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Newton’s God of Dominion: The Unity of Newton’s Theological, Scientific, and Political Thought

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Abstract

Today, when we consider Newton and his work, there is a tendency among both popularizers and scholars to see Newton through a prism, so to speak, and to study Newton in refraction just as Newton studies light by passing it through a prism and breaking it down into its primary colors. Newton is seen, at different times, as a heretical theologian, a scientific genius, or a politically connected man of affairs. There often seem to be as many Newtons as there are primary colors and we study Newton by studying the many manifestations of his multi-hued genius independently. Failing to appreciate the synthetic unity in Newton’s thought is the inevitable result of overemphasizing one or another of its integrated components.

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Notes

  1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 264. Consider the sort of modern Valhalla into which modern scientific rationalists seek to enshrine Newton. In the Introduction by Zev Bechler to a collection of essays entitled Contemporary Newtonian Research (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982), Bechler writes that “This belief in the overall rationality of the scientist is the unbreakable tie that unifies historians of scientific ideas into one big loving family in which disputes can’t really be fundamental. Here everyone works for the common good and deviations are negligible, and the common good is an exhibition of true rationality silently throbbing wherever science exists.” (p. 2)

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  2. Robert C. Cowen, “Sir Isaac Newton: Charting the Course of Modern Thought,” The Christian Science Monitor (July 17, 1987), p. 16. Other journalists have helped to define Newton as the positivistic father of all that is “good,” i.e., rational, and, therefore, serious and “objective,” in modern science. But journalists tend to write their stories based on what the people they interview tell them. Writing in The New York Times (March 31, 1987), Malcolm W. Browne “pegs” his story of the three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Newton’s Principia to the many events celebrating this anniversary, from specially issued postage stamps to symposia and conferences. His story features a long interview with Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, one of the “leading physicists participating in the current symposiums on Newton’s Principia….” In answering Browne’s question about how Newton would have felt about the course of science since his death, Dr. Chandrasekhar replies, “I think he would have been troubled by the development of quantum theory since so much in quantum physics is indeterminate and acausal. But he would have been far less surprised by today’s science than would any of his contemporaries. He would have been much more disturbed, I think, by today’s religious evangelism.” (p. 21)

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  3. D. T. Whiteside, “Newton the Mathematician,” in Contemporary Newtonian Research, ed. Zev Bechler (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987), pp. 109–27.

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  4. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.)

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  5. Richard S. Westfall, “Newton’s Theological Manuscripts,” in Contemporary Newtonian Research, pp. 139–40.

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  6. Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 596.

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  7. Ibid., p. 597.

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  8. Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), passim, but especially, p. 175.

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  9. Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light. Based on the fourth edition, London, 1730. With a Foreword by Albert Einstein, and Introduction by Sir Edmund Whittaker, a Preface by I. Bernard Cohen, and an Analytical Table of Contents prepared by Duane H. D. Roller (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), Book One, Part II, Prop, v, Theor. iv, p. 134.

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  10. Westfall, “Newton’s Theological Manuscripts,” p. 130.

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  11. Newton, Yahuda MS 14, f. 25, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

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  12. Ibid. Frank E. Manuel, in his book The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), discusses a fragment from Yahuda MS 15.5 (dated by Westfall as from the period around 1710) on p. 21. Manuel argues that the Lord God of the General Scholium must not be seen as merely the result of the great dispute with Leibniz. It is a view reiterated too many times in too many other contexts. The text pointed to by Manuel reads:If the father or son be called God, they take the name in a metaphysical sense as if it signified Gods metaphysical perfections of infinite eternal omniscient omnipotent whereas it relates only Gods dominion to teach us obedience. The word God is relative and signifies the same thing with Lord and King, but in a higher degree. As we say my Lord, our Lord, your Lord, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, the supreme Lord, so we say my God, our God, your God, the God of Gods, the supreme God, the God of the earth, the servants of God, serve other Gods: but we do not say my infinite, our infinite, your infinite, the infinite of infinities, the infinite of the earth, the servants of the infinite, serve other infinities. When the Apostle told the Gentiles that the Gods which they worshipped were not Gods, he did not meane that they were not infinities, (for the Gentiles did not take them to be such:) but he meant that they had no power and dominion over man. They were fals Gods; not fals infinities, but vanities falsely supposed to have power and dominion over man. (Yahuda MS 15.5, folios 96 verso, 97 recto, and 98 recto.)

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  13. Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World. Translated into English by Andrew Motte in 1729. The translations revised, and supplied with an historical and explanatory appendix by Florian Cajori. 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), 2:544. In a footnote to this text, Newton states that, according to Dr. Edward Pococke (the Biblical scholar and orientalist who had introduced the study of Arabic into Oxford and then become the first Professor of Arabic there), the Latin word Deus derives from the (transliteration of) du in the Arabic which means lord.

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  14. Newton, Yahuda MS 15.1, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Newton’s conception of the nature of God’s dominion and its necessary consequence that Jesus is not divine in his metaphysical nature is adopted by his disciples Samuel Clarke and William Whiston. The following text from Clarke, for example, resoundingly echoes the quotation cited above from Newton’s General Scholium. In his The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity. In Three Parts. Wherein All the “Texts” in the New Testament relating to that Doctrine, and the principal Passages in the Liturgy of the Church of England, are collected, compared, and explained (London, 1712), Clarke writes: The reason why the Scripture, though it stiles the Father God, and also stiles the Son God, yet at the same time always declares there is but One God’, is because in the Monarchy of the Universe, there is but One Authority, original in the Father, derivative in the Son: The Power of the Son being, not Another Power opposite to That of the Father, nor Another Power coordinate to That of the Father; but it self The Power and Authority of the Father, communicated to, manifested in, and exercised by the Son. (pp. 332–3) One author, the low church Whig, William Stephens, clearly recognizes the heterodoxy of Clarke’s position in this text, which Stephens quotes, and then controverts, in his sermon entitled The Divine Persons One God by an Unity of Nature: Or, That Our Saviour is One God with his Father, by an Eternal Generation from his Substance, Asserted from Scripture, and the Ante-Nicene Fathers (Oxford, 1722.) Stephens quotes the entire text of Clarke cited immediately above and then writes: In this Proposition, the Unity of the Godhead is plainly resolv’d into an Unity, not of Nature and Essence, but of Dominion and Authority: And, if this be the Scripture-Doctrine, as this Author would perswade us, Our Saviour is no otherwise God, than as his Father has been pleas’d to associate him with Himself in the Government of the Universe. This Artifice of speciously continuing to our Saviour the Name and Title of God, (and yet in reality of denying it him,) by supposing him to be God only by Authority and Power, and not by Nature, is not a novel or late-invented Scheme. The Arians of the fourth Century pleaded the same thing: And hence it came to pass, that in the Great Defenders of the Nicene Faith in that Century we find so much Labour expended in shewing that the Word God is not a Name of Office and Authority, but of Being and Substance; that it does not denote Ruler, Governour, and the like; but a Nature and Essence, Infinite, Eternal, and Divine, in that Person of whom it is praedicated. When the Followers of Socinus reviv’d the same Plea, they met with no better Success than their Predecessors in the Evasion: and, the Godhead has been by many Hands so accurately shewn to be a Substance, not an Office, that it would be Superfluous and Unnecessary to attempt a further Proof of it. (pp. 4–5)

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  15. Newton, “Commonplace Book,” s.v. “Predestinado,” Keynes MS 2, King’s College Library, Cambridge.

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  16. Newton, Yahuda MS 14, f. 9 verso. Cited in Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 315.

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  17. See Westfall, Never At Rest, pp. 330–4.

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  18. Newton to Bentley, December 10, 1962, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols., ed. H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and Laura Tilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 3:233.

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  19. Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 329.

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  20. Newton, Yahuda MS 7.2, f. 4. Cited in Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 319.

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  21. See James E. Force, William Whiston, Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 76.

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  22. Newton, Yahuda MS 1.2, ff. 60–1; Yahuda MS 1.3; ff. 40–8. Cited in Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 325.

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  23. Manuel reproduces Newton’s “Fragments from a Treatise of Revelation,” Yahuda MS. 1, as Appendix A in his The Religion of Isaac Newton. The citation is from p. 124 of Manuel’s book. Westfall dates this work from the early 70’s.

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  24. Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator. Isaac Newton and His Times (New York: The Free Press, 1984), pp. 312–3. Christianson also reminds us that “we remember Newton and honor him today not for providing us with ultimate answers to the most profound scientific questions but because, in apprehending the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux, Isaac Newton contributed more than any other individual to a rational world view.” These statements must be juxtaposed with the following quotation from Christianson’s Preface: Historians have tended increasingly to interpret Newton and his intellectual achievements not in seventeenth-century terms but in the light of our times. In doing so we have been made ever more conscious of his limitations and ever less appreciative of the revolutionary nature of his many accomplishments. Moreover, the twentieth century has made out of Newton something that he was not — an Enlightenment figure whose dedication to the principle of a mechanical universe became his reason for being and his single most important legacy to posterity. That Newton did adhere to a philosophy of mechanistic causation in the physical world is undeniable; but to argue, as did Voltaire, that this is the whole Newton, or even the essential Newton, is erroneous. Isaac Newton held tight the conviction that science (or natural philosophy, as it was known in his day) must be employed to demonstrate the continuing presence of the Creator in the world of nature. Christianson, like Westfall, feels that what influence there is between Newton’s theology and Newton’s science runs from Newton’s science to Newton’s theology. As Christianson points out, for Newton and the Newtonians, science is used to reveal a God with “continuing presence,” but it also reveals, in conjunction with the argument from prophecy, a God of supreme dominion, a Lord God whose will and power are sovereign. Another way to put this point is to argue that, for Newton, natural philosophy is something beyond what we today would call science and that it contains a heavily metaphysical approach to nature which, in Newton’s case especially, is necessarily related to theology. Newton does not strip his universe of metaphysical considerations simply because in his voluntaristic theory of God’s nature, God is always supervising nature, whether directly or indirectly.

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  25. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in Enquiries Concerning Human Understandings and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, third edition with text revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) pp. 16 and 165.

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  26. Newton, Opticks, pp. 403–4.

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  27. The line of interpretation which I am adopting in this paper was first established nearly thirty years ago by Alexandre Koyré in his From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), Chap. XL Koyré is not always given the respect which is his just due. In the mid-fifties, he clearly saw the connection between empiricism and a priorism in physics and a deus artifex and a dieu fainéant in theology. Twenty years ago, J. E. McGuire wrote a fundamental article based on first rate and highly original research in manuscript sources which further established beyond doubt that Newton’s theology is inextricably and mutually bound up with his metaphysics and his natural philosophy.

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  28. See J. E. McGuire, “Force, Active Principles, and Newton’s Invisible Realm,” Ambix 15, No. 3 (1968), esp. pp. 187–94. The writer who has done the most to link Newton’s conception of God with such medieval metaphysical theologians as Ockham and Suarez has been Francis Oakley.

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  29. J. E. McGuire See his The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly: The Voluntarist Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964)

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  30. J. E. McGuire“Medieval Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition,” Natural Law Forum 6 (1961), pp. 65–83

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  31. J. E. McGuire “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature,” Church History 30, No. 4 (1961), pp. 433–57.

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  32. Newton, Yahuda MS 21, fol. 1 recto. In the General Scholium, Newton writes, “We know [God] only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature.” Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 2:546. The point is that what makes a king to be a king is his dominion, i.e., his ability to exert his will and power. One worships God because of his power over us unless one is wickedly vain and thus caught up in idolatry. The text of 2 Kings 17:15–6, which is the text for this sermon, is most significant. After journeying to Damascus where he met the King of Assyria, Tiglath-Pileser, the King of Judah saw a bronze altar. He sent the details of the construction of the altar home to “Uriah the Priest” ordering him to build a copy for use in the temple at Jerusalem. Ahaz is regarded as one of the worst kings in the history of Judah because of his reinstitution of human sacrifice. The text for Newton’s sermon is preceded in verse 14 by the remark that the people of Israel and Judah “were stubborn, as their fathers had been, who did not believe in the LORD their God.” Newton’s text then reads: They despised his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and the warnings which he gave them. They went after false idols, and became false, and they followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the LORD had commanded them that they should not do like them. And they forsook all the commandments of the LORD their god, and made for themselves molten images of two calves; and they made an Ashe’rah, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Ba’al.

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  33. Memoranda by David Gregory, 5, 6, 7 May 1694, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3:336.

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  34. William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, second ed. (London, 1708, p. 284. In this text, Whiston cites as corroboration for this point Dr. Bentley’s seventh sermon from his Boyle Lectures delivered in 1692 under the title A Confutation of Atheism From the Origin and Frame of the World (London, 1693.)

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  35. Whiston, A New Theory, pp. 435–6.

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  36. Ibid., pp. 432–3. I have emphasized the term “act.”

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  37. David Gregory MS.245, fol. 14a, Library of the Royal Society, London. This translation is found in the seminal article by J. E. McGuire, “Force, Active Principles, and Newton’s Invisible Realm,” p. 190. As an example of how this distinction works in the writing of one of Newton’s followers, consider William Whiston. Whiston accepts some events to be genuine transgressions of natural law by a special, voluntary interposition of God’s power: the Creation of the matter of the Universe out of nothing; the changing of a chaotic comet’s orbit into that of a planet; the formation of the seeds of animals, especially “our First Parents,” and vegetables. And The Natures, Conditions, Rules and Quantities, of those several Motions and Powers according to which all Bodies, (of the same general nature in themselves,) are specifi’d, distinguish’d, and fitted for their several uses, were no otherwise determin’d than by the immediate Fiat, Command, Power, and Efficiency of Almighty God (New Theory of the Earth, pp. 287–95.) As for Clarke, he, too, makes a place for real miracles in the ordinary coursing of nature. In his 1705 Boyle Lectures, he writes that a miracle is a work effected in a manner unusual or different from the common and regular method of Providence by the interposition either of God Himself, or some intelligent agent superior to man, in the proof or evidence of some particular doctrine or in attestation to the authority of some particular person. [A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation, Being Eight Sermons Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in the Year 1705 in A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion, 2 vols. (London, 1707), 2:165.]

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  38. Quoted in Sir Isaac Newton’s Theological Manuscripts, ed. H. McLachlan (Liverpool, University Press, 1930.), p. 17. Like Whiston who wrote a book on when miraculous acts ceased in the early church, Newton believed that true miracles ceased being performed by God early in the church’s history. See Newton to Locke, 16 February 1691–2, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. 3:195.

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  39. Newton, “Paradoxical Questions concerning ye morals & actions of Athanasius & his followers,” Clark Library Manuscript. Cited by Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 345.

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  40. Newton, Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John. In Two Parts (London, 1733), pp. 251–2.

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  41. The term is Frank E. Manuel’s and comes in the context of Manuel’s reluctance to entertain any metaphysical significance beyond the debate over who discovered calculus first in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz. See his A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 333.

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  42. A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War. The Quarrel Between Newton and Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 258. To Hall, the relationship between metaphysics and mathematics is a “Pandora’s box” which he mentions in passing: Let me release from this Pandora’s box no more than the simplistic affirmation that Leibniz’s was a calculus of discontinuity, of monads, while Newton’s was concerned with the continuity of flow, with time; or, one might say, differentials belong to the relative, fluxions to the absolute. Does not this involve seeing different things?” (p. 258.) The irony of finding this position stated in a book in which the author has already stated his general position that the path of the argument from the priority dispute into the realm of metaphysics was “a largely regrettable and pointless diversification” is pointed out by Steven Shapin, “Licking Leibniz,” History of Science 19 (1981), p. 302. Another famous scholar who argues for the complete autonomy of Newton’s scientific mechanics from any taint of metaphysics, is Edward W. Strong. He believes that Clarke departs from Newton’s own line of thinking by taking the religious addendum to be fundamental to his science, for therein [Clarke does] violence to the autonomy of science in methods and results upon which Newton had clearly and vigorously insisted. [Strong, “Newton and God,” Journal of the History of Ideas 7, No. 2 (April, 1952), p. 167.]

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  43. Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, “Cotes’s Preface to the Second Edition,” 1:xxxii. Just as Strong has argued that Clarke departs from Newton’s position so, too, he argues that Cotes in this Preface “might have prompted Newton to relax his caution as a scientist.” (“Newton and God,” p. 167.)

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  44. Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Book III. 2:400. Newton’s view about the contingency of human knowledge in the light of God’s total dominion over nature parallels that of Robert Boyle who puts this point most clearly when he observes that in this very phenomenal world of partial regularity, at any moment all our science may be upset by the elimination, or change of regularity through the operation of Him who is the guider of its concourse. For the most optimistic investigator must acknowledge that if God be the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion, whose general concourse is necessary to the conservation and efficacy of every particular physical agent, God can certainly invalidate all experimentalism by withholding His concourse, or changing these laws of motion, which depend perfectly upon His will, and could thus vitiate the value of most, if not all the axioms and theorems of natural philosophy. Therefore reason operating in the mechanical world is constantly limited by the possibility that there is not final regularity in that world, and that existential regularity may readily be destroyed at any moment by the God upon whom it depends. [Mitchell Salem Fisher, Robert Boyle: Devout Naturalist. A Study in Science and Religion in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: Oshiver Studio Press, 1945), pp. 127–8, citing Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 6 vols, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1772), 4:161.]

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  45. This text is cited by Mitchell Salem Fisher in Robert Boyle: Devout Naturalist. A Study in Science and Religion in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: Oshiver Studio Press, 1945), pp. 127–8. Fisher goes on to note that Newton agrees with Boyle’s view about God’s power over creation: “[Boyle’s] God, like that of Newton’s was an absolute, free, and omniscient being who governed all the phenomena of nature not at all as any indwelling soul of the world, but as the mechanical master and lord of the universe.” (p. 160)

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  46. Newton, Observations Upon the Prophecies, p. 251.

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  47. Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, p. 432.

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  48. A. A. Sykes, “The Elogium of the late… Samuel Clarke,” The Present State of the Republic of Letters 4 (1729), pp. 54–6.

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  49. Newton, Opticks, Query 31, p. 403.

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  50. Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality. Beyond the New Physics (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987), p. xi.

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  51. Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality. Beyond the New Physics (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987)., pp. xi-xii.

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  52. Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator, p. 307. A. J. Meadows has also found in the American Constitution the “logical culmination” of Newton’s “mechanical” frame of nature. See his The High Firmament (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), p. 148. It may very well be the logical culmination of the frame of nature once that framework is ripped out of the dominion of God. But it is not the logical culmination for Newton just because he cannot imagine eliminating God from the structure of the heavens. This logical consequence is first arrived at by Hume who starts from vastly different metaphysical suppositions.

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  53. Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 2:546.

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  54. Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 144.

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  55. Newton, Yahuda MS 1, bundle 1, folio 14r.

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  56. Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 2:398.

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  57. Margaret C. Jacob’s book, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720, will remain the standard work on how Newton’s work is taken up for the purpose of low church latitudinarian apologetics. Another approach is found in Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis 72 (June, 1981), pp. 187–215. Shapin is concerned to cast the Leibniz-Clarke dispute over the dominion of God into the context of the Whig-Tory, low church-high church, dynastic politics of the day. On the whole, he is quite successful; certainly he is correct in emphasizing the centrality of the metaphysical issue of the debate. Like Jacob he is primarily concerned with the uses others make of Newton’s work and not about inquiring “Whether or not Newton… intended that his philosophy of nature should be put to specific political uses….” (p. 189)

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  58. J. T. Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, The Best Model of Government (London, 1728), lines 191–2, p. 34.

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  59. Geoffrey Holmes, “Science, Reason, and Religion in the Age of Newton,” British Journal for the History of Science II, Part 2, No. 38 (July, 1978), p. 168.

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  60. Perhaps the strongest statement of the contention by both Margaret C. Jacob and James R. Jacob that the latitudinarian churchmen who utilize Newton’s science for the defence of religion do so in behalf of low church orthodoxy and against the crypto-Republican forces of Radical Enlightenment is found in their joint article entitled “The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution,” Isis 71, No. 257 (June, 1980), pp. 251–67. I take no issue with the general conclusion that Newtonian scientific arguments are used by others to give vital ideological support to the Protestant monarchy.

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  61. William Whiston, A Collection of Authentick Records Belonging to the Old and New Testament, 2 vols. (London, 1728), 2:1073–4.

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  62. See J. E. McGuire, “Newton on Place, Time, and God: An Unpublished Source,” British Journal of the History of Science 11, No. 38 (1978), pp. 115–29.

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  63. Newton, Unpublished Scientific Papers, p. 107. Cf. Henry Guerlac, “Theological Voluntarism and Biological Analogies in Newton’s Physical Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44, No. 2 (April-June, 1983), pp. 219–29.

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  64. Newton, Opticks, p. 182.

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  65. Newton, “Irenicum,” Keynes MS 3.

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  66. See James Tully, A Discourse on Property. John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 35–50.

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  67. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Collated and annotated by Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 2:321–2

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  68. See also Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 92.

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  69. See Force, William Whiston, p. 103.

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  70. This paper is being printed for the first time in this volume. An earlier version of it was presented by the author as part of a public lecture series devoted to the topic of “Science, Politics, and Religion in 17th Century England” on December 1, 1987. This lecture series was sponsored by The Claremont Colleges Program in Critical Studies of Science and Technology and The Humanities and Social Sciences Department of Harvey Mudd College through the generosity of the Garrett Fund.

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Force, J.E. (1990). Newton’s God of Dominion: The Unity of Newton’s Theological, Scientific, and Political Thought. In: Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology. Archives Internationales D’Histoire Des Idées/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 129. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1944-0_5

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