Many histories of science—the kind you encounter in physics textbooks or in New Atheist books and videos—claim that Newton depicted a “mechanistic universe,” an autonomous self-organizing and self-maintaining “world machine”—one that left no place for the activity of a divine creator, sustainer, or legislator of nature. This view misrepresents Newton in three ways. First, he rejected the idea that gravity—with its mysterious action at a distance—could be explained by any mechanistic cause. Second, Newton thought that laws of nature express God’s way of ordering “brute matter” through the
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