In a review of Newton and the Origin of Civilisation by Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold, Jonathan Rée takes note of the scientist’s attitude toward religion:
Apart from trying to please his readers, Sir Isaac – as he became in 1705 – also sought to reassure them about his theological opinions. He was known to have ducked out of ordination in the Church of England, which was formally a condition of his professorship, and his reputation as a divine genius had a whiff of blasphemy about it. He had avoided any discussion of God or creation in the Principia (in the first edition, that is, where God is mentioned only once), and could not pretend to be interested in priests, rituals or religious ceremonies. On top of that there were well-founded rumours that he regarded the doctrine of the Trinity as a papist fabrication. But if his version of orthodoxy differed from that of the established church, there could be no doubt about his reverence for the Bible. To anyone wondering about the truest form of Christian worship, his advice was clear:
‘search the scriptures thy self,’ he said, with ‘constant meditation upon what thou readest, & earnest prayer to God to enlighten thine understanding’. He was convinced the Bible was, essentially, a sacred text, and he sought to honour his maker by studying it closely, every day, sometimes for hours on end. He read it repeatedly, in English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, weighing every word, syllable and letter. ‘Mr Newton is really a very valuable man,’ as John Locke put it, ‘not onely for his wonderfull skill in Mathematicks but in divinity too & his great knowledge in the scriptures where in I know few his equals.’
Newton read the Bible with the same exactness he brought to his mathematical inventions or his experiments with prisms, and with the same disregard for tradition and common sense: he always refused, as one critic put it, to acknowledge ‘any one’s having ever consider’d the same Things before him’. He fled from controversy in religion as he did in mathematics, but he was convinced that his discoveries in the two domains supported each other, maintaining that the leading doctrines of the Principia – heliocentrism and universal gravitation – had formed part of the primitive biblical religion from which all others derived, and were explicitly endorsed by Moses before being passed to the Greeks and winning general assent in ‘the earliest ages of philosophy’. Mathematics could thus unite with the biblical narrative to proclaim the reasonableness of Christianity.
The Dish 