First, Newton did indeed believe that God sustains the orderly concourse of nature in what we call the laws of nature. Thus, he stated in the General Scholium of the Principia: “In him [God] are all things contained and moved.”23 Second, Newton also believed that God could act, and had acted, in more discrete and special ways at specific times in the past history of the universe and of life. He argued that both living organisms and the solar system exhibited evidence of special creative acts distinct from the constant exercise of the divine power that, he thought, maintains the laws of nature.
