemed to affirm that Christ was divine but he was created so that's different than the the Orthodox Creeds because Christ is begotten not made according to Orthodox Creeds but oddly and I just I just was reading this in an article today I'll give you the titles of these two articles one is by a fantastic historian of science named Steven snowland um who thinks that that uh Newton was a non-trinitarian and another by an equally fantastic historian of ideas by Thomas fitzmier who thinks that Newton was a trinitarian but had an alternate way of formulating the Trinity different than was formulated at the at the Council of NAA in My Views I I love Steven Snow's work but on this one issue I mean he's a fantastic Newton scholar he knows far more about Newton than I do uh he studied with our the same supervisor we were both supervised by Simon Schaffer in Cambridge me and my Master's year but Steve for his PhD um it in looking at the two treatments from these two historians of science they basically agree about what Newton says but they give different uh they have different takes on what it means and so I've been trying to get to the bottom of this myself and I'm not by any means the the last word on this but it appear um Fitz Meer argues that whereas in the 1670s Newton did seem to argue that that Christ was created but still Divine which is half of half Aran because the arens believed he was not created or he was created and not divine uh Newton affirms his divinity but thinks he's created by the 167 or 1690s he's he is repudiating someone else or someone else's view who affirms that that Christ was not created and affirms instead that he was eternally existent so it seems that there's a there was a development in Newton theology that moved him more towards believing in Christ as both Divine and created and therefore clearly not an Aryan even though that's a very very common view among among many newton biographers now where I think Newton departs from what many traditional Christians have held is his way of formulating the Trinity if you go back to the Nan Creed the idea was that that that God the father and Christ and the Holy Spirit were of one substance they were of the same nature or substance and the the the idea here is um the Greek there's a Greek word for substance that's affirmed in the Creeds and what what Newton objected to at least was that this formulation of the Trinity based on these Greek philosophical categories remember in his work on gravitation he doesn't want to invoke some cause like that's that's occult he just wants to stick to the phenomenon I see what I see the movements there's something moving the planetory bodies I'll describe it mathematically but I hypothesis non fingo I don't know what the cause of it is in the same way in his theology he says well Christ is divine the holy spirit is divine God is divine the father is divine but I I can't say what sub what does it mean to be of one substance that's a Greek philosophical category that you don't find in the scripture Newton says and he's he's he the the most fundamental thing about Newton is that he's a biblicist he wants every biblical Doctrine every theological Doctrine to be rooted in the text without a long line of inferences or without the imputation of philoso of philosophical categories to the biblical texts that are alien to it he thinks that the Greeks are pagans so whatever they mean by substance maybe it's it's not the same it's it's not found in the biblical description so snoblin argues that he's not a trinitarian um whereas Fitz Meer argues that he is a trinitarian but he's formulating the Trin Trinity in other categories and both snow and and fit Fitz Fitz Meer these two great historians agree that Newton believes that that the father and the son are won in dominion and Authority by that uh and and uh snowland says well that shows that he's not affirming their Unity of kind and therefore he's more Aryan whereas Fitz Meer says no he's affirming their Unity of authority and dominion and and saying that's an alternative view of what we mean by the Trinity and and so fitzmyer wants to say that's within the circle of Orthodoxy whereas snowland says that's not so it's an interesting debate the key thing though is that I mean you read I just read Newton's own personal Creed he believes in Christ as mediator he believes in Christ as Savior he believes he's the predicted Messiah who fulfills the predictions of the Messianic office he believes he's one with the father not in substance but in dominion and Authority um he believes he's worthy of worship and angels are not so he has a very high christology it's it's much higher I think than the than traditional aryanism and whether you think it's uh heterodox or fully Orthodox I think depends on how wide you want to draw the circle around uh the doctrine of the Trinity um I myself would probably favor the and do favor the athanasian Nan formulation that we all say when we say the Apostles Creed but Newton had a different way of formulating that and it's clearly it's not what historians have have in the past said that he was an Aryan or a heretic he's thinking very deeply about these things and in any case the two articles are by Steve snow and God of God and Lord of lords the Theology of Isaac Newton's General scholium in in the Theology of Isaac Newton's General scholium to the prinkipia it's very we we'll reference them in the description Bo article is also extremely good and and and we'll leave it to here it was simply titled was is Newton and Aryan and are these online or are these books you have to purchase I'll I'll send you links and you can put them up for your your listeners I mean perfect they'll be in the description box it's fascinating discussion I tend more on this issue towards the Fitz Meer view but Steve snin is really knows his stuff so there's there's a a lot but it's it's it's interesting they both affirm the same that Newton affirmed the same things it's really a question of well what does that mean with respect to to to Orthodoxy and the the the the historic Christian Creeds this is that that he changed over a 20year period is normal if you were to read some of the things or or hear some of the things that I said 20 years ago and then I say something different today people will sometimes call me out on it and I say look you know these sort of things change in people's lives the way they view things number one number two the entire idea of the Trinity is not something that's easy to grasp that's right it's it's it's easy to just hear something say okay I believe that but if you have a very deep thinker about one of these subjects then then uh um it's going to go much deeper and it's going to be harder to describe and it may not not fit into a a typical model uh even even to hear that that what is gravitation what is energy what is sound as it's perceived by by by organisms by uh uh by people by animals what is sound these are hard Concepts to understand not easy to grasp and clearly Newton was a a deeper thinker than most of us and so um yeah it'd be hard to pigeon hole them based on the things that you've read yeah I I I think that's one of the points that Fitz Meer makes is that um that we have to realize that that um he doesn't he he's his thinking does not fit neatly in any of the pre-established categories of heresy he's not an Aryan U he he's there's another heresy called cinas I have a hard time pronouncing and I'm not a church historian but he doesn't quite fit there either he's got a very high christology but he has an even even higher view of God the father and I think one of the things that as I've been reading about this it's becomes apparent is remember Newton died or Newton's father died before he was born and one of his biographers said that the circumstances of his birth being born on Christmas day without a father gave him throughout his life a Devotion to his heavenly father as a kind of replacement for the father he didn't have so what I see in his theology is a real uh emphasis and Primacy an emphasis on the importance of God the father as The Sovereign Lord of all and and snowy and emphasizes that as all as well but he still he still has you know he's very clear he has a high regard for Christ he thinks that Christ is the Fulfillment of Prophecy that he's the Messiah the Savior the Divine mediator even Richard westall who was the first really great biographer of Newton who attributed the Aryan label to him said that he that that that um that Newton believed that Christ was the Divine mediator between God and man so if he's an Aryan he's a he's a strange kind of Aryan who can say as I just read um so there is Divinity in the father Divinity in the son Divinity in the Holy Ghost that's not really classical aryanism whatever it is it may not be fully Orthodox Christianity but it's it's not aryanism but it may be it was certainly anti-trinitarian in the context and this is snow and's big point in the context of the theological discussions that were going on at the time where people were defending the Trinity using these Greek Concepts like substance Newton was very opposed to that but he seemed to still believe that there were three persons in one God at least but Bound by something other than substance by Dominion by Authority by something else so anyway we'll probably never know entirely but definitely a deep thinker and and the these things are again let me being a Messianic Jew myself meaning I'm um I'm a Jew by by uh uh descendancy but I I believe Jesus is the Messiah you know for example Messianic Jewish Scholars will often teach that you don't pray to Jesus you pray to the father in the name of Jesus that was Newton specifically in his own personal Creed that was one of his points really yeah interesting you pray to the father in the name of Jesus that was what yes and and and there's a lot of scriptural uh evidence for that um uh and and but you you know people will will pull out a particular verse where where the um for example Stephen says says uh uh receive Lord receive my spirit you know cries out to to the Lord but but uh uh but what I'm saying is is that there are these that even within Orthodox views of of the Lord there are these subtle differences and I'm not sure that it matters a whole lot maybe some people will say I'm a heretic for saying there are certain things that don't matter a whole lot these are questions of how we formulate in the abstract sense some of these profound doctrines and Mysteries that are intrinsic to the Christian faith and there was an interesting line in the um in the fitzmier article where he was saying yeah that it was um that the trinitarian doctrine has in fact been understood with a certain degree of variety within the sphere of Orthodoxy and in interpreting Newton we should resist the temptation to new make Newton fit some predetermined category of or school of trinitarian thought we will be and and and I I think that's apt you know that um he when if you take those two defin those two uh criteria by which you would Define someone as an Aryan in early in his life he meets one and not the other later in his life he meets neither and yet he is still making subtle anti-trinitarian arguments at least as the trinitarian case or the trinitarian view of his day was being articulated in terms of these Greek philosophical categories so um he's very subtle in fact that passage that I read to you um from the Yehuda manuscript he actually before that uses an analogy to gravitation to get his point across and you've heard preachers come up with you know analogies like this to try to explain the Trinity and he says suppose and I'll I'll I'm paraphrasing because the the English is Antiquated but he says suppose you've got three bodies a b and c and they're all being affected by gravity and the first one then bumps into the second one and this and the second one bumps into the third one he said now they're all three being affected by the same Force but one is affecting the other in you know body a affects body B in one way and then body B in another way and so you know at the councils they said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and the sun that's like body C now you could read Newton's illustration is saying that body a you know that that God the father created body or God the son in the same way that massive body a knocks into body B but you could just as easily read it as one of these illustrations of the Trinity that pastors come up with to try to make it make a little bit of sense for people because it's got this deeply paradoxical quality it's it's a difficult concept if you really he's ABS I mean black and white here he absolutely affirms the Divinity of Christ and and the unity of the father of the son but not on Greek philosophical terms so that's where I think we have to leave it that's interesting okay we're going to wrap this up let me let me just make one announcement for for those that that may have listened this far in uh I'm going to be coming out with a a series of of about 12 lectures on nanotechnology I'm just filming from an undergraduate course that I'm teaching on nanotechnology and just uh filming it and so you'll see a little dialogue that I might have with the students occasionally that are in the class and uh talk about how how we took some technologies and then turned them into businesses and started companies around them I have a lecture on how do you start a company out of Academia how do you take something out of the university and start a company around it so keep your eye out for that and uh um thank you thank you uh um Stephen thank you for bringing Clarity to this I I don't know anybody who who knows this better than you so I I really appreciate you're doing this and uh um we'll do it again sometime thank you well thank you F fantastic discussion one of my favorite topics obviously but again I do know people that know this stuff better than i s St snow and is a fantastic Newton scholar Ted Davis is a fantastic Newton scholar and this Thomas fitzmier as well have I think broken new ground and Simon Schaffer the Cambridge historian of science from whom I learned M Newton unbelievable world-class guy and there's a he's got a nice uh short biography video kind of a short documentary about Newton online that's also worth watching so people okay so give us that link and we'll post that in the description links yeah okay all right thank you Sten yeah God bless you you too if you're enjoying this series give us a thumbs up and click the Subscribe button and that way you'll hear when we're coming out with new videos there are no salari employees in this organization all the accounting all the legal work that's all done by friends of mine the only thing that I have to pay for is the production work and if you could help us out with that I'd appreciate it there's a link below where you can just click on that and help us in several different ways thank you [Music]

Channel: Dr. James Tour

Views: 113,626

Keywords: Dr. James Tour, Jim Tour, Science, Faith, Jesus, nanomachines, NanoEngineering, Bible, Professor, Chemistry

Id: 9LPG0ErLvK8

Length: 88min 40sec (5320 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024