I'm fascinated by the fact that Isaac Newton spent more time on his spiritual and alchemical research than any of his other scientific pursuits. As I began to look into it, I was amazed at the number of books and scholarly articles available about this aspect of his life.

As pointed out in the above article, the economist John Maynard Keyes purchased a large collection of Newton's papers on these subjects that had been rejected as unworthy by Cambridge University. In 1942 Keyes delivered a speech on these papers giving a very different view on Newton:

"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago."*

* Michael White, Isaac Newton - The Last Sorcerer, Fourth Estate, London, 1997, p3.

I'll reference examples of this material in threaded replies to this comment.

~ ron

From:
Isaac Newton and the Ocean of Truth
by Sue Toohey, © July 2003

http://www.skyscript.co.uk/newton.html

"... Although these views make Newton a heretic from the perspective of established Christianity, he was in fact a fervent believer in the Bible. Newton's laws of motion contradicted the accepted biblical doctrine in the same way that Galileo's views had. But rather than contradicting the Bible, Newton believed that the Bible was accurate and that it was the interpretation of theologians that was wrong. He continued to study biblical prophecy until his death, being fascinated by its symbols and developing a lexicon of prophetic emblems. He was also intrigued by the architecture of the Jerusalem Temple, believing it to hold the secrets to many unanswered questions of the Bible.

"Newton's inspiration for his extensive research on theology was led by a strong conviction that the ancients had possessed true knowledge about God and the world. Surviving extensive notes and ink sketches show that he also looked to biblical and Talmudic sources in order to reconstruct the plan of the Temple. Not only did he believe that the Temple and its ritual would provide answers to Revelations, but he also saw it, along with other temples, as a model of the heliocentric system - knowledge of which the ancients subsequently lost. ...

"Newton, like most alchemists of the time, believed that alchemic wisdom extended back to ancient times. He believed strongly in the religious and astrological symbolism of alchemy. Most alchemists of the day were adept at astrology, sharing much of the deeper symbolism of the two disciplines, including the connection between the seven metals and the seven planets, as well as the four elements and the four humours. Newton became involved in secretive alchemical networks, devoting time to copying out the unpublished alchemical treatise passed around among them. The ultimate goal of the alchemist was an inner transformation of the psyche. Success depended on the alchemist's state of mind, prayer and meditation being part of the practice. Newton often pleaded with fellow alchemist Robert Boyle to keep silent in publicly discussing alchemy. But, rather than being uncomfortable with his participation in alchemy, it seems that Newton believed that this secret knowledge was not for everyone. He felt that the Hermetic writers of the past had concealed their work for good reason and Newton was prepared to honour this adherence to secrecy."

From:
Space, Spirit and Self
by Margaret Wertheim
© October 2001

"... As medieval Europeans recovered Greek science, one of the ancient thinkers they encountered was the mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras of Samos. If the science of modern physics has a spiritual mentor, it is Pythagoras, for it is to this most enigmatic of the Greek sages that we trace the idea of a universe formed according to mathematical principles.[4] Today we call such principles "laws of nature." Pythagoras encapsulated his radical philosophy in the compact dictum "All is number," and he believed that behind all physical forms were transcendent numerical archetypes - what he called the divine armonia or mathematical "harmonies" of the world.

"Pythagoras believed that numbers were literally gods and he associated the numbers one through ten with the major deities of the Greek pantheon; late medieval thinkers took this seed and refashioned it within a Christian context, giving birth to the extraordinarily enduring idea of the Judeo-Christian God as a mathematical creator. "The creation of number is the creation of things," wrote Thierry of Chartres in the twelfth century.[5] "God disposes everything in number, weight and measure," said Bishop Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth.[6] In the seventeenth century Galileo would go even further: anyone who wanted to understand the "book of nature," he famously declared, must first grasp the language in which God had written it - to wit, mathematics.

"If God had written the book of nature in the language of mathematics, medieval Pythagoreans (following Plato) believed the primary dialect He had used was Euclidean geometry. ..."

From:
Space, Spirit and Self
by Margaret Wertheim
© October 2001

"... Newton's law of gravity (a Pythagorean triumph if ever there was one) demonstrated with compelling logic an essential continuity between the terrestrial and celestial domains: if gravity operates between celestial bodies then they too must be solid material bodies, for gravity is a force that arises between concrete lumps of matter.

"Newton's science shattered the distinction between terrestrial and celestial space; it also suggested (as Cusa had previously) that the physical universe might be infinite. Once astronomers had abandoned the medieval machinery of the crystal spheres, there was indeed no longer a reason to imagine that the physical cosmos had any limit whatsoever. Why should physical space not go on forever? By the end of the eighteenth century, that view had become scientific orthodoxy - and it still is today.

"This new cosmology had profound theological consequences, for with physical space extended to infinity there was literally no "room" left for any other kind of space to be. Within the medieval scheme one could consider, even if, strictly speaking, only in a metaphorical sense, that there was plenty of room left for some other reality "beyond" the physical realm, but with the physical realm going on forever, where could a spiritual realm possibly be? Of course one could still say, as liberal theologians do, that the realm of the Christian spirit is simply beyond physical space, and leave it enigmatically at that. In a sense the answer is still the same as in the medieval era. The difference is that when physical space was seen to be finite, it was easier psychologically for people to accept the idea of a "beyond," but with physical space infinitized, the whole question of what "beyond" might even mean becomes increasingly problematic. I do not mean to give the impression that this is an insurmountable theological problem; my purpose is only to draw attention to a serious psychological obstacle thrown up by modern cosmology. For better or worse, one of the major consequences of the scientific revolution was to write out of the Western picture of reality any conception of a spiritual space.

"Newton himself was concerned about the atheistic tendencies within his cosmology and tried to rescue the situation by associating space itself with God. Picking up on a tradition that originates in Judaism, Newton posited space as the medium through which the deity's presence permeates the physical world. For him, as I noted earlier, space was God's sensorium. But soon after the great physicist's death, less religious scientists stripped these theological embellishments from his system, realizing quite rightly that science could stand alone without Christian support. In doing so they desanctified the world, leaving us with a purely physical account of reality - a reality without a spiritual domain. ..."

This is quite True. These bastions of the scientific method which has led to the desacralization of nature and a general pervasive atheism within the scientific community, themselves had very strong beliefs in a diety who could resolve the contridictions they found between Nature and its scientific study. The same thing is true with Descartes whose mind/body split is much less a psychological problem once one has God as the intermediary.


rc

As you will notice in my recently posted essay of Physics and the Philosophy of Evolution, a finite time and space has been readded to the picture, which leaves plenty of room for an infinite beyond, and it also opens the door to an infinite within. As Karl Popper says in a fascinating book on mind-body issues (The Self and its Brain, 1981),"...modern physics has transcended the original programme of materialism."

So if physics has transcended the program of materialism on the micro (quantum) level and the macro (relativity) level, the question is how to assimilate these findings in our perception of the ordinary classical world of physics and phenomena in which we reside. How does one make the leap between the weird physics of quantum states and our everyday psychology and perceptions of the world?

Or do we make do with corollary explanations such as given by Capra and the like as to the similarities between the narrative of modern physics and eastern mysticism?

Even if Penrose and similar researchers are correct about quantum states of consciousness (although huge hurdles must be overcome to make these theories work) how does this address our interface with the phenomena of the classical world? How do these 3rd person accounts of physics translate into 1st person accounts of the world?
Can quantum states of reality be transposed into phenomenological states of consciousness? Or would we be mixing metaphors here too badly to continue this line of exploration?

rc

From:
A Brief Look at Mathematics and Theology
Philip J. Davis

"Sir Isaac Newton, convert to (heretic) Arianism, alchemist, theologian, (1642-1727), the “last of the magicians” according to John Maynard Keynes, is so preeminent in mathematics and physics that the amount of material on his “non-scientific” writings – for long considered by historians of science to be an aberration -- is now substantial. See, e.g., James E. Force and Richard Popkin and also B.J.T Dobbs. Briefly, Newton attempted to combine mathematics and astronomical science so as to prepare a revised chronology of world history and thereby to understand the divine message. For example, we find in Newton’s The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended:

“Hesiod tells us that sixty says after the winter solstice, the star Arcturus rose just at sunset: and thence it follows that Hesiod flourished about an hundred years after the death of Solomon, or in the Generation or Age next after the Trojan War, as Hesiod himself declares.”

“Newton saw his scientific work as evidence of God's handiwork. He turned to religious studies later in life and considered it an integral part of his thinking. Indeed, just as today’s cosmologists are trying to find a `Theory of Everything’ , Newton looked for a unification of the sacred texts with his mathematico-physical theories.” --Katz & Popkin.