Search results
Religious views of Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac Newton at 46 in Godfrey Kneller 's 1689 portrait. Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) [1] was considered an insightful and erudite theologian by his Protestant contemporaries. [2] [3] [4] He wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies, and he wrote religious tracts that ...
- The Son. It is impossible to say precisely when Newton began the innovative researches that would lead to his heterodox position on the Trinity. There is no sign that he was brought up in any radical tradition, or that he had contact with any anti-Trinitarians while he was at Cambridge.
- The Father. The flipside of Newton’s view of Christ the Son was his understanding of the overwhelming supremacy of God. Indeed, his accounts of God, offered up in later editions of his Principia and Opticks, were the best known of his statements on religion in the eighteenth century.
- Politics and religious freedom. Newton’s decision not to take holy orders at the end of 1674 marked a central point in his life. If he had ever entertained thoughts of becoming a clergyman when he entered the university, these had completely dissipated.
- A Nasty Secret. It is in this context that one should consider Newton’s Nicodemism, namely the practice of dissimulating one’s real beliefs by using various tactics of silence or concealment.
- Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 360.
- White, Isaac Newton, 346.
- Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte (Berkley University of California Press, 1946), Rule 4 in Book III, 400.
- Aristotle, On the Heavens, 1.9.
both of these views untenable. The unravelling of the myth When Newton died on 20 March 1727 he left behind a treasure trove of manuscript material. Few even today know that Newton’s unpublished writings dwarf what was released to the public in his lifetime. Newton’s executors found something like one million words on alchemy and as much as
Newton was an unusual Christian. At some point in his adult years, and certainly by 1690, Newton had dismantled the standard biblical proofs for the doctrine of the Trinity whilst keeping his beliefs to himself. It was not until after his death in 1727 that his views became public and they have attracted study and speculation ever since.
People also ask
What did Isaac Newton do?
Did Isaac Newton believe in atoms?
Was Isaac Newton an Anglican?
What was Newton's View on Christianity?
The approximately 2.2m words of Newton’s religious writings published since the start of 2008 show each stage of his creative process, from his note-taking to his idiosyncratic redrafting of various texts, and then finally on to the polished and virtually complete texts, written for a still largely mysterious audience.
Three paragraphs on religion, with drafts. Author: Isaac Newton. Metadata: post-1710, in English with some Latin, c. 2,222 words, 5 pp. Source: Keynes Ms. 9, King's College, Cambridge, UK. Newton Catalogue ID: THEM00009. [ Diplomatic text] [ Catalogue Entry] 4. Prolegomena ad lexici prophetici partem secundam in quibus agitur De forma ...
