Content area
Full Text
Abstract. Throughout his life, Newton searched for the machinery through which God creates, designs and sustains the world. He believed that the Creator is a God of Dominion who continuously preserves His creation through secondary mechanical causes or through direct, voluntary actions. God periodically intervenes in order to restore the pure and divine state of creation, deteriorated due to material interactions in a natural process of decay. The restoration, whether through matter or through chosen souls, is pure and simple, flowing equably along God's eternal duration. As time passes, a process of decay and corruption causes these pure states to deviate from the original divine path and they gradually begin to flow along distorted and distracted ways. Newton's youthful method of fluxions, though dealing with abstract mathematics, has a crucial role in revealing true knowledge about the God of creation and sustenance. The mathematical method captures and reveals the most fundamental truth about the mechanism of perception and the natural decline of all processes in Nature. This simple method is analogous to the simple creed, which God reinstills throughout history in religious founders and prophets assisting humans to worship God properly.
The search for truth
`It is, in Newton's belief, in the unity of Truth', writes the late Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, `guaranteed by the unity and majesty of God, that one may find a way to reunite his many brilliant facets, which however well polished, now remain incomplete fragments1 Newton believed that the Truth can be uncovered only by 'a remnant, a few scattered persons which God has chosen, such as without being led by interest, education, or humane authorities can set themselves sincerely & earnestly to search after [it]2. Such a `Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things'.3 But of what does this simple Truth consist for Newton? This paper argues that Newton's youthful method of fluxions, though dealing with abstract mathematics, has a crucial role in revealing the true simple knowledge about the God of creation and sustenance. The mathematical method captures and reveals the most fundamental and simple truth about the mechanism of perception and the natural decline of all processes in Nature. This simple method is analogous to the...