The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

At a stroke, Newton overturned centuries of Christian tradition. Hitherto leading theologians had argued that the creation could tell us nothing about God; indeed, it proved to us that God was unknowable. Thomas Aquinas’s “five ways” had shown that though one could prove that “what all men call God” had brought something out of nothing, it was impossible to know what God was. But Newton had no doubt that his Universal Mechanics could explain all God’s attributes. The Oxford orientalist Edward Pococke (1604–91) had told him that the Latin deus was derived from the Arabic du (“lord”).52 In the laws of gravity that held the universe together, Newton saw evidence of this divine “dominion” (dominatio), the overwhelming force that masters and controls the cosmos. It was the fundamental divine attribute: “It is the dominion of a spiritual being that constitutes a God.”53 But this domineering God was very different from Luria’s self-emptying En Sof or the kenotic God of the Trinity. Having established “Dominion” as the divine quality par excellence, it was possible to infer other attributes. A study of the universe proved that the God who created it must have intelligence, perfection, eternity, infinity, omniscience, and omnipotence: “That is, he continues from age to age, and is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things and he knows what happens and what is able to happen.”54