In support of my views

By chance I found this letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement by one Andrew Janiak (Duke University) in response to some rather dismissive comments by Steve Weinberg (imminent physicist and careless historian of science):

Sir, – Steven Weinberg's review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion contains some inaccurate remarks about the history of Weinberg's discipline, mathematical physics. If the contemporary debate between religious thinkers and defenders of "scientific" conceptions of the world is to be constructive, we must recognize the historical specificity of the current positions. The fault lines of the raging debate about intelligent design, and related matters, may seem permanent, but the relation between science and religion was decidedly different during the era of modern physics's emergence. For instance, although contemporary physicists like Weinberg may now understand Sir Isaac Newton as having promoted a secular conception of natural phenomena and of their ultimate origin, this characterization reflects a decidedly anachronistic picture of Newton's own conception of his work.
Weinberg contends that Newton's theory of gravity in Principia mathematica challenged religion because it provided a natural explanation of various phenomena, such as the planetary orbits. But this was certainly not Newton's own understanding of his theory; indeed, in the first edition of the Principia, published in 1687, Newton argued that the solar system could only have been given its current configuration by the intervention of a wise and intelligent being. Weinberg misrepresents Newton again when he contends that the "argument from design" was refuted by Newton's explanations of the world. In fact, Newton himself endorsed a version of the design argument, and in the very text in which he presents his explanations of natural phenomena. In the famous "General Scholium", added to the second edition of the Principia in 1713, Newton writes that "the diversity of created things" could only have arisen "from the ideas and the will of a necessarily existing being". More generally, Newton made it clear that discussing God by analysing the phenomena of nature is a proper part of his natural philosophy. The task now confronting us, then, is to understand precisely why science and religion are understood as conflicting with one another, given their intertwining in the past. [my italics]

ANDREW JANIAK
Department of Philosophy, Duke University,
Durham, North Carolina 27708.

I'm happy to see the same mention of the gravitation controversy as well as the "intertwining" of science and theology in the past. Of course, we don't have the same views, but I think Janiak is highlighting the same intellectual ambiguity out of which modern science has sprung. It is perhaps just my reading of Janiak that sees a sympathy with the notion that things did not have to turn out the way the did.

I should also mention that my comments on Newtonian gravitation are drawn from the book "Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism" by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs (with a name like that, surely she also wrote a cookbook? I hope that's not belittling). It's a great little book on Newton and his first followers. See pages 50-51 and 59 for the most direct route to the topics in question.