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THE ALCHEMIST (5)

By the 1670s Newton had become convinced that a major principle embraced by the church was wrong. The doctrine of the Trinity, to which his very college had been dedicated by Henry VIII, was in his eyes a form of heresy. Newton rejected this idea on the grounds that the worship of three figures in one violates the First Commandment, which states that there shall be only one
God, the Creator of the universe. To accept ordination, or Holy Orders, would be to sacrifice his conscience, something he would not do.

Yet, at the same time, Newton was being less than honest when he petitioned the king, for he kept his real reason for not taking Holy Orders secret. Why he chose to lie is easily understood: if his rejection of church doctrine was ever discovered, he would be dismissed from Trinity College and forced to return home to Woolsthorpe in disgrace, his chances of ever making a name for himself ruined. Instead, he kept his explosive opinions to himself, and only on occasion revealed them to an inner circle of young admirers once he became a famous man.

Employing sacred texts, Newton compiled a dictionary of religious terms, events, and images in a manner reminiscent of the Index Chemicus. He believed that biblical prophecy, especially as set forth in the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Revelation of St. John in the New, provided an excellent chronology of events to come. Of course, the writings required interpretation and once again Newton thought he was just the person for the job: “Having searched after knowledge in the prophetique scriptures,” he wrote while he was still in his thirties, “I have thought myself bound to communicate it for the benefit of others.”8 Such communication would not take place until after his death, however, when his Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John was published in 1733. In this work he predicted that Satan’s spell would be broken and that the “fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and sorcerers, and idolators, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.”9 And just exactly when would this come to pass? Never shrinking from a challenge, Newton calculated that it would occur in the year 2060.

It is easy to dismiss Newton’s religious beliefs as little more than the eccentric musings of an otherwise supremely rational mind. But it must be remembered that however modern his science may seem to us, Newton was still a man from the seventeenth century, a man of his time. Unlike many thinkers today, he saw no conflict between science and religion and wrote that the world could not operate without God being present. Indeed, without the Creator’s periodic intervention the universe would eventually run down, only to collapse and explode as the planets, comets, and stars rush together as part of the final cataclysm long foretold in prophecy. Few things would have angered or dismayed Isaac Newton more than the claim by a later generation of thinkers that his formulation of mechanical laws established the framework of a universe in which God is no longer a vital, or even necessary, part.

Taken From : Isaac Newton