Does Science Take Us Away From or To God?

Because Newton died over 175 years before the tale was first published.

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You don’t have evidence that Kirscher did not say it. You are assuming that based on not yet finding supporting evidence. It is a stretch that the author just made this up.

The fact the tale was never written down before 1904 is pretty strong evidence Kirschner ever said it. How did the story change from Kirschner to Newton? Like always you ignore facts inconvenient to your fantasies.

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First, it’s unclear (and probably unlikely) that the story is true of Kircher himself. Kircher lived in the 17th century before the Enlightenment and it’s unlikely that there were any strident atheists around living at the time. They were simply interested in different questions than that of Paley and his contemporaries.

That being said, it seems that Newton did support some sort of design argument:

When the great English natural philosopher Robert Boyle died at the end of 1691, he endowed a lecture series designed to promote Christianity against what Boyle took to be the atheism that had infected English culture after the revolutionary period of the mid-century. Famous Newtonians such as Samuel Clarke and William Whiston would eventually give the Boyle lectures. The first “Boyle lecturer” was the theologian Richard Bentley, who would eventually become the Master of Newton’s alma mater , Trinity College, Cambridge, and who also worked under Locke’s correspondent, Bishop Stillingfleet, himself an admirer of Newton’s (Gascoigne 1985: 65). When preparing his lectures for publication—they had been presented to a public audience in London in 1692—Bentley conferred with Newton, hoping to solicit his help in deciphering enough of the Principia to use its results as a bulwark against atheism (Bentley 1976). Newton obliged, and a famous correspondence between the two began (eventually published as Bentley 1756). The exchange is of great philosophical interest, for Bentley elicited a number of important clarifications that have no peer within Newton’s published oeuvre .

Bentley sought Newton’s assistance in particular because he wanted guidance in divining how the theory of the Principia indicates that the solar system must have been designed by an intelligent agent and could not have arisen through the physical interactions of material bodies. In the first edition of the Principia in 1687, Newton had made such a claim in a very brief statement (Newton 1972: vol. 2: 582–3; Cohen 1971: 154–6). In the second edition of the text (published in 1713), he removed that statement, replacing it with a more extensive discussion in the new section of the text, added to its end, called the “General Scholium” (mentioned above). Through their correspondence, Bentley learned that from Newton’s point of view, the positions of the planets relative to one another—and especially to the sun—indicate that mere chance, or the ordinary physical interactions of the planetary bodies, could not have placed each planet in precisely the right orbit to maintain a solar system like ours for an extended period of time. With this argument, Newton seems to be indicating that mere chance would have produced an unstable planetary system, one in which the planets would eventually either be too strongly attracted to the sun, falling into it, or be too weakly attracted, flying off into space. In this episode, a theologian appeals to the new authority of Newtonian natural philosophy when attempting to undermine atheism. And that was apparently the very kind of interchange that Boyle had envisioned when endowing the lecture series.

This is similar to what @Eddie has mentioned earlier in this thread. However, none of this gives any historical evidence of Newton using an orrery for his design argument. Perhaps the orrery story was retrospectively applied to Newton because he may have made similar design arguments in his actual writing.

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He may or may not have written this but why would a non embellished version be written in the archives at U of M. Tom McIver validated that the non embellished version was there. It is certainly possible that he owned a version of an orrery.

I agree with @Timothy_Horton that if you want to really make a convincing positive argument you need documentation from Newton and Kirschner. At the end of the day as you supported Newton believed the origin of the solar system was caused by an intelligent creator. The cleaver “orrery” argument may or may not have come from him.

The Orrery story is a (relatively) recently made up anecdote by someone looking to support his/her religion. It’s just like the silly “Darwin recanted on his deathbed” story. Zero basis in any factual evidence but repeated uncritically by the True Believers because they desperately want it to be correct.

(facepalm) Bill Bill Bill…

The Kirschner story was first published in 1904 in the Wisconsin based Annals Of Saint Joseph.
The Minnesota Technolog was published at UMinn from 1920-2008
The Hall book The Truth: God or Evolution? repeating the story was published in 1974.

Someone in Minnesota read the 1904 version and republished it in the Technolog between 1920 and 1974. They changed Kirschner to Newton but left the rest of the wording almost identical.

The Halls read the changed version and put in their 1974 book, adding a few more “details”.

Bill Cole reads the Hall version and is convinced it’s the truth from the 1600’s. :slightly_smiling_face:

Really Bill?

Did you read this?

I read this Bill

You desperately want the “cleaver” [sic] argument to be true despite having zero supporting evidence and ample evidence against. That seems to be a recurring theme with all your ID-Creation beliefs.

It doesn’t. And in fact the claim in the story isn’t that he owned it; it’s that he designed it. More importantly, the central point of the fiction is the confounding of the atheist friend. It reads just like a Chick tract.

No he didn’t. You are quite confused. It’s the same story with the name changed, and it’s from 1904. Your credulity knows no bounds, and yet you still refuse to believe that any two species are related by descent. Mirabile dictu!

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure it’s spelled Kircher.

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The inquisition would have had something to say about that, one suspects.

You guys should all read the full version of McIlver’s Skeptic article, which shows the many versions of this story: https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|A112409046&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=fulltext&issn=10639330&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=mlin_b_massblc&isGeoAuthType=true

Newton and Kircher are not the only scientists that the story has been applied to.

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You are reading intent into my answers that does not exist. The recurring theme is all in your head.

I used the spelling from the 1904 story. You are right the current preferred spelling seems to be Kircher.

It’s paywalled, unfortunately.

No, I’d have to agree with him. You are credulous toward anything that agrees with your believes and highly skeptical to the point of rejection toward anything that doesn’t. We’ve all seen it countless times.

(cough cough) Remember your latest infatuation with Jeanson’s mtDNA “proof” the Earth and humans are only 6000 years old? :slightly_smiling_face:

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That’s clearly untrue. You were making claims about what Newton would have believed under different circumstances.

We know that Newton, Boyle, Kepler and several other of the titans of early modern science that natural laws were an expression of the reason and will of God. Not only is this obvious from many statements in the primary sources, it is the view of the leading historians of science today. And this is the only fact I need to make my point, i.e., that the high rate of disbelief among modern scientists and particularly among NAS scientists does not follow logically from belief in the existence of natural laws (or from our more detailed modern understanding of those laws).

You can try to distract from the main point by complaining about the exact way in which I phrased my response to John Harshman about Newton’s view on rewinding the planetary clock, but my main point was clear from the beginning, and your comment does not refute it.

You are, of course, welcome to give your own explanation of why such a high percentage of modern US scientists don’t believe in God, and why this was not the case for the early modern founders of science.

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9 posts were split to a new topic: A Conversation about the Trinity