How To Be An Agnostic
was a way of glimpsing the majesty of the divine. The very reg-
ularity of the world he was unveiling originates in ‘the counsel
and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being’, Newton
wrote. This was evidence for, not against, faith: ‘the Supreme
God exists necessarily, and by the same necessity he exists
always and everywhere’. Newton was not orthodox. He went
to great lengths to conceal his disbelief in the Trinity, not least
because it was against the law. However, the pressing question
for him was not, does God exist, but how does God intervene
in the world, and how does the new science resonate with, and
reinvigorate, his theological beliefs?
His scientifi c work was part of a broader vocation to seek a
deeper truth. At one level, the new science provided possible
answers to the pressing religious questions of the day, like
the wherewithal for miracles, in the form of events like com-
etary appearances or immaterial substances like ether. These
issues seem anachronistic now, of course. But at another, more
durable level, his scientifi c concerns were an expression of an
immensely energetic and engaged sense of wonder. They were a
kind of spiritual practice.
It is hard to be certain exactly how the intensely private
Newton would have described this feeling himself but it is rea-
sonable to suppose it is captured in a quotation he took from
Milton’s Paradise Regained:
I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself,
I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore,
and diverting myself in now and then fi nding a smoother
pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean
of truth lay all undiscovered before me.There is a wondering humanity there – that the pebbles and
shells of mathematical equations are mere refl ections of a full
understanding. There is the consciousness that, for all the
successes of thought and experiment, human beings see only
through a glass darkly. This humility before nature, shaping the