Context: Newton personally believed in the concept of absolute space since it reinforced the idea of an absolute God, but the entire premise was proven false by what we know as ‘relativity of motion’ which makes use of Newton’s laws of motion.

Excerpts from ‘A Brief History of Time’ by Stephen Hawking:

“… Aristotle believed in a preferred state of rest, which any body would take up if it were not driven by some force or impulse. In particular, he thought that the earth was at rest. But it follows from Newton’s laws that there is no unique standard of rest.”

“Newton was very worried by this lack of absolute position, or absolute space, as it was called, because it did not accord with his idea of an absolute God. In fact, he refused to accept lack of absolute space, even though it was implied by his laws.”

  • adam_y@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    16 days ago

    Yeah, no.

    Newton was such a complex human. He seemed capable of holding many, sometimes opposing beliefs, at the same time.

    Newton’s conception of the physical world provided a model of the natural world that would reinforce stability and harmony in the civic world. Newton saw a monotheistic God as the masterful creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation.

    There’s even a Wikipedia page dedicated to his religious beliefs.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newton

    If you are into learning about him there’s also a rather good read, The Janus Faces of Genius, by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, that looks into his occult work.

    Furthermore, for the sake of complexity, we can look into how, when he was the warden of the mint, he became responsible for the deaths of 19 people. He turned a largely ceremonial role into a task force, chasing down forgers and sentencing them to death.

        • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayEnglish
          2·
          16 days ago

          Petition to edit all textbooks

          All in favor of the emotional motion guy motion petition to move forward unless acted on by an equal and opposite motion say aye.

      • embed_me@programming.devEnglish
        4·
        16 days ago

        I am an engineer but even I felt insulted on behalf of mathematicians when you referred to him as the motions guy 😭

  • EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
    English
    171·
    16 days ago

    discovering how physics works doesn’t necessarily dis-prove the existence of a supreme being that designed the laws of physics

    I’ve said many times in my life that I hate all religion…But Jesus lives under one of the couches in my house so I guess he might be real.

    I asked him what he was doing down there and he told me “I’m hiding from the Christians”

    He likes to watch me play video games, but he can’t drive himself to actually play any of them. He doesn’t like violence…not even computer-simulated violence.

    • fishos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      how physics works doesn’t necessarily dis prove the existence of a supreme being that designed the laws of physics

      This is how Darwin felt about evolution. It was the answer to “how?”, not “why?”.

  • Patapon Enjoyer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    16 days ago

    “So then gravity may put the planets into motion, but without the Divine Power it could never put them into such a circulating motion, as they have about the sun”

    Nah, he rationalized the shit out of it

  • Reddfugee42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    15 days ago

    This is the bullshit that fundies are accidentally pointing to when they claim all the great scientists were theists

  • atro_city@fedia.io
    14·
    16 days ago

    God cannot be refuted nor confirmed. It’s like unicorns, elves, dragons, and many other myths: we have not seen proof of their existence, nor have any claimed proofs of their existence been confirmed to be a valid, but that doesn’t rule out that we will never find proof.

    Such is my understanding science: there is no absolute certainty nor absolute confidence. I think only logical fallacies might never exist e.g an all-powerful creator immediately runs into the logical problem of “can god create a rock that it itself cannot lift?”.

    But what if our universe were just a simulation within a machine of a highly advanced species? Their ability to modify the simulation to their will might make them akin to gods for us, but that also incurs the question: what if they were in a simulation themselves? That can be repeated to the root until a “real world” is reached, but that still leaves the question: how did everything come to be?
    We can thus cut out all the “if god exists, who created god” and focus on a world without the need to get distracted by the god problem.

    • Sylveon@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      God cannot be refuted nor confirmed.

      I’d say that depends on the specific god claim. Some of them are unfalsifiable, but others could be demonstrated to be true or false. I feel like your examples support this, because you could easily demonstrate the existence of a unicorn or a dragon by finding and capturing one. Also, the fact that they’re fairly large land animals and there’s zero confirmed sightings, no photographs and no captures is pretty good evidence that they likely don’t actually exist (on Earth).

      Generally, if the claim is that the god intervenes in some form, it should be testable. You could, for example, test whether prayer works. But if it’s more of a deist god that supposedly just created the universe and then fucked off then that’s probably not testable. But I don’t think any of the most popular religions propose such a god and it also wouldn’t really have any implications for human lives, so the claim isn’t as interesting to me.

      I think only logical fallacies might never exist e.g an all-powerful creator immediately runs into the logical problem of “can god create a rock that it itself cannot lift?”.

      I don’t like this argument very much because defining omnipotence in a way that includes logical impossibilities doesn’t really make sense to me to begin with. I think it’s more reasonable to define omnipotence as “can do anything that’s possible”.

      I do however agree with the sentiment that we can’t know anything with absolute certainty.

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        15 days ago

        Yes, the history of science is refuting claims about God or gods. What is left is the untestable vagueness of the God of the Gaps.