Newton Religion Quotes

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being... This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont, to be called Lord God παντοκρατωρ or Universal Ruler.

I endeavored to renounce society, that I might avoid temptation. But it was a poor religion; so far as it prevailed, only tended to make me gloomy, stupid, unsociable, and useless.

How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?...and these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent...?

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing.

How unspeakably wonderful to know that all our concerns are held in hands that bled for us.

They who search after the Philosopher's Stone [are] by their own rules obliged to a strict and religious life.

The more time and devotion one spends in the worship of false gods, the less he is able to spend in that of the True One.

This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.

No sciences are better attested than the religion of the Bible.

Newton Pulsifer had never...as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. .... Then he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist. To Newt's straightforward mind this was intolerable.

It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet.

The other part of the true religion is our duty to man. We must love our neighbour as our selves, we must be charitable to all men for charity is the greatest of graces, greater then even faith or hope & covers a multitude of sins. We must be righteous & do to all men as we would they should do to us

Newton was haunted by insanity. He spent hours trying to find hidden messages in the Bible, and wrote over a million words on religion and the occult. He pursued the medieval art of alchemy, obsessively searching for the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance that alchemists believed had magical properties and could even help humans achieve immortality. At the age of fifty, Newton became fully psychotic and spent a year in an insane asylum.

When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal.

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau; Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain. You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again. And every sand becomes a Gem Reflected in the beams divine; Blown back, they blind the mocking Eye, But still in Israel's paths they shine. The Atoms of Democritus And Newton's Particles of light Are sands upon the Red sea shore Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

People say I have to be good. But what does it mean to be good? To follow the precepts of another man's thinking? To bind oneself to the morality of another man's religion? Where others see morality, I see a means to power. Where others see ethics, I see a mark of the weak.

Every brilliant theory in physics, for example, has been proven mainly wrong, except for the most recent ones, which will be. The big players, like Newton and Copernicus, gave us answers that were later proved more wrong than right. What they did—and why they are valued—is direct our attention to more piercing and compelling questions or possibilities. (I’d suggest the same holds true for the big spiritual players, but that’s a different letter.)

By the sixth century B.C. Pythagoras and his students had embarked on the immense ordering task that attempted to find common numerical laws binding together astronomy, geometry, music, and arithmetic. Not surprisingly, their work was difficult to distinguish from religion, since it tried to accomplish similar goals: to find a way of expressing the structure of the universe. Two thousand years later, Kepler and then Newton were still on the same quest. Theoretical

Double-mindedness only leads to spiritual instability, and those who love money can make no progress in the Christian life. No matter how often they attend church or study orthodox theology, they remain “destitute of the life, power, and comfort of religion, so long as they cleave to those things which are incompatible with it.”13 Gospel simplicity dies by split motives. Befriending the world and befriending God is impossible (James 4:1–10). You cannot have both a love of drunkenness and a desire for health. Split desires and split motives lead to sickness, decay, and death. Spiritual health is gained—and maintained—only by singular motives.

It is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some 200 years earlier than she eventually did. The Galileo affair was an isolated episode in the history of relations between science and theology. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. Some historians wish to make us believe that the decline of science in Italy was due to the "terror" caused by the trial of Galileo. But the next generation saw the rise of Toricelli, Cavallieri, Borelli, whose contributions to science were more substantial than those of any generation before or during Galileo's lifetime. The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement. This becomes evident if we shift our attention from Italy to the Protestant countries of Europe, and to France. Kepler, Descartes, Barrow, Leibniz, Gilbert, Boyle and Newton himself, the generation of pioneers contemporary with and succeeding Galileo, were all deeply and genuinely religious thinkers. The pioneers of the new cosmology, from Kepler to Newton and beyond, based their search into nature on the mystic conviction that there must exist laws behind the confusing phenomena; that the world was a completely rational, ordered, harmonic creation.

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, or if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and subscribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science, to maintain our stand against creed and dogma.

The influence of geometry upon philosophy and scientific method has been profound. Geometry, as established by the Greeks, starts with axioms which are (or are deemed to be) self-evident, and proceeds, by deductive reasoning, to arrive at theorems that are very far from self-evident. The axioms and theorems are held to be true of actual space, which is something given in experience. It thus appeared to be possible to discover things about the actual world by first noticing what is self-evident and then using deduction. This view influenced Plato and Kant, and most of the intermediate philosophers. When the Declaration of Independence says 'we hold these truths to be self-evident', it is modelling itself on Euclid. The eighteenth-century doctrine of natural rights is a search for Euclidean axioms in politics.8 The form of Newton's Principia, in spite of its admittedly empirical material, is entirely dominated by Euclid. Theology, in its exact scholastic forms, takes its style from the same source. Personal religion is derived from ecstasy, theology from mathematics; and both are to be found in Pythagoras.

Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts and men have their right side and left side alike shaped (except in their bowels) and just two eyes and no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head and a nose with two holes and no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose and either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom and the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped and fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light and what was its refraction and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These and such like considerations always have and ever will prevail with man kind to believe that there is a being who made all things and has all things in his power and who is therefore to be feared.

Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts and men have their right side and left side alike shaped (except in their bowels) and just two eyes and no more on either side the face and just two ears on either side the head and a nose with two holes and no more between the eyes and one mouth under the nose and either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders and two leggs on the hipps one on either side and no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel and contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom and the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, and within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle and a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped and fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light and what was its refraction and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These and such like considerations always have and ever will prevail with man kind to believe that there is a being who made all things and has all things in his power and who is therefore to be feared.

Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strenght of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he'd been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self-suficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother's house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the magazine was run by a bunch of bib-overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word 'community' too often; Newton had always suspected that people who regularly used the word 'community' were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.

Upon that basis the first Grand Lodge was founded, and upon that basis Masonry rests today-holding that a unity of spirit is better than a uniformity of opinion, and that beyond the great and simple "religion in which all men agree" no dogma is worth a breach of charity

clergy, and church leaders, teaching and travel in Korea, and study of Korean religion and culture. HeeSun Kim is a Korean who has done academic work and ministry in Korea and the United States. From our experiences we believe there are life-giving perspectives in Korea that need to be shared with United States and Korean religious leaders who are searching for God’s spirit at work for healing, liberation, and reconciliation. What Is Pastoral Theology? Christian pastoral theologians and counselors in the United States have produced some of the most creative ideas about the nature of human suffering and hope in the contemporary world. Experiments in new forms of Christian pastoral counseling started in the 1920s with Anton Boisen and Russell Dicks, who understood the promise of the new psychologies in dialogue with Christian theology and practices. In almost one hundred years these theologies and practices of care have spread over the world. Students from Asia, South America, Africa, Europe, and Australia have studied in the United

His belief in God was absolute, and the God he believed in was “eternal and infinite; He is not duration and space, but He endures and is present.” Men like Galileo and Newton recognized instinctively that science has a limited claim on men. It does not limit or control those areas of man’s nature that are concerned with esthetics, morals, ethics, or religion. Galileo, as a man of the late Renaissance, was not only a scientist but an accomplished painter and musician. Newton in his last years remained influential in scientific circles, but he also devoted most of his time to theology.

Newton found the law of gravitation not in a written page, but in a falling apple.

the first to do so. Maybe the universe . . . has slept in ignorance of itself these aeons until suddenly in a few years mankind’s curiosity . . . has opened its cosmic eyes and the universe has seen itself for the first time. Maybe we are the brains of this outfit. . . . We are like Robinson Crusoe, stranded on a cosmic island, not knowing whether or not we are alone until we can see the footprints in the sand. —Paul Hodge, Concepts of Contemporary Astronomy (1979)

Da Vinci, Newton, and Mozart walked the Earth. Religion, Mathematics, Art, Literature, and Science emerged

Divine Hiddenness Argument against God’s Existence Divine Hiddenness does not necessarily mean that the Ultimate Being hides; it instead means that our human powers are limited. The natural laws were secret (and still are) to the people before they learned to decipher them slowly. We may say that Newton's laws deciphered and formulated were hidden up to that point not because they were hiding per se but because our abilities were not on par with the laws of physics, which we have thought were “hidden.” It is a poor argument to use hiddenness as a legitimate argument against God or against anything else, of which, at some point, we do not have a proper or complete understanding. Hiddenness by itself is not proof that God does not exist. By using that logic, we may say that mosquitos are not aware of the existence of human beings. The argument that they are very “aware,” in some sense while sucking the blood of humans would not be sufficient because they are not aware of who and what human beings are. Certainly, microorganisms, without any desire to compare human beings with microorganisms, are not aware of the existence of human beings. What if animals used an argument, if they could, that there is no evidence that there are many galaxies in the Universe, or if any other animal could have used that argument? Would that be proof that other galaxies do not exist? On what basis are we sure that we possess the ability to experience God directly if it existed (although the world is one of the faces of God)? I am not trying to compare human beings to other animals or diminish human abilities. Still, I would like to emphasize that, regardless of how advanced we are, we may still be as distant from God, or more, as some animals are from us. To rely only on evidence is to limit the science, not to be scientific. What is scientific in limiting science to the frame that fits our capacity for understanding, learning, and comprehension instead of fitting the frame of reality and the truth? To be precise, we would need to redefine or make the idea of God more precise. Maybe God is not what we think it is. What if the World itself is God? What if the World, regardless of its beginning and end, is still a consequence of an eternal Being without a beginning and end? What if the world and matter as we know it are only the modes of the Universal Eternal Being from which everything originates and to which everything returns? Matter is not what we think it is. God is not what religious books say. Nobody has the right to God, a title to God. No prophet can tell other people that he (or she) speaks the word of God. Humans do the things done in the name of God in their name, not the name of God. Their hiding behind God is a form of manipulation, demagogy, and control of others.

What motivated Newton to suspect that something like the Zeroth law had to be true was not painstaking experiments but, rather, powerful intuition, derived from his religion, about how the world is built. Newton had no doubt about God's existence, and he saw his task in science as revealing God's method of governing the physical world.

For as the few and obscure Prophecies concerning Christ’s first coming were for setting up the Christian religion, many and clear Prophecies concerning the things to be done at Christ’s second coming are not only for predicting, but also for effecting a recovery and re-establishment of the long-lost truth. —Issac Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse  of St. John[66]

Partly we are distracted by entertainment. Our fickle attention is far too easily distracted from Christ as our marauding affections jump from thrill to thrill in fictional entertainment that is wholly disconnected from us. Newton would warn us here against using entertainment and amusements as escapism. True religion is sufficient to provide joy. “That religion which does not engage the whole heart for the Lord can be little better than a name. The comforts of the gospel neither require nor admit such poor assistance as worldly amusements offer.”54 Binging on the cotton candy of worldly amusements cannot nourish a living soul. Christ’s sufficiency bears directly on our lives, providing us a feast of eternal joy and significance. The tragedy is that

Religion itself can get in the way of Christ. When a sense of guilt and a lack of confidence in Christ push the Christian away from Christ, they tend to promote a wrong activity—an increasing confidence in self-righteousness. These insecurities before God quickly devastate communion with Christ.

popular religion produces shallow people. Several years ago, Bill McKibben wrote an article in Harper’s magazine that described the current condition of American Christianity:   Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that, “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counterbiblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.6

For as the few and obscure Prophecies concerning Christ’s first coming were for setting up the Christian religion, many and clear Prophecies concerning the things to be done at Christ’s second coming are not only for predicting, but also for effecting a recovery and re-establishment of the long-lost truth. —Issac Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse  of St. John

Human Rights calls for responsible behavior on the part of every individual being, and the society at large. As entwined portion of rights, duties follow, thereby it calls for performance of duties such as practicing nonviolence, solving conflicts with a dialogue, respect for the other individual or a nation, respect for human rights of other individuals etc

..Thus it can be said that ‘Human Rights’ is an ever expanding subject, which grows in leaps and bounds with the evolution of knowledge, development of the society and the advancement of the world at large, thereby encompassing within its ambit newer forms of right/s as and when recognized as an inalienable ‘right’ , along with wrapped-in duties; duties, on the part of the state, the government, the human rights organizations on one hand, and duties incumbent on individuals as responsible beings owing their allegiance to the society, the society itself , and the world at large on the other...

The Newton Twins were the first to try to force the machine to be wrong. Both their tickets said Old Age, so they committed suicide. Ten times they tried, and ten times they failed. Gun jammed. Car engine died. Gas ran out. Tree branch snapped—and by now, the media was all over it. They injected HIV, and it just went away. Concrete slippers in the lake, underwater for half an hour—but the medics brought them back to life, pictures of health. One of the twins, Julie, jumped off the railway bridge, but her sister was scared of heights, so abstained. Nonetheless, she was caught by the tarp on a slow-moving train, and trudged home three days later. I try to inject some perspective, but it’s hard when religion died overnight.

...religion focused far more on damnation than on consolation.

In hindsight, this night must have been when I knew for certain I didn't believe in the Christian God, who always seemed to align with my mom and justify her desires. Demons had a way of showing up, as she told it, to underscore the wickedness or folly of whatever she didn't like. Like my Puritan forebears—and their Puritan enemies—she was certain that God took her side. Religion was a shield and a weapon. If someone had to suffer, it was not the believer.

understood the necessity of religion as a means of escaping hell, but I loved sin and was unwilling to forsake it.

Flip religion, it was so far out, you couldn’t blame anybody for believing anything…Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they’d killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends’ underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pair of socks. He took a lot of shit about it. (“When you go to sleep we’re gonna eat your fucking cookie’), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn’t kidding.

Darwin's theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it's been under attack since day one. That's just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we'd still be debating Newton with idiots too.

The most amazing part,” Katherine said, “is that as soon as we humans begin to harness our true power, we will have enormous control over our world. We will be able to design reality rather than merely react to it.” Langdon lowered his gaze. “That sounds . . . dangerous.” Katherine looked startled . . . and impressed. “Yes, exactly! If thoughts affect the world, then we must be very careful how we think. Destructive thoughts have influence, too, and we all know it’s far easier to destroy than it is to create.” Langdon thought of all the lore about needing to protect the ancient wisdom from the unworthy and share it only with the enlightened. He thought of the Invisible College, and the great scientist Isaac Newton’s request to Robert Boyle to keep “high silence” about their secret research. It cannot be communicated, Newton wrote in 1676, without immense damage to the world. “There’s an interesting twist here,” Katherine said. “The great irony is that all the religions of the world, for centuries, have been urging their followers to embrace the concepts of faith and belief. Now science, which for centuries has derided religion as superstition, must admit that its next big frontier is quite literally the science of faith and belief . . . the power of focused conviction and intention. The same science that eroded our faith in the miraculous is now building a bridge back across the chasm it created.” Langdon considered her words for a long time. Slowly he raised his eyes again to the Apotheosis. “I have a question,” he said, looking back at Katherine. “Even if I could accept, just for an instant, that I have the power to change physical matter with my mind, and literally manifest all that I desire . . . I’m afraid I see nothing in my life to make me believe I have such power.” She shrugged. “Then you’re not looking hard enough.” “Come on, I want a real answer. That’s the answer of a priest. I want the answer of a scientist.” “You want a real answer? Here it is. If I hand you a violin and say you have the capability to use it to make incredible music, I am not lying. You do have the capability, but you’ll need enormous amounts of practice to manifest it. This is no different from learning to use your mind, Robert. Well-directed thought is a learned skill. To manifest an intention requires laserlike focus, full sensory visualization, and a profound belief. We have proven this in a lab. And just like playing a violin, there are people who exhibit greater natural ability than others. Look to history. Look to the stories of those enlightened minds who performed miraculous feats.

But in 1936 a huge archive of Newton’s private manuscripts was put up for auction at Sotheby’s, in London. The papers had been kept from the public for over two centuries. One hundred lots of the manuscripts were bought by the famous British economist, John Maynard Keynes, who found that many of Newton’s papers were written in a secret cypher. And for six years, Keynes struggled to decipher them. He hoped they would reveal the private thoughts of the founder of modern science. But what the code really revealed was another, far darker, side to Newton’s work. For, in the manuscripts, Keynes found a Newton unknown to the rest of the world—a Newton obsessed with religion, and a purveyor of practices of heresy and the occult.

Many scientists in the past did not regard scientific discoveries as a challenge to faith. They understood that what had been offered by modern science are better explanations of physical phenomena rather than finding a newer source of origin, creation and ‘will’ behind the physical phenomena. Isaac Newton is quoted to have said that gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control… The two are not rivals. —Martin Luther King, Jr. God created everything by number, weight and measure. —Isaac Newton I believe in Darwin and God together. —Ray Bradbury Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a

My family looked very much different than my family today. As the years passed my family and friends warped into what I see before me today. Originally we were tight. Perhaps the reason was the Great depression or the war. It could have been that we all depended on each other to succeed. In time however I got married and with two sons formed my own nucleus. Although not always perfect, and what is? Ursula and I have been together for over 60 years. Our two sons are both now older than I was when I retired. Life now has become difficult in a different way and perhaps because of this reason I find that everyone is too busy to carry on the ties that I had in the past. Everyone has grown apart and has to struggle with the results of divorce or burdens placed on their shoulders by others, although some of these burdens are self-inflicted wounds. Fortunately we do still see each other for events such as my 85th birthday. Sometimes we celebrate birthdays with tons of gifts and cookie cakes and other times we celebrate a birthday with a simple card. There are also times that our successes are recognized and other times that they are forgotten. Yes things have changed but no one is to blame, since this is the world we live in. Like all families we have gone our own ways politically. Some of us are open in our political or religious beliefs and others disguise them, but for the greatest part of my life we were all for American first. Unfortunately and perhaps for extra-national reasons we no longer have the country we had during my earlier years, nor do we have a president I and others, can be proud of. Our values have dissipated as I never envisioned, separating small children from their parents and locking them into cages, or fearing that children would be shot to death in their classrooms as it has happened all too frequently. I still can’t believe that it happened in Newton, CT, a feeder community to the school where I taught for 25 years. I never would have believed that not one of the 8 victims of a recent shooting, recovering in a hospital, would see the president of the United States.

That is why throughout history and across disciplines, the best problem solvers, the big beasts of creativity who conjure earthshaking breakthroughs, have cherished solitude. Einstein spent hours staring into space in his office at Princeton University. William Wordsworth described Newton as “a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” Every major religion has prophets—Buddha, Muhammad, Moses—who went out into the wilderness to grapple with the big questions on their own.

The Ultimate Creator has to be uncreated since it is necessary for the universe to be created in the first place. We find cause or creator for something that is created and that begins to exist at some finite point in time like the universe which came into existence 13.7 billion years ago. The Ultimate Creator did not come into existence at some finite point in time. It is ever-existing. This God is not the ‘scientific conjecture of god of the gaps’ which fits in the novel for pages that are not found in the novel. This God is the author of the whole novel and the programmer of nested loops within loops. He is not the pixel of the painting or a brush or a colour or the painting itself. It is the painter. It is not the laws of physics or theorems of mathematics alone. It is the source of these laws and theorems. Isaac Newton aptly said that gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

La condena de Galileo es emblemática de la posición anticientífica de las religiones. Más tarde, en cambio, los protestantes adoptaron una actitud positiva frente a la ciencia, así la teoría de Isaac Newton fue reconocida por la Inglaterra y la Alemania protestantes, en tanto Roma la rechazó como herejía protestante. Esa actitud divergente marcó la separación drástica entre el progreso científico de las sociedades protestantes

La condena de Galileo es emblemática de la posición anticientífica de las religiones. Más tarde, en cambio, los protestantes adoptaron una actitud positiva frente a la ciencia, así la teoría de Isaac Newton fue reconocida por la Inglaterra y la Alemania protestantes, en tanto Roma la rechazó como herejía protestante. Esa actitud divergente marcó la separación drástica entre el progreso científico de las sociedades protestantes y el atraso de las católicas.

Several major and significant discoveries in science occurred in the 19th and 20th century through the works of scientists who believed in God. Even in just the last 500 years of modern scientific enterprise, a great many scientists were religious including names like Isaac Newton, Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, William Thomson Kelvin, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Louis Pasteur and Nobel Laureate scientists like: 1.Max Planck 2.Guglielmo Marconi 3.Robert A. Milikan 4.Erwin Schrodinger 5.Arthur Compton 6.Isidor Isaac Rabi 7.Max Born 8.Dererk Barton 9.Nevill F. Mott 10.Charles H. Townes 11.Christian B. Anfinsen 12.John Eccles 13.Ernst B. Chain 14.Antony Hewish 15.Daniel Nathans 16.Abdus Salam 17.Joseph Murray 18.Joseph H. Taylor 19.William D. Phillips 20.Walter Kohn 21.Ahmed Zewail 22.Aziz Sancar 23.Gerhard Etrl Thus, it is important for the torchbearers of science to know their scope and highlight what they can offer to society in terms of curing diseases, improving food production and easing transport and communication systems, for instance. To mock faith and faithful, the scientists who do not believe in God do not just hurt the faithful people who are non-scientists, but a great many of their own colleagues who are scientists, but not atheists.

This was how we grew up—in a close family with a proud, strong, protective father and a loving, joyful mother. No wonder we came to feel that all our needs—from religion to friendship to entertainment—were met within the family circle. There was no felt need for outside friends; we were such good friends with each other.

Es importante recordar que el hemisferio cerebral que procesa los sonidos de la naturaleza es el derecho. Si nos damos cuenta, toda la ciencia actual, sobre todo a partir de Newton, se basa en esta percepción: existimos nosotros y existe un universo externo a nosotros. Esta misma separación afectó profundamente a las religiones al considerar que estábamos nosotros por una parte y allí a lo lejos habitaba un Dios o una serie de dioses.