Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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Transmitter substances, and their respective

types of post-synaptic receptors, come in a wide

variety. Among the major transmitter substances

identified are acetylcholine, dopamine, norepi-

nephrine, serotonin, GABA, and glycine, but there

are many more than this. There are, for example,

at least four variants of dopamine. The field of

neuropharmacology attempts to exploit this variety

by finding drugs that act in a specific manner on

synapses that use a particular neurotransmitter so

that specific functions of the brain can be modu-

lated. The drug Prozac, for example, inhibits the

reuptake of transmitter substance within synapses

that utilize serotonin, causing these particular

synapses to be active for a longer period of time.

Developmental neuroscience

Developmental neuroscience studies the fetal and

childhood development of the nervous system.

There are stages in development of the brain and

nervous system: development of cell identity, cell

migration, axon growth and guidance, growth of

dendrities and synaptic formation, differentiation

of connections based on early experiences, and

myelinization of axons.

Nerve cells differentiate from undifferentiated

stem cells. Stem cells become precursor neurob-

lasts that eventually produce neurons, glial cells, or

other cells within the nervous system. This differ-

entiation process is based primarily upon interac-

tions with neighboring cells. Because of the po-

tency of the influences of neighboring cells in

causing undifferentiated stem cells to become neu-

rons, a great deal of research is being done in an at-

tempt to introduce undifferentiated stem cells into

the adult brain as a means of reinstituting develop-

mental processes within areas of damaged neural

tissue (e.g., stem cells into the spinal cord in indi-

viduals who are paralyzed from spinal cord injury).

Cells differentiate into neurons in the middle of

the brain surrounding the neural tube and ventri-

cles. However, these cells must migrate outward to

form various brain structures. Once cells have mi-

grated to their appropriate place in the nervous

system, axons form and begin to grow toward dis-

tant targets. For example, neurons in the motor

cortex may send axons all the way down into the

spinal cord to synapse on motor neurons there.

Mechanisms for stimulating and guiding cell mi-

gration and axonal growth are topics of intensive

study. An example of a congenital brain abnormal-

ity related to a failure of appropriate axonal growth

is agenesis of the corpus callosum, a condition in

which the axons that are supposed to cross be-

tween the two cerebral hemispheres do not find

their way and, instead, end up traveling toward

the back of the brain.

Another important developmental process is

the growth of dendrites and the formation of

synapses. An interesting aspect of this process is

the overexuberance of dendrite and synapse for-

mation in the first two years of life, and the subse-

quent loss of dendrites and synapses. It is thought

that this loss of dendrites and synapses represents

brain differentiation based on experience, such

that connections that get incorporated into infor-

mation processing and memory circuits survive,

and the others do not survive.

A final developmental process is the progres-

sive increase in myelinization of axons that, in

some systems (e.g., the interhemispheric axons of

the corpus callosum), are still increasing in myelin-

ization well into the second decade of life. The

myelin sheath allows a neuron to transmit actions

potentials more rapidly and efficiently. Thus,

myelinization of axons contributes to increased

cognitive processing speed and power.

Sensory and motor neuroscience

This domain of neuroscience studies the way sen-

sory information (vision, hearing, etc.) is received,

coded, and recognized by the nervous system, and

the means by which the nervous system controls

motor activity in service of both reflexive and pur-

posive movement.

The largest volume of work in sensory neuro-

science has involved vision. What is becoming

clear from this research is that different properties

of the visual signal are processed by separate brain

areas. In the cortical area that first receives visual

signals, there are different cellular systems for de-

tecting light-dark boundaries and for coding color.

As information is further processed, there are sep-

arate cortical areas for processing complex visual

properties: the parietal lobe for visual guidance of

movement, the inferior temporal lobe for object

recognition, and a superior temporal area for spa-

tial analysis. Similar processes occur in the pro-

cessing of sound, touch, and pain. The existence

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of multiple visual processing areas raises an inter-

esting question regarding how these various sen-

sory properties are reconnected to create a unified

percept. This problem is known as the binding

problem, a problem that has yet to be solved.

Motor systems are studied by neuroscientists

all the way from simple reflexes controlled by the

spinal cord, to the voluntary control of skilled

movement initiated and regulated by the motor

cortex and various subcortical structures. One of

the knotty issues in the study of motor activity is

determining the modes by which spinal cord re-

flexes, more complex innate motor responses

(such as eating, drinking, sleeping, fear, aggres-

sion, etc.), learned habitual behaviors, and con-

scious voluntary activity are all coordinated with

each other and with important vestibular, propri-

ocpetive, and visual sensory information.

Regulatory neuroscience

Regulatory neuroscience studies widely distributed

neural and hormonal systems by which the brain

influences bodily systems both to insure home-

ostasis and to prepare the body for particular forms

of response to the environment. These neural sys-

tems provide regulatory control of breathing, car-

diac function, food intake and metabolism, water

intake and retention, stress responses, reactions to

pain, and sexual development and activity. Regu-

latory neuroscience overlaps with research in de-

velopmental neuroscience with respect to hor-

monal influences on growth, sexual differentiation,

and brain development. The class of regulatory

substances called neuromodulators lies somewhere

between the direct neural control of bodily sys-

tems carried out by the autonomic nervous sys-

tem, and the release of hormones into the blood

stream by the brain’s pituitary gland. Neuromodu-

lators are substances that act like synaptic trans-

mitters, but which are released into extracellular

space bathing large areas of the brain in order to

regulate the general level of activity in specific

brain systems.

Another important phenomenon studied

within regulatory neuroscience is the interactions

between psychological states, brain function, and

the activity of the immune system (called psy-

choneuroimmunology). This research focuses on a

number of recently discovered ways by which the

neural activity that constitutes certain psychological

and affective states (such as responses to stress,

general levels of depression or distress, or a sense

of well-being) can affect the activity level of the

immune system. This area of research is beginning

to explain why the belief that one is receiving a

beneficial treatment has such a ubiquitous and

powerful positive effect on health and recovery

from illness (i.e., the placebo effect).

Behavioral and cognitive neuroscience

One of the most significant scientific trends of the

latter half of the twentieth century has been the

joining of cognitive science and neuroscience into a

field called cognitive neuroscience. This field stud-

ies the role of various neural systems in complex

forms of thought and behavior such as attention,

object recognition, spatial orientation, skilled motor

activity, language production and comprehension,

arithmetic, music, historical (episodic) memory, and

the affective-cognitive aspects of social perception.

Methodological developments were an impor-

tant catalyst for this merger. During the first two-

thirds of the twentieth century, methods for study-

ing brain processes contributing to more complex

cognition was limited to studies of changes in the

behavior of animals created by lesions made in dif-

ferent areas of the brain, or elicited by electrical

stimulation of various brain structures. It was also

possible to record electrical activity from the depths

of the brain of behaving animals. Investigation of

human cognition was generally limited to study of

individuals with various forms of brain damage, or

to brain wave recordings from the scalp.

Technical advances in the methodologies

available to neuroscience have remarkably en-

hanced the ability of investigators to study com-

plex human cognition. Most notable has been the

development of the various forms of neuroimag-

ing: computer assisted tomography (CAT), mag-

netic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI

(fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and

single photon emission computed tomography

(SPECT). These methods provide the cognitive

neuroscientist with noninvasive ways of viewing

the structure of the nervous system (CAT and MRI),

or the relative level of functional activity of various

brain areas (fMRI, PET, and SPECT) in an alive,

awake, and mentally active human being.

One example of the kinds of studies that can

be done with neuroimaging methods is a 1999

study that compared PET scans taken while Italian-,

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French-, and English-speaking dyslexic individuals

were attempting to read. This research demon-

strated that, despite the fact that reading disability

took somewhat different forms in the different lan-

guages, there was nevertheless a consistent area of

diminished brain activity during reading (in the left

temporal lobe). This study illustrates the capacity of

neuroimaging to reveal, non-invasively, character-

istics of human brain processing that occur during

a complex cognitive task, such as reading, in nor-

mal and cognitively impaired individuals.

Clinical neuroscience

Much of the early history of the field of neuro-

science involved the study of individuals with

brain damage or brain disease. Studies of patients

with epilepsy, brain tumors, traumatic brain dam-

age, or brain diseases (e.g., multiple sclerosis,

Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease) have

contributed much to new ideas and theories about

how the brain works.

A few individual cases in clinical neurology

have been particularly influential. For example, in

1861 Paul Broca (1824–1880) described a patient

who had suddenly lost his speech, but was other-

wise cognitively normal. The patient has been

called “Tan” in the literature, since “tan” was the

only word the patient could utter. Autopsy of the

brain of this patient showed a lesion of the left

frontal lobe, suggesting that this frontal area, sub-

sequently called Broca’s area, was important for

expressive language. Similarly, a single case re-

ferred to in the literature by the initials “H. M.”

made a substantial contribution to the understand-

ing of explicit, episodic memory. In 1953, H.M.

underwent neurosurgical removal of the medial

temporal lobes of both hemispheres to control

seizures. The result was a profound amnesia in

which old memories were preserved, but the abil-

ity to form new conscious, explicit memories was

permanently lost. This case focused intensive neu-

roscientific study on the role of the hippocampus

(a structure of the medial temporal lobe) in mem-

ory formation—research that is still ongoing.

The contribution of new ideas about brain

function goes not only from clinical cases to basic

neuroscience, but also from neuroscience to clini-

cal medicine. All of the areas of neuroscience de-

scribed above feed critical information into areas

of investigation concerned with those human dis-

eases and disorders of the nervous system that are

diagnosed and treated by neurologists, neurosur-

geons, psychiatrists, neuroendocrinologists, and

neuropsychologists. An example of the impact of

basic neuroscience on clinical medicine is the con-

tribution made by studies of the synapse and

synaptic transmitters to the development of new

drugs that affect the nervous system (neurophar-

macology) and behavior (psychopharmacology).

Neuroscientific study of religious experience

and moral agency

Most persons identify as most uniquely spiritual

their experiences of religious ecstasy and awe—

those moments when one feels most transcendent

or overwhelmed by the feeling of divine presence.

However, the fact that such religious experiences

can accompany epileptic seizures (or drug intoxica-

tion) has been recognized since ancient times. This

observation caused many ancient cultures to asso-

ciate epilepsy with possession by gods or demons.

There is a significant literature in modern neu-

rology that suggests that in some cases of temporal

lobe epileptic seizures, religious experiences result

from the abnormal neural activity in the temporal

lobes and limbic system. Consistent with the clini-

cal data from temporal lobe epilepsy, investigators

have shown that electromagnetic stimulation of the

temporal lobes increases the likelihood of experi-

encing a “sense of presence,” leading some investi-

gators to speculate that abnormal temporal lobe ac-

tivity is the neural basis of all religious experiences.

Other investigators studying the activity of the

brain during religious experiences have suggested

the importance of other brain areas. Andrew New-

burg and Eugene d’Aquili have argued that the

sense of diminishment of self and an awareness of

oneness with god or the universe that is experi-

enced by some during transcendental meditation

or some forms of prayer is associated with dimin-

ished activity in the parietal lobes, rather than in-

creased activity in the temporal lobes. These in-

vestigators interpret these results as indicating a

neural correlate of an absence of the sense of self

and the achievement of a sense of “absolute uni-

tary consciousness.”

These studies of brain activity during religious

experiences at least make it clear that religious ex-

periences (whether feelings of ecstasy, awe, or one-

ness) have correlates in brain functional states. What

is as yet unclear is whether these functional brain

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states are unique to religious experiences or also

occur in similar situations that the person would not

report as religious. Is the religious attribution to the

experience being studied a matter of the context in

which the state occurs, or rather a matter of the

particular brain state? Nevertheless, over the last two

decades of the twentieth century, there has been in-

creasing interest in the neuroscientific study of reli-

gious experiences, such that a new field has taken

shape that is being called neurotheology.

There has also been considerable neuroscien-

tific study of the processes involved in moral deci-

sion-making and moral behavior. A long history of

cases from clinical neurology has pointed to the

important role of the medial frontal cortex in inter-

personally responsible action and moral behavior.

Important work by Antonio Damasio has strongly

suggested that deficits in these areas involve ab-

sence of the unconscious elicitation of negative

and positive emotions in relationship to contem-

plated behaviors, and that the medial frontal cortex

is important in triggering emotional reactions to

contemplated actions. In a similar vein, fMRI stud-

ies of persons attempting to solve moral dilemmas

have suggested that areas of the brain involved in

emotion are activated to the degree that the partic-

ular moral dilemma would demand direct action

toward another person.

Philosophy of neuroscience

As is evident in what is described above, neuro-

science as a field is committed, to a greater or lesser

degree, to four basic philosophical positions: em-

piricism, physicalism, reductionism, and determin-

ism. Like all science, neuroscience is empiricist in

attempting to learn what is true through systematic

observations and experimentation. However, neu-

roscientists might differ regarding whether empiri-

cism is the only contributor to knowledge of truth.

Physicalism maintains that human (or animal) mind

and behavior are the product of the physical activ-

ity of the nervous system. While some neuroscien-

tists might have an extra-scientific commitment to

body-soul or mind-body dualism, neuroscientific

theory and research would not admit the concept of

any nonmaterial entity. Reductionism refers to at

least two different positions. Methodological reduc-

tionism is merely the idea of breaking more com-

plex things into parts and studying the parts, such

as studying changes in synaptic efficiency as a part

of what happens in the brain during learning.

Causal (or explanatory) reductionism presumes that

the causes of any particular mental or behavioral

event can be found in more and more elementary

mechanisms, such that eventually all mental activity

is explainable in a bottom-up manner by chemistry

and physics. Some neuroscientists have begun to

adopt the concept of non-reductive (or top-down)

causal principles emerging within complex systems

such as the brain, thus loosening the grip of causal

reductionism on neuroscience. However, method-

ological reductionism is still a predominant princi-

ple within the field. Finally, determinism suggests

that the physical state of the brain at one point in

time is entirely determinative of the immediate fu-

ture activity of the brain. Certainly, much research

in the neurosciences proceeds as if current brain ac-

tivity is predictive of future brain (mental) activity.

However, neuroscientists differ with respect to the

question of existence of conscious agency or free

will. There is, as yet, no generally accepted theory

as to how conscious agency might emerge from

brain activity, or how such agency would create a

nonreducible causal influence on the processes

studied by molecular neuroscience.

See also ARISTOTLE; CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES;

ETERMINISM; EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS:COGNITIVE

AND

NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS; EXPERIENCE,

ELIGIOUS:PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS; MIND-BODY

THEORIES; MIND-BRAIN INTERACTION; NEURAL

DARWINISM; NEUROPHYSIOLOGY;

EUROPSYCHOLOGY; NEUROTHEOLOGY;

HYSICALISM, REDUCTIVE AND NONREDUCTIVE;

LACEBO EFFECT; PSYCHOLOGY

Bibliography

Adelman, George, ed. Encyclopedia of Neuroscience.

Boston and Stuttgart, Germany: Birhäuser, 1987.

Bechtel, William; Mandik, Peter; Mundale, Jennifer; et al.

eds. Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader.

Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001.

Brown, Warren S., Murphy, Nancey; and Malony, H. New-

ton. Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and

Theological Portraits of Human Nature. Minneapolis,

Minn.: Augsburg Press, 1998.

Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and

the Human Brain. New York: Putman, 1994.

Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body

and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New

York: Harcourt, 1999.

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D’Aquili, Eugene, and Newburg, Andrew B. The Mystical

Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience.

Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1999.

LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Un-

derpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Touch-

stone, 1996.

Libet, Benjamin; Freeman, Anthony; and Sutherland,

Keith, eds. The Volitional Brain: Toward a Neuro-

science of Free Will. Thorverton, UK: Impact Acade-

mic, 1999.

Greene, Joshua D.; Sommerville, R. Brian; Nystrom, Leigh

E.; et al. “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engage-

ment in Moral Judgement.” Science. 293, no. 5537

(2001): 2105–2108.

Kandel, Eric R.; Schwartz, James H.; and Jessell, Thomas

M., eds. Principles of Neural Science, 3rd edition.

Norwalk, Conn.: Appleton & Lange, 1991.

Kolb, Bryan, and Whishaw, Ian Q. Fundamentals of

Human Neuropsychology. New York: W.H. Freeman,

1996.

MacKay, Donald M. Behind the Eye. Oxford: Basil Black-

well, 1991.

Pansky, Ben, and Allen, Delmas J. Review of Neuroscience.

New York: Macmillan, 1980.

Paulesu, Eraldo; Démonet, Jean-François; Fazio, F.; et al.

“Dyslexia: Cultural Diversity and Biological Unity.”

Science 291, no. 5511 (2001): 2165–2168.

Russell, Robert J; Murphy, Nancey; Meyering, Theo; and

Arbib, Michael A., eds. Neuroscience and the Person:

Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Vatican City:

Vatican Observatory Publications, 1999.

Saver, Jeffery L., and, Rabin, John. “The Neural Substrates

of Religious Experience.” Journal of Neuropsychiatry

9 (1997): 498–510.

Zigmond, Michael J; Bloom, Floyd E.; Landis, Story C.; et

al., eds. Fundamental Neuroscience. New York: Aca-

demic Press, 1998.

WARREN S. BROWN

NEUROTHEOLOGY

The term neurotheology refers to the attempt to in-

tegrate neuroscience and theology. Depending on

whether its subject matter is defined in terms of re-

ligiosity or human personhood, neurotheology

may be divided in two main lines of research.

The first line of research was dominant during

the 1970s and 1980s when Eugene d’Aquili, Charles

Laughlin, and others attempted to relate neuropsy-

chology to religious phenomena, for example, by

looking for the neuropsychological determinants of

ritual behavior. Researchers also studied the psy-

chological characteristics linked to dominance of

the left or right hemisphere of the brain in relation

to various patterns of belief and images of the di-

vine. John Ashbrook suggested the term neurothe-

ology for this type of inquiry.

Since the 1980s, the search for specifiable

brain structures and brain functioning in correla-

tion to religious or mystical experiences has come

to the foreground. Along this line, Michael

Persinger as well as Vilayanur Ramachandran have

claimed a direct relation between religious experi-

ence and temporal lobe activity. Persinger inter-

prets this relationship atheistically, but others point

out that it validates neither an atheistic nor a theis-

tic conclusion.

D’Aquili and Andrew Newberg have gone con-

siderably beyond the temporal lobe hypothesis by

developing a model for religious experiences that

involves the entire brain. This model is based in

part on non-invasive neuroimaging of the working

brain during ritual behavior and meditation. It is es-

pecially this kind of work that is commonly labelled

neurotheology. Its aim is to explore the question of

how religion and God are perceived and experi-

enced by the human brain and mind. This research

has revealed that during meditation and worship,

the level of activity in those parts of the brain that

distinguish between the self and the outside world

is diminished. D’Aquili and Newberg regard their

research not only as neuroscience but also as a con-

tribution to theology because they feel that it will

bring all the elements of religion under one rational

explanatory scheme, namely that of neuroscience.

The second line of research concerns a por-

trayal of human personhood, which is both neuro-

scientifically and theologically accurate. The neu-

roscientific discourse on the human person,

increasingly vocal since “the decade of the brain”

(1990–2000), seems to be at variance with theolog-

ical discourse on that subject. In the latter, mind

and soul, free will, consciousness, responsibility,

and the human being’s contact with God are

thought to be fundamental characteristics of the

human person. In neuroscience, all of these are ei-

ther seriously doubted or reduced to their under-

lying material relationships.

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This second type of neurotheology aims at im-

proving the compatibility of theology and neuro-

science with regard to the concepts of human per-

sonhood. Here, conceptual analyses, such as the

analysis of free will, and concepts from the philos-

ophy of mind, such as supervenience, play an im-

portant role. The work of the international research

group co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory

and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sci-

ences in Berkeley, California, represents this type of

inquiry. Beyond compatibility, this “neurotheology

of the person” also aims at the mutual enrichment

of theology and neuroscience. Whereas the latter

may help theology incorporate materiality in its

conceptions of human personhood, theology may

stimulate neuroscience to be mindful of the more

holistic or synthetic characteristics of being human.

See also COGNITIVE SCIENCE; CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES;

XPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS: COGNITIVE AND

NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS; EXPERIENCE,

ELIGIOUS: PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS; FREEDOM;

EUROSCIENCES; PRAYER AND MEDITATION; SOUL

Bibliography

Ashbrook, James B. “Neurotheology: The Working Brain

and the Work of Theology.” Zygon 19 (1984): 331–350.

D’ Aquili, Eugene G., and Newberg, Andrew B. The Mysti-

cal Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience.

Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1999.

Persinger, Michael A. “Religious and Mystical Experiences

as Artifacts of Temporal Lobe Function: A General

Hypothesis.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 57

(1983):1255–1262.

Russell, Robert John; Murphy, Nancey; Meyering, Theo C.;

and Arbib, Michael A.; eds. Neuroscience and the Per-

son: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Vatican

City State: Vatican Observatory; Berkeley, Calif: Cen-

ter for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1999.

PALMYRE OOMEN

NEW PHYSICS

The term new physics refers to a range of funda-

mental developments and paradigm shifts that oc-

curred in the physical sciences during the last half

of the twentieth century. These include the theory

of quarks, which is essential to the standard model

of fundamental particle physics; the study and ap-

plication of macroscopic manifestations of quan-

tum phenomena such as superconductivity, super-

fluidity, lasing, and other types of spontaneous

quantum self-organization; the realization of elec-

troweak unification and the quests for grand and

total unification of the four fundamental interac-

tions; the burgeoning successes in gravitational

physics, including gravitational wave and black

hole physics; and inflationary, fundamental-particle,

and quantum cosmology, which ultimately rely on

total unification and quantum gravity schemes.

Another component of the new physics is the

study of chaos and complexity, which involves

modeling complex physical processes using non-

linear, often dissipative, deterministic mathematical

systems in which there is extreme sensitivity to ini-

tial conditions, leading to loss of predictability, the

importance of top-down causality together with a

lack of reducibility to more fundamental systems

and processes, and the emergence of higher-level

self-organization out of lower-level erratic behavior.

Some of the key features of the new physics are the

fundamental indeterminism at the basis of all quan-

tum phenomena due to the Uncertainty Principle,

and the appearance of one of more levels of global

chaotic or self-organizing behavior accompanied

by radical unpredictability and irreducibility in

complex systems, such as fluid turbulence, weather

systems, and the dynamics of insect populations.

See also COSMOLOGY, PHYSICAL; GRAND UNIFIED

THEORY; PHYSICS; PHYSICS, QUANTUM

Bibliography

Davies, Paul. “The New Physics: A Synthesis.” In The New

Physics, ed. Paul Davies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 1989.

WILLIAM R. STOEGER

NEWTON,ISAAC

When a tiny and frail boy was born in the obscure

Lincolnshire hamlet of Woolsthorpe on Christmas

Day 1642, the attendant maids did not believe he

would survive the hour, let alone eighty-four years.

As it was, Isaac Newton went on to become a Fel-

low of Trinity College and the Royal Society, Cam-

bridge’s second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics,

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NEWTON,ISAAC

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the author of the Principia mathematica (1687)

and the Opticks (1704), a member of Parliament,

Master of the Royal Mint, a knight and President of

the Royal Society. When he died in 1727, he was

given a state funeral and buried in a place of hon-

our at Westminster Abbey. His work in physics

gave us universal gravitation, a mathematical ex-

planation for the elliptical orbit of planets, and a

precise celestial mechanics that still serves the

world in the space age. His optical experiments

confirmed the heterogeneous nature of white light,

and he constructed the first practical reflecting tele-

scope. He discovered calculus and showed more

than any other thinker before him how well math-

ematics could explain the workings of the universe.

Hagiographic celebrations of Newton in the years

and decades after his death ensured his fame as an

enduring icon of science and as having produced

one of the greatest revolutions ever in the study of

nature. But the range of his intellectual endeavour

was even broader than this. What is less well

known is that for more than half a century Newton

was carrying out a private revolution in theology.

Newton’s science and his religion

When the young Cambridge-educated clergyman

Richard Bentley was called upon in 1692 to deliver

the first Boyle Lectures for the defence of Chris-

tianity against infidelity, he buttressed his natural

theological arguments for the existence of God

with support from Newton’s Principia. While re-

vising his lectures for the press, he wrote the au-

thor of the Principia to determine if his deploy-

ment of its physics would meet the approval of the

great man himself. In his first reply to Bentley

Newton confirmed: “When I wrote my treatise

about our Systeme I had an eye upon such Princi-

ples as might work wth considering men for the

beleife of a Deity & nothing can rejoyce me more

then to find it usefull for that purpose.” Newton

went on and asserted that “ye diurnal rotations of

ye Sun & Planets as they could hardly arise from

any cause purely mechanical … they seem to

make up that harmony in ye systeme wch … was

the effect of choice rather than of chance.”

Even though Newton’s letters to Bentley were

published in 1754 and thus became part of the

public record, the Principia’s original theological

backdrop receded in the wake of the profoundly

successful Enlightenment portrayal of Newton,

which made him the patron saint of the Age of

Reason. It was in the eighteenth century that the

still-common association between Newton and the

secular clockwork universe emerged. Yet the no-

tion of a self-sustaining clockwork universe, origi-

nally wound up at the beginning by a remote

deity, is precisely the sort of view of creation and

providence that Newton himself opposed in the

General Scholium, which portrays the biblical

“Lord of Lords” as a personal God with an ongo-

ing, interventionist relationship with creation. En-

lightenment apologists and later positivist scientists

also developed the two variations of the “Two-

Newton” thesis: first, that Newton only turned to

theology with old age and dotage (and thus after

the “first Newton” had produced his great works of

science) and, second, that Newton kept his science

separate from his religion in a kind of early mod-

ern anticipation of methodological naturalism. Al-

though the vestiges of the second variant of the

Two-Newton thesis can still be found in current lit-

erature, the recent availability of Newton’s long-

inaccessible manuscripts for study has made such

claims untenable. A steadily increasing body of

scholarly literature is both explicating Newton’s

theological views (the main contours of which

were mainly in place prior to or around the time of

the appearance of his Principia) and revealing

ways in which his theology interacted with his nat-

ural philosophy. Although some of the conclusions

will remain tentative until the manuscript corpus

has been thoroughly analyzed, the view of Newton

now emerging is that of a natural philosopher who

was both profoundly religious and who saw no

firm cognitive barrier between theology and the

disciplines now called scientific. Isaac Newton the

natural philosopher cannot be understood apart

from his religion.

Newton’s theology and prophetic studies

In addition to being the preeminent natural

philosopher in the West in the late seventeenth and

early eighteenth centuries, Newton was a theolo-

gian and prophetic exegete in his own right. It is

also now known that he left behind one of the

largest corpora of theological writings in the early

modern period (totaling as much as four million

words). In his zeal to plumb the depths of biblical

theology and comb the records of the early church,

Newton far out-stripped all but a few of his con-

temporaries, including those known as divines or

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NEWTON,ISAAC

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religious figures in the first instance. Newton him-

self was to remain a lay member of the Church.

When Newton became a Fellow of Trinity College,

Cambridge, he was obligated to become ordained

as a priest in the Anglican Church by 1675. The im-

pending deadline was likely one motivation for the

initiation of a comprehensive study of Christian

theology and ecclesiastical history that began by

the early 1670s. But as the deadline neared, New-

ton sought ways to avoid taking holy orders. An

eleventh-hour exemption from ordination (granted

by no less a personage than King Charles II) al-

lowed him to avoid the resignation of his fellow-

ship, which he had been prepared to do. Whatever

academic reasons Newton may have had for avoid-

ing ordination, theological discoveries that he

made by the early 1670s made ordination (and

subscription to the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles)

impossible. Among the results of Newton’s early

theological studies was the conclusion that Chris-

tianity’s chief doctrine, the Trinity, was a corrup-

tion deviously imposed on the Church in the

fourth century by Athanasius.

Newton gravitated toward the position of the

fourth-century Arians who, according to Trinitarian

historiography, were the doctrinal losers in the

Christological controversies of that era. As in Ari-

anism, Newton viewed the Father as the only true

God, while Christ was of a lesser status and nature,

albeit pre-existent before his appearance on Earth.

But Newton’s Christology was not precisely iso-

morphic with Arianism, and his discomfort over the

Athanasian injection of the Greek notions of

essence and substance into Christian theology ex-

tended to the Arians, who conceived of Christ as

being of similar substance (homoiousios)totheFa-

ther, while the Athanasian Trinitarians saw Christ

and the Father as of the same substance (ho-

moousios). In his stress on the moral rather than the

essential relationship between the Father and Son

Newton’s theology shows affinities with that of the

seventeenth-century Socinians and English Unitari-

ans, some of whose works were in his library. It is

also evident that Newton’s powerfully monotheistic

conception of a unipersonal “God of dominion”

owes something to Hebraic and Judaic thought.

Nor did Newton’s heresy stop here. By the

early 1690s his study of key biblical texts led him to

reject the orthodox doctrine of the soul’s natural

immortality in favour of a mortalist viewpoint. For

Newton such texts as Psalms 6:5 and Ecclesiastes

9:5 and 9:10 demonstrate that there is no

intermediate conscious state between death and

resurrection. Around the same time Newton con-

cluded that demons (thought by many in his day to

be departed spirits) in the Bible were not literal evil

spirits, but rather delusions or distempers of the

mind. Similarly, Newton rejected the belief that

Satan is a fallen angel, asserting instead that the

devil is a symbol of human lust and ambition. His

final position on the devil is almost identical to the

Jewish teaching of yetzer ha-ra (“the evil inclina-

tion”), in which sinful desires are personified as

Satan. Newton’s conception of human temptation

thus shifted from a focus on external and ontologi-

cally real evil spirits to a psychology of the inner

demons of the mind.

Denial of the Trinity was illegal in Newton’s

day and for many years afterward. The rejection of

the soul’s immortality was viewed as scandalous

and the denial of evil spirits was seen, ironically, as

tantamount to atheism. Until his dying day Newton

hid these maligned heresies from the notice of all

but a few trusted confidants. Although kept secret,

Newton’s heterodox theology was at the core of

his existence and helped to shape many aspects of

his thought, including his natural philosophy.

While heretical from the perspective of traditional

Christianity, these departures from orthodoxy do

not make Newton into some sort of protodeist. On

the contrary, Newton was a fervent biblicist who

always cast his theological language in scriptural

terms and supported his views amply with biblical

texts. Newton’s friend the philosopher John Locke,

who was also a lay student of the Bible, once re-

ferred to Newton as “a very valuable man not

onely for his wonderful skill in Mathematicks but

in divinity too and his great knowledg in the Scrip-

tures where in I know few his equals.” Newton

knew his Bible; he believed it too.

No true deist adheres to the literal fulfilment of

biblical prophecy, and Newton was nothing if not

passionate about just that. Newton wrote his first

monumental treatise on the Apocalypse in the

1670s and continued to study prophecy until his

death. He was fascinated by the symbols of bibli-

cal prophecy and methodically developed a lexi-

con of prophetic emblems. He also produced stud-

ies of the architectural structure of the Jerusalem

Temple. Following Cambridge’s Joseph Mede,

Newton’s eschatology was premillenarian. Newton

believed that the Jews would be restored to Israel,

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NEWTON,ISAAC

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the Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem, and that Christ

would return to the earth in the future to set up a

terrestrial Kingdom of God (which he put off to no

sooner than the twentieth century). As with his the-

ology, Newton’s prophetic views were virulently

anti-Catholic. Newton departed from most of his

contemporary Protestant prophetic exegetes, how-

ever, in placing the doctrine of the Trinity at the

center of the great apostasy.

The fulfilment of prophecy also provided New-

ton with one of the best lines of evidence for the

existence of God. In his posthumously published

Observations (1733), he wrote that “the event of

things predicted many ages before, will … be a

convincing argument that the world is governed by

providence.” At the same time, he looked askance

at exegetes who overconfidently set dates, believ-

ing that such enthusiasm inevitably brought dis-

credit on Christianity when the predicted dates

failed. When speaking about a particular prophecy

in his Observations, he wrote: “The manner I know

not. Let time be the interpreter.”

Religious motivations for Newton’s natural

philosophy

Newton’s theology related to his natural philosophy

at two levels. First, in a general way Newton’s piety

and religious beliefs acted as a stimulus to the study

of nature (the weak relationship between science

and religion). Second, in some cases the particulars

of Newton’s theology helped shape the cognitive

content of his physics and mathematics (the strong

relationship between science and religion). Begin-

ning with examples of the first type, Newton had

imbibed the seventeenth-century Protestant culture

of natural theology and, like the chemist Robert

Boyle, saw himself as a priest of nature. Manuscripts

dating from around the time of the Principia indi-

cate that Newton believed the priests of the Ur-

religion (for Newton a prescriptive ideal) were also

adept natural philosophers. The study of nature,

then, was intrinsically related to piety and could it-

self be a form of worship and devotion. Religion

and piety served as a stimulus to unravel the secrets

of nature. Newton’s adherence to the Renaissance

notion of the prisca sapientia (lost ancient wisdom)

served as one common motivator of both his natu-

ral philosophy and his religion, with Newton striv-

ing to recover the original, pure manifestations of

both. Like other natural philosophers of his age,

Newton believed that natural philosophy had as one

of its chief ends the understanding of God and his

attributes. Thus, he held that one aim of experiment,

which he promoted assiduously as President of the

Royal Society, was to discover God’s attributes.

Moreover, because he also was committed to the

topos of the Two Books—that God has revealed

Himself in both the Book of Scripture and the Book

of Nature—Newton employed similar methods of

analysis in his natural philosophy and his theology.

Analogies between Newton’s prophetic hermeneu-

tics and his natural philosophical methodology may

also be explained by his commitment to the Two

Books. Newton used the distinction between the

absolute and relative in both his science (to distin-

guish absolute and relative time and space) and his

theology (e.g., to distinguish between the absolute

and relative use of the term God). In his theology

Newton adhered to an epistemological dualism in

which he divided knowledge into open and closed

levels. This esoteric-exoteric divide, which may owe

something to Newton’s involvement in alchemical

networks, was also operative in his natural philoso-

phy. Other examples of the weak relationship could

be cited. For example, Newton’s animosity toward

Jesuit critics of his optics can be illuminated by an

understanding of his theologically inspired animus

against Catholicism.

Newton’s aforementioned letters to Bentley

confirm his adherence to natural theology. New-

ton’s belief in the argument from design was given

public acknowledgement when he added his Gen-

eral Scholium to the conclusion of the second edi-

tion of the Principia in 1713. In this new appendix

Newton states confidently that “This most elegant

system of the sun, planets, and comets could not

have arisen without the design and dominion of an

intelligent and powerful being.” The theological

part of the General Scholium concludes with the

claim that discoursing of God “from phenomena is

certainly a part of experimental philosophy” (“nat-

ural philosophy” in the third edition of 1726). This

was not Newton’s only public articulation of the

design argument; the later editions of his Opticks

also conclude with powerful expressions of natural

theology. In one of his unpublished papers he

wrote that “God is known from his works,” thus

confirming a natural theological empiricism that he

shared with such contemporaries as Boyle. In a

document dating from the early 1690s, Newton

stated: “there is no way (without revelation) to

come to the knowledge of a Deity but by the frame

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of nature.” There was also an apologetic edge to

Newton’s use of the design argument, and in one

place he wrote that “Atheism is so senseless & odi-

ous to mankind that it never had many professors,”

and then went on to speak about symmetry and

unity in nature, citing the fact that animals share

homologies in their physiological structures.

Newton’s adherence to the Two Books tradi-

tion is made plain in his early treatise on the Apoc-

alypse, where he argues that the same “God of

order” who embedded simplicity in creation also

ensured that the fundamental meaning of biblical

prophecy would be simple. This analogy between

parsimony in Scripture and nature helps explain

why Newton believed that similar inductive meth-

ods could be utilized in the interpretation of both

Books:

It is the perfection of God’s works that

they are all done with the greatest simplic-

ity. He is the God of order not confusion.

And therefore as they that would under-

stand the frame of the world must indeav-

our to reduce their knowledg to all possi-

ble simplicity, so it must be in seeking to

understand these visions.

For Newton all truth (God’s Word and God’s

Works) is a unity because all Truth comes from the

same, powerful Deity.

Newton’s theology and the content of his

natural philosophy

Examples of the weak relationship between theol-

ogy and natural philosophy in Newton’s career

serve as the substratum for cases of the strong re-

lationship, which has only recently begun to be

presented by scholars with force. It goes without

saying that interaction between matters of faith and

facts of nature should be entirely plausible for a

scholar who was committed to the Two Books tra-

dition and for whom there were no rigid method-

ological or conceptual barriers between theology

and natural philosophy. Nevertheless, the strong

relationship is more difficult to convey and, while

certain examples (such as Newton’s conception of

space as the divine sensorium) are transparent,

some case studies used to confirm it still require

further investigation and refinement.

First, it is evident that some examples of the

weak relationship or analogies, on closer inspec-

tion, lead into strong ones. This is the case with the

symmetry between Newton’s prophetic hermeneu-

tics and his natural philosophical methods, for

Newton’s rules of reasoning in the final edition of

the Principia appear to have been related to or

even based in part on his rules of prophetic inter-

pretation, which were written decades earlier. And

the analogy between the methods of interpretation

in both these disciplines is itself based on Newton’s

conception of God. Just as René Descartes used

God to guarantee deductive logic, so Newton em-

ployed the guaranteeing God to support his use of

induction. For Newton natural philosophers can

use inference in experimental philosophy precisely

because the faithful God of order allows one to ex-

pect parsimony in nature and since the unity of

creation ensures that specifically observed princi-

ples and structures point to universals.

Newton’s conception of space and time is thor-

oughly imbued with a profound sense of God’s

omnipresence and omnitemporality. For Newton

absolute space is rigid and immovable, thus pro-

viding a stable frame of reference within which

relative motion occurs. All of this is possible be-

cause absolute space is coextensive with God’s

omnipresence, a belief Newton came to in part

from his exposure to the Rabbinical notion of God

as m

qôm (“place”). As J. E. McGuire put it, space

for Newton was God’s “sacred field.” Similarly,

Newton conceived of absolute time as flowing

evenly and uniformly largely because it is cotermi-

nus with God’s eternal duration. Newton’s calculus

also depended on his conception of absolute time,

which for Newton rested on a belief in God’s eter-

nal, evenly flowing duration. God’s omnipresence

further provided an explanation for the phenome-

non of gravity, and in private Newton speculated

that God was the upholder of universal gravitation.

His notion of attraction may have also owed some-

thing to his engagement with alchemical doctrines.

Newton saw the deity as a God of dominion who

ruled creation directly and continuously, interven-

ing with particular providence when necessary to

keep history or nature on track. Here Newton’s

view of the providence of nature stands in stark

contrast to that of Gottfried Leibniz, whose Supra-

mundana used his supreme intelligence and per-

fect foreknowledge to set the world in motion at

creation, obviating the need for intervention. The

differences between these two views are articu-

lated eloquently in the famous debate between

Leibniz and Newton’s disciple Samuel Clarke.

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