Tag: Isaac Newton

  • On Newton’s World View

    Quotes from David Castillejo, Expanding Force in Newton’s Cosmos. These are quotes from Newton manuscripts. Alchemy “This rod & the male & female serpents joyned in the proportion of 3, 1, 2 compose the three headed Cerberus which keeps the gates of Hell. For being fermented & digested together they resolve & grow dayly more…

  • Neuroscience about Newton

    Quotes from Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain p. 98 “In moment-to-moment activity, the interpreter [in the brain] is always dealing  with the changing inputs from sites in the brain where activity is going on.  Sitting under the apple tree, Isaac Newton, indulging in that most human…

  • Mathematics as Escape

    Quotes from Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World, Chapter Twenty-One “Shuddering Before the Beautiful” ‘For the mathematically minded, the notion of glimpsing God’s plan has always exerted a hypnotic pull. The seduction is twofold. On the one hand, delving into the world’s mathematical secrets…

  • Every Event has a Cause as Metaphysics

    In his book An Essay on Metaphysics in Part IIIc Causation, Collingwood has considered what could mean that every event must have a cause. This could be interesting for a discussion on free will, as Collingwood shows that causation presupposes free will. In other words, if free will is to be abandoned, then causation must…

  • Experimental Method and God’s Voluntarism

    From Nancy Pearcey, Charles Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy p. 19 “In 1277 Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, issued a condemnation of several theses derived from Aristotelianism – that God could not allow any form of planetary motion other than circular, that He could not make a vacuum, and many…

  • God as a Cosmic Operator

    I will start with a couple of quotes from the Chapter 2, The Disunity of Science, Paul Feyerabend, The Tyranny of Science “After Newton had found his law of gravitation, he applied it to the moon and to the planets. It seemed that Jupiter and Saturn, when treated in this way, slowly moved away from each…