Religious views of Isaac Newton

Newton was born into an Anglican family three months after the death of his father, a prosperous farmer also named Isaac Newton. When Newton was three, his mother married the rector of the neighbouring parish of North Witham and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough. making necessary his commitment to taking Holy Orders within seven years of completing his MA, which he did the following year. He was also required to take a vow of celibacy and recognize the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Newton considered ceasing his studies prior to completion to avoid the ordination made necessary by law of King Charles II. He was eventually successful in avoiding the statute, assisted in this by the efforts of Isaac Barrow, as in 1676 the then Secretary of State for the Northern Department, Joseph Williamson, changed the relevant statute of Trinity College to provide dispensation from this duty. ==Christian heresy==

According to most scholars, Newton was Arian, not holding to Trinitarianism. Scholars have generally concluded that Newton's heretical beliefs were self-taught, but he may have been influenced by then-current heretical writings; controversies over unitarianism were raging at the time. Although he was not a Socinian, he shared many similar beliefs with them. Newton refused the sacrament of the Anglican church offered before his death. After his death, Deists sometimes claimed him as one of their own, as have Trinitarians. In fact, he was an active apologist who opposed both orthodox teachings and religious skepticism. ==God as masterful creator==

Newton saw God as the masterful creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation. Nevertheless, he rejected Leibniz's thesis that God would necessarily make a perfect world which requires no intervention from the creator. In Query 31 of the Opticks, Newton simultaneously made an argument from design and for the necessity of intervention: This passage prompted an attack by Leibniz in a letter to his friend Caroline of Ansbach: Leibniz's letter initiated the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, ostensibly with Newton's friend and disciple Samuel Clarke, although as Caroline wrote, Clarke's letters "are not written without the advice of the Chev. Newton". Clarke complained that Leibniz's concept of God as a "supra-mundane intelligence" who set up a "pre-established harmony" was but a step from atheism: "And as those men, who pretend that in an earthly government things may go on perfectly well without the king himself ordering or disposing of any thing, may reasonably be suspected that they would like very well to set the king aside: so, whosoever contends, that the beings of the world can go on without the continual direction of God...his doctrine does in effect tend to exclude God out of the world". In addition to stepping in to re-form the Solar System, Newton invoked God's active intervention to prevent the stars falling in on each other, and perhaps in preventing the amount of motion in the universe from decaying due to viscosity and friction. In private correspondence, Newton sometimes hinted that the force of gravity was due to an immaterial influence: Leibniz said that such an immaterial influence would be a continual miracle; this was another strand of his debate with Clarke. Newton's view has been considered to be close to deism, and several biographers and scholars labelled him as a deist who is strongly influenced by Christianity. However, he differed from strict adherents of deism in that he invoked God as a special physical cause to keep the planets in orbits. He warned against using the law of gravity to view the universe as a mere machine, like a great clock, saying: On the other hand, latitudinarian and Newtonian ideas taken too far resulted in the millenarians, a religious faction dedicated to the concept of a mechanical universe, but finding in it the same enthusiasm and mysticism that the Enlightenment had fought so hard to extinguish. Newton showed considerable interest in millenarianism, as he wrote about both the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation in his Observations Upon the Prophecies. Newton's concept of the physical world provided a model of the natural world that would reinforce stability and harmony in the civic world. ==Bible==

Newton spent a great deal of time trying to discover hidden messages within the Bible. After 1690, Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible. In a manuscript Newton wrote in 1704, he describes his attempts to extract scientific information from the Bible. He estimated that the world would end no earlier than 2060. In predicting this, he said, "This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail." The Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, holds in its collections Newton's personal copy of the King James Version, which exhibits numerous marginal notes in his hand as well as about 500 reader's marks pointing to passages of particular interest to him. A note is attached to the Bible, indicating that it "was given by Sir Isaac Newton in his last illness to the woman who nursed him". The book was eventually bequeathed to the Library in 1878. The places Newton marked or annotated in his Bible bear witness to his investigations into theology, chronology, alchemy, and natural philosophy; and some of these relate to passages of the General Scholium to the second edition of the Principia. Some other passages he marked offer glimpses of his devotional practices and reveal distinct tensions in his personality. Newton's Bible appears to have been first and foremost a customized reference tool in the hands of a biblical scholar and critic. Newton's alchemical knowledge influenced his religious views. The Trinity Newton's work of New Testament textual criticism, An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, was sent in a letter to John Locke on 14 November 1690. In it, he reviews evidence that the earliest Christians did not believe in the Trinity. According to Manoilă, Newton considered Jesus to be God as dominion, not as being or substance. Prophecy Newton relied upon the existing Scripture for prophecy, believing his interpretations would set the record straight in the face of what he considered to be, "so little understood". Though he would never write a cohesive body of work on prophecy, Newton's beliefs would lead him to write several treatises on the subject, including an unpublished guide for prophetic interpretation titled Rules for interpreting the words & language in Scripture. In this manuscript, he details the requirements for what he considered to be the proper interpretation of the Bible. End of the world vs. Start of the millennial kingdom In his posthumously-published Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, Newton expressed his belief that Bible prophecy would not be understood "until the time of the end", and that even then "none of the wicked shall understand". Referring to that as a future time ("the last age, the age of opening these things, be now approaching"), Newton also anticipated "the general preaching of the Gospel be approaching" and "the Gospel must first be preached in all nations before the great tribulation, and end of the world". Over the years, a large amount of media attention and public interest has circulated regarding largely unknown and unpublished documents, evidently written by Isaac Newton, that indicate he believed the world could end in 2060. While Newton also had many other possible dates (e.g. 2034), he did not believe that the end of the world would take place specifically in 2060. Like most Protestant theologians of his time, Newton believed that the Papal Office and not any one particular Pope was the fulfillment of the Biblical predictions about Antichrist, whose rule was predicted to last for 1,260 years. They applied the day-year principle (in which a day represents a year in prophecy) to certain key verses in the books of Daniel and Revelation (also known as the Apocalypse), and looked for significant dates in the Papacy's rise to power to begin this timeline. Newton's calculation ending in 2060 is based on the 1,260-year timeline commencing in 800 AD when Charlemagne became the first Holy Roman Emperor and reconfirmed the earlier (756 AD) Donation of Pepin to the Papacy. F. A. Cox also confirmed that this was the view of Newton and others, including himself: Thomas Williams stated that this timeline had become the predominant view among the leading Protestant theologians of his time: In April of 756 AD, Pepin, King of France, accompanied by Pope Stephen II entered northern Italy, forcing the Lombard King Aistulf to lift his siege of Rome and return to Pavia. Following Aistulf's capitulation, Pepin gave the newly conquered territories to the Papacy through the Donation of Pepin, thereby elevating the Pope from being a subject of the Byzantine Empire to the head of state, with temporal power over the newly constituted Papal States. The end of the timeline is based on Daniel 8:25, which reads "he shall be broken without hand" and is understood to mean that the end of the Papacy will not be caused by any human action. Volcanic activity is described as the means by which Rome will be overthrown. In 1870, the newly formed Kingdom of Italy annexed the remaining Papal States, depriving the Popes of any temporal rule for the next 59 years. Unaware that Papal rule would be restored (albeit on a greatly diminished scale) in 1929 as head of the Vatican City state, the historicist view that the Papacy is the Antichrist and the associated timelines delineating his rule rapidly declined in popularity as one of the defining characteristics of the Antichrist (i.e. that he would also be a political temporal power at the time of the return of Jesus) were no longer met. Eventually, the prediction was largely forgotten and no major Protestant denomination currently subscribes to this timeline. Despite the dramatic nature of a prediction of the end of the world, Newton may not have been referring to the 2060 date as a destructive act resulting in the annihilation of the earth and its inhabitants, but rather one in which he believed the world was to be replaced with a new one based upon a transition to an era of divinely inspired peace. In Christian theology, this concept is often referred to as The Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of Paradise by The Kingdom of God on Earth. ==Other beliefs==

Henry More's belief in the universe and rejection of Cartesian dualism may have influenced Newton's religious ideas. Later works—The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)—were published after his death. Newton and Boyle's mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts, and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox clergy as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians. These principles were available for all people to discover, allowed man to pursue his own aims fruitfully in this life, not the next, and to perfect himself with his own rational powers. Newton believed in the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. This is mentioned in (J. Edleston, Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes, London: John W. Parker, 1850) where a swedish professor by the name Björnstahl visited a certain Mr. Fontein, an Anabaptist preacher, in Amsterdam in December of 1774, who related to him that he had visited England in 1738 and had heard several anecdotes about Newton from professors or fellows at Cambridge. Among other things he was told (translated to english):" ... that Newton had believed that Muhammad had been sent by God to lead the Arabs back from darkness towards belief in one god etc. [...] the fables and miracles occurring in the Quran and Muhammad's life this enlightened man had not believed.". Though there is no evidence that Isaac Newton ever had the chance of being able to properly study the Islamic scriptures. ==Writings==

His first writing on the subject of religion was Introductio. Continens Apocalypseos rationem generalem (Introduction. Containing an explanation of the Apocalypse), which has an unnumbered leaf between folios 1 and 2 with the subheading De prophetia prima, written in Latin some time prior to 1670. Written subsequently in English was ''Notes on early Church history and the moral superiority of the 'barbarians' to the Romans. His last writing, published in 1737 with the miscellaneous works of John Greaves, was entitled A Dissertation upon the Sacred Cubit of the Jews and the Cubits of the several Nations''. All of Newton's writings on corruption in biblical scripture and the church took place after the late 1670s and prior to the middle of 1690. == See also ==