WHITECROW
BORDERLAND
Sir
Isaac Newton: Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy. (07/12/2002)
One
might wonder how a scientist like Sir Isaac Newton, a man dedicated to a
mechanical explanation of the universe, ever got around to finding a place for
God in his vision of reality. I only ask
that question because God is not a cog in a wheel of universal motion, since He
is always referred to as a prime mover, and not as a secondary object affected
by motion, as far as I know, and has never been accused of being a mere part of
a machine that somehow keeps everything else going. God is not a “part” of anything, since
nothing can be more than He is so as to contain Him as something less than a
universal, absolute, even infinite, whole.
If anything, God’s principle role in human thought is to represent
everything that is essentially “apart” from everything else. Especially where nature is concerned, where
material reality resides, where the universe has its place in the cosmos, God,
even by definition, is wholly and absolutely other than that material reality. Newton follows this traditional, orthodox,
line of reasoning when he finally gets around to mentioning God at all, even as
a kind of afterthought, in his “General Scholium” to his Mathematical Principles.
Newton was derided by his more religious contemporaries precisely
because he put off mention of the Prime Mover until the last, and very final,
pages of his book about the existence of a cosmological gravity that held
everything together and in place. He did
not attribute gravity to God but argued instead that matter was bound together
by natural principles, even mathematical ones, which simply arise because
matter itself must exist in some reasonable form and structure that can be
perceived by our senses. This seemed
true to him, apparently, because that is exactly how human beings experience
the world and Newton seemed reluctant to embrace transcendental concepts as a
way of discussing material reality. In
his third rule of “Reasoning in Philosophy,” Newton argues that
“We
are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of
dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the
analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple, and always consonant to
itself. We no other way know the
extension of bodies than by our senses, nor do these reach it in all bodies;
but because we perceive extension in all that are sensible, therefore we
ascribe it universally to all others also.
That abundance of bodies are hard, we learn by experience; and because
the hardness of the whole arises from the hardness of the parts, we therefore
justly infer the hardness of the undivided particles not only of the bodies we
feel but of all others. . . . The
extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and inertia of the whole,
result from the extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and inertia of
the parts; and hence we conclude the least particles of all bodies to be also
all extended, and hard and impenetrable, and movable, and empowered with their
proper inertia. And this is the
foundation of all philosophy.” (Sir Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Book III: The System
of the World, Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy)
This
argument about the relationship between the “least particles of all bodies” and
the whole of each individual mass, where the least and the whole must always
show consonance with each other, if the part moves up then the whole must
follow its direction, is one idea, or demand, of Newtonian physics that has
fallen on hard times in light of the fact that quanta (quarks for instance) do
not seem to obey this command either well or consistently in consonance with
the bodies to which they seem to belong.
Newton’s certainty, then, has been challenged by the observations and
experiments involving the behavior of sub-atomic particles which, as often as
not, seems to violate the rules governing objects in macro-space. While this issue will come around again in a
different context, it is more to the point here to outline exactly how the
physicist turned to the issue of God at the end of his mathematical analysis of
the universe. He notes, for instance,
that
“it
is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many
regular motions . . . . [but that] this most beautiful system of the sun,
planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an
intelligent and powerful Being. And if
the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these, being formed by
the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One. . . .”
What
may be most curious about Newton’s position here is that his argument has
recently been appropriated by right-wing fundamentalist Christians to refute
Darwin’s theory of evolution on the ground that no complex system of biological
or cosmological mechanics can arise without the intent of a master
designer. This so-called “new” theory of
creationism is usually referred to as the “Intelligent Design”
theory of natural reality and is one that some Christian scientists argue
should be taught in place of Darwinian evolution. The irony, of course, is that Newton has long
been a target of Christian denunciation for the same reasons, and for as long a
time, as Darwin has, and probably still is, but the resistance that so-called
Christian educators have always directed toward science in general has
prevented them from discovering that one demonized opponent of their faith
(Newton) actually articulated their current theory of choice as a means of
refuting a second demon (Darwin) well before any of them did. Several of the more sophisticated theorists
who champion Intelligent Design are aware of the long-standing tradition in the
scientific community that equates God’s existence with the beauty of His design
for the universe (see Copernicus, for instance), but many of the other
advocates treat the theory as if it arose out of nothing the day before they
first imagined its potential as an anti-Darwinian diatribe. Being relatively ignorant of the history of
the design argument for the existence of God does not affect the validity of
its propositions but one should seriously question anyone who advocates the
replacement of one theory as an aspect of a teaching curricula with another
radically different one that they believe was born through Divine intervention
for the sake of refuting established scientific knowledge.
Newton
himself, of course, was not engaged in any aspect of this contemporary debate
and made statements in his “General Scholium” that would have precluded his
inclusion as an advocate for the Intelligent Design theory as it is currently
articulated. He notes, for instance,
that God, even if He did create the world, had no involvement with its on-going
motions or existence: “In him are all things contained and moved; yet neither
affects the other: God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find
no resistance from the omnipresence of God.
It is allowed by all that the Supreme God exists necessarily; but by the
same necessity he exists always and everywhere” (Emphasis Newton’s). The idea that God is not able to affect the
material world, that He does not influence its motions and is not Himself
influenced by them, is completely unacceptable to ordinary, orthodox Christian
theologians, since they argue explicitly that God, as the supreme Lord and
Master of the universe, “always and everywhere” has an active hand in
whatever befalls material reality and the creatures who inhabit it. This point alone elevates Newton to the
status of a supreme enemy of Christian ideology, especially to ones that are
concerned with the Intelligent Design argument because the idea that a Supreme
Master of reality has no influence over it removes any purpose for His being
present at all as its Creator. Newton
adds an element of insult to injury when he says that “[w]e have ideas of
[God’s] attributes, but what the real substance of anything is we know
not.” This concept is often voiced by
Christian theorists themselves when they are confronted by one of the many
contradictions that have been incorporated into the creed but here Newton
suggests that none of the ideas we have about God is any more credible than
another. Newton’s impulse to exclude God
from material reality is what earned him the disdain of theologians during his
lifetime and he went out of his way, as it were, to make this an article of his
own faith when he concluded his “Scholium” by asserting that
“hitherto
I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from
phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is to be deduced from the
phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical
or physical, whether of occult properties or mechanical, have no place in
experimental philosophy.”
Here,
of course, Newton could simply have argued that gravity was the result of God’s
interaction with material reality, that the force was how God ordered and
controlled the motion of His beautiful creation, but instead of taking the easy
path out of his own ignorance of final causes, so to speak, Newton remained
true to his experience of the material world as precisely that: a world where
invisible forces did move material objects but where those forces were not the
result of “metaphysical” or “occult” entities that could never be seen, or
understood, or analyzed, or measured.
Choosing to leave gravity as a force that originated naturally from the
mass and distance of interrelated material objects, rather than as something
that spiraled downward from an omnipotent supernatural creative force, makes
Newton’s view of the cosmos both materialistic and mechanical as opposed to
spiritual, “occult,” and/or mysterious.
Newton labors well to give us a materially consistent view of celestial
motion, attributing it to gravitational force, and then says that it
“abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and
of our sea.” In his final paragraph,
however, Newton speculates that “a certain most subtle spirit,” which he seems
to connect to electricity, pervades all “gross bodies” and gives them the power
to attract and repel each other over this or that given distance. Newton does say that experimentation has so
far not produced adequate knowledge to determine and demonstrate precisely how
“the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates.”
The
question any of this raises in the current context is why Newton felt compelled
to address the issue of God’s existence as the Creator of natural reality when
his ultimate intent was to deny that supernatural force had any direct role in
the mechanical operations of celestial motion.
While Newton was probably not much in front of other contemporary Deists
at the time, people who also tended to put God beyond any immediate and
intimate interaction with the material world on a day-to-day basis, the fact
that he begs the issue so directly in Mathematical
Principles, even perhaps as Copernicus had done before him as a means of
avoiding the direct censure of the church, may only succeed in continuing the
tradition of tangling science in the older, deeper roots of theology where the
initial expressions of cosmology have their origins in human thought. This becomes a problem now because advocates
of the “Intelligent Design” theory have appropriated Newton’s mathematical
arguments about gravity as a kind of window dressing for their contention that
gravitational force had to be incredibly constrained within infinitesimal
limits from the time of the “Big Bang” for the universe to expand in a way that
allowed human life to exist in the world.
They attribute those limits to the actions of the same Creator that
Newton rejected as a cause for the existence of gravity. In effect, then, advocates of “Intelligent
Design” appropriate Newton’s Principles
to deny the very ground of scientific experimentation that produced them in the
first place. True though it may be that
creationists are primarily focused on Darwin today, if allowed to banish him
from school curricula now, there seems nothing to stop them from gathering up
Newton and Einstein and Copernicus as they drag us back to a flat earth at rest
in the center of perfect spheres turned in harmony by angels singing the
soul-song of the all-powerful God. That
is an easier way to comprehend reality than the one Newton gave us.