Religious views of Isaac Newton
When Newton was three, his mother married the rector of the neighbouring parish of North Witham and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough.
[12] Newton considered ceasing his studies prior to completion to avoid the ordination made necessary by law of King Charles II.
[13] Of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica he stated:[14] When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe of a Deity and nothing can rejoyce me more than to find it useful for that purpose.According to most scholars, Newton was Arian, not holding to Trinitarianism.
[15] Despite his unorthodox beliefs, Sir Isaac Newton affirmed infant baptism, in keeping with his Anglican upbringing, writing, "The Declaration by imposition of hands is a Jewish ceremony.
In Query 31 of the Opticks, Newton simultaneously made an argument from design and for the necessity of intervention: For while comets move in very eccentric orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in orbs concentric, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted which may have arisen from the mutual actions of comets and planets on one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this system wants a reformation.
[21]This passage prompted an attack by Leibniz in a letter to his friend Caroline of Ansbach: Sir Isaac Newton and his followers have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God.
Newton's view has been considered to be close to deism, and several biographers and scholars labelled him as a deist who is strongly influenced by Christianity.
[16] He warned against using the law of gravity to view the universe as a mere machine, like a great clock, saying: This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being.
[31][32]On the other hand, latitudinarian and Newtonian ideas taken too far resulted in the millenarians, a religious faction dedicated to the concept of a mechanical universe, but finding in it the same enthusiasm and mysticism that the Enlightenment had fought so hard to extinguish.
"[34] The Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, holds in its collections Newton's personal copy of the King James Version, which exhibits numerous marginal notes in his hand as well as about 500 reader's marks pointing to passages of particular interest to him.
The places Newton marked or annotated in his Bible bear witness to his investigations into theology, chronology, alchemy, and natural philosophy; and some of these relate to passages of the General Scholium to the second edition of the Principia.
[36] Newton's work of New Testament textual criticism, An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, was sent in a letter to John Locke on 14 November 1690.
[37] Newton relied upon the existing Scripture for prophecy, believing his interpretations would set the record straight in the face of what he considered to be, "so little understood".
They applied the day-year principle (in which a day represents a year in prophecy) to certain key verses in the books of Daniel[42] and Revelation[43] (also known as the Apocalypse), and looked for significant dates in the Papacy's rise to power to begin this timeline.
Those contemporaries who knew him during the remaining 23 years of his life appear to be in agreement that Newton, and the "best interpreters" including Jonathan Edwards, Robert Fleming, Moses Lowman, Phillip Doddridge, and Bishop Thomas Newton, were eventually "pretty well agreed" that the 1,260-year timeline should be calculated from the year 756 AD.
[45]Thomas Williams stated that this timeline had become the predominant view among the leading Protestant theologians of his time: Mr. Lowman, though an earlier commentator, is (we believe) far more generally followed; and he commences the 1260 years from about 756, when, by aid of Pepin, King of France, the Pope obtained considerable temporalities.
[49]In 1870, the newly formed Kingdom of Italy annexed the remaining Papal States, depriving the Popes of any temporal rule for the next 59 years.
Unaware that Papal rule would be restored (albeit on a greatly diminished scale) in 1929 as head of the Vatican City state, the historicist view that the Papacy is the Antichrist and the associated timelines delineating his rule rapidly declined in popularity as one of the defining characteristics of the Antichrist (i.e. that he would also be a political temporal power at the time of the return of Jesus) were no longer met.
[50] Newton and Boyle's mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts, and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox clergy as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians.
[33] The attacks made against pre-Enlightenment magical thinking, and the mystical elements of Christianity, were given their foundation with Boyle's mechanical conception of the universe.
Containing an explanation of the Apocalypse), which has an unnumbered leaf between folios 1 and 2 with the subheading De prophetia prima,[53] written in Latin some time prior to 1670.
