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From:	Moi (24.72.178.63)
Subject:	Isaac's cup held more religion than your plastic cup ever will...
Date:	June 28, 2009 at 8:28 pm PST

In Reply to: Mental midget? You don't even have a brain. posted by Jack in OH on June 28, 2009 at 7:21 pm:

Before describing Newton's alchemical work, it is necessary to explain a few things about Newton's Christian beliefs which are quite different from what most of us were taught in Sunday school. First, Newton believed that church teachings as practiced by Catholics and Anglicans were totally corrupted. Dan Brown used this fact in his book The Da Vinci Code. Specifically, Newton rejected the concept of the trinity because he did not believe that Jesus or the Holy Ghost were on an equal footing with God. Newton's God reigned supreme: all-knowing and present everywhere in the universe. Newton found that in nature there was much evidence of "choice" not "chance." If nature seems to follow physical "laws" consistantly, it is because God supervises each and every event taking place in the world. God, according to Newton, did not leave the scene after the creation. These were dangerous beliefs which Newton had to keep private since his job at Cambridge University depended on his public compliance with Anglican doctrines.

Newton's hostility towards Catholics, especially French Catholics, was not unusual in the 17th century after the English civil war. There were several plots by the French to place a Catholic king upon the English throne. Consequently, relations between England and France went from bad to worse. What is strange is Newton's belief that before the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, all of the laws of science were known and understood. Natural philosphers like himself were merely "recovering" knowledge from the time of Eden. Newton was the not the first natural philosopher to try to "Christianize" science and, in this way, make it less threatening. He kept it to himself, however; along with another surprising idea. He believed that ancient philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato wrote about gravity and the inverse square law! Newton believed that he had found evidence of the inverse square law in the ancient concept of "the harmony of the spheres," specifically in the connection between tension and pitch in a stringed instrument. Newton spent years scouring ancient texts looking for more evidence of gravity buried in arcane symbolism.

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