Poetry Influenced by the Scientific Revolution 71
orthodox in their religious thinking or at least they claimed to be. This is
a fairly safe surmise in the case of Newton who considered his dating of
events in the Bible as important as his work in physics. Newton believed
that the order in the universe that his physics theories had uncovered
revealed the greater glory of God and reaffirmed his faith in the Christian
deity. According to orthodox Christian thinking, however, God often
intervened in worldly matters and is actually actively engaged in the
running of the universe from day to day. To many thinkers this seemed
incompatible with the Newtonian world picture in which the objects of
the universe behave predeterministically according to certain well-
defined mathematical equations. To these thinkers it was natural to
relegate to God solely the job of creation of the universe, which once
created would run according to His law. There was no need for God’s
intervention. Voltaire used the analogy of the clockmaker and his
clock to describe the relation of the Deity and His universe. He wrote,
“I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without
a clockmaker.”
This religious viewpoint referred to as Deism, perhaps first en-
countered in the thinking of Bruno, still involved a worshipful attitude
toward the deity as is evidenced by Addison’s ode:
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim:
The unwearied Sun, from day to day,
Does his Creator’s power display,
And publishes to every land,
The work of an almighty Hand.Other thinkers took the Deist position to its logical conclusion of a
universe without a deity governed by mechanical and mathematical
natural law, a position similar to that of Thomas Hobbes.
Perhaps the greatest impact Newton physics made outside the field of
science itself was on the field of philosophy. Two major philosophical
movements, one in England (the British Empiricists consisting of Locke,
Berekeley and Hume) and the other in France (the Philosophes consisting
of Voltaire, Condillac, Diderot, Condoret and others) based their
philosophical methods directly upon the scientific methods, which
formed the basis of the Newtonian system. These thinkers attempted to