I'm sure there were many religious philosophers in Newton's time -- including him, right? And "the atheist philosophers of Newton's time" don't represent all atheists, anyway.

P.S. Also, the Big Bang theory was proposed a little later than that.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Actually, Newton suggested it. He wrote letters to various people in which he did a lot of speculating. Some of these letters were later collected and published in books. The fact that the universe contained a lot of gravity with all the stars, led Newton to speculate that it might be contracting, expanding, or revolving.

Years ago I started collecting old books, mainly because the ones from the 19th and 18th Centuries were sold in junk stores for .25¢ back in the 1950s and ‘60s, and these were the cheapest “antiques” I could find back when I was in school. So I bought books about subjects I was interested in, such as science and astronomy, and to my surprise, in them I found many modern hypotheses that most modern books claim were thought up only in the 20th Century.

For example, here is a hint of Newton’s “big crunch”/”big bang” hypothesis, as published in 1803 in “Natural Theology”, by Rev. William Paley, Arch-Deacon of Carlisle. I found this quote on page 276 of the book...

“But many of the heavenly bodies, as the sun and fixed stars are stationary. Their rest must be the effect of an absence or of an equilibrium of attractions. It proves also that a projectile impulse was originally given to some of the heavenly bodies, and not to others. But further; if attraction act at all distances, there can be only one quiescent center of gravity in the universe: and all bodies whatever must be approaching this center, or revolving around it. According to the first of these suppositions, if the duration of the world had been long enough to allow it, all its parts, all the great bodies of which it is composed, must have been gathered together in a heap round this point.”

The religious scientists were considering the big-bang/big-crunch theory back in those days, back when the atheists were claiming the universe had “always existed”. Boy, were the atheists surprised when Hubble made his announcement in 1929.

But did he have the evidence to support such a theory?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Yes. An understanding of gravity and visual evidence of a lot of mass in stars. He figured the stars had to be doing something other than just sitting still in space.

That 1803 book cost me $12 back in the 1980s. It turns out to be a first edition, and now it is selling for up to $350.

LINK TO BOOK

I do not firmly believe that. I think it's a view that has some merit, but it does not entirely convince me. One reason for that is that I am doubtful that such a life is even achievable.

Then why did Einstein still think the universe was static, over a hundred years later -- because he was an atheist?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I think he thought so because spectrography was still fairly new in 1915-17, and many astronomers were still reporting a fairly “static” universe in which the stars seemed to be “fixed”, except for some small motions that were not much faster than the speed of the earth around the sun. I’ve actually researched this. I think he was misled by the lack of spectrographic evidence of rapid star and galaxy motion. One problem that slowed down that progress was the insensitivity of old film and glass plates. So, the expert spectrographers could not get good spectrographic pictures of distant galaxies and their high redshifts until some years later. Hubble had the advantage in the 1920s of a larger telescope (100 inches, I think), plus much more sensitive glass plates. Einstein, being somewhat youthful and very precocious, didn’t want to wait 50 years until more was known before he started suggesting ideas about the universe.

Einstein wasn’t quite an “atheist”, thus his remark about the “dice”.

His remark on dice had more to do with the fact that he was a determinist. But I was being ironic. :wink:

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Agreed, Tman, and I think both ways are harmful.

To the Board:

With this thread I originally thought of discussing Newton´s departude from the modern scientific behavior. Of course Newton has represented an advance in human thinking. But he lacked a method. He had a powerful mind but lacked the understanding of the impact of his work on society, which I call responsibility, a modern scientific characteristic. And there´s all his superstition. Descartes had just finished his "discourse on the method", so you wouldn´t expect a full-fledge scientific behaviour those times. In fact, I find it amazing that gravity and calculus could come to light in the pre-scientific era, in spite of the "zeitgeist".

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"Shut up and calculate" R. Feynman

Uhh, maybe I’m a little dense, or something, but what is the modern “scientific behavior” supposed to be?

When Newton was about 22 years old he was off from college a couple of years because of the plague in the big cities, so he went to his family farm and conducted experiments with prisms in his family barn. Through these experiments he learned a lot about light. Then he tried to figure out a way to get around the problem of lens aberration in telescopes in those days, and he thought up the idea of making a mirror reflecting telescope, which is still a major kind of telescope in use today. Then he took some of the old information about the orbits of the planets and figured out an equation of gravity that NASA still uses today. So in what way do you think he did not act properly regarding modern “scientific behavior”? In what way did he “behave” that you don’t like?

I dunno, I googled on it, and came up with zero hits
In another thread, Sam5 brought up LeMaitre, a Catholic Priest, who came up with the Big Bang theoy, and that there was some resistance.

Pre-scientific era?
Galileo Galilei lived and worked before Newton.
He pointed out that the language of mathematics had to be used to read the book of Nature. And that experiments determine what is correct.
The "modern" scientific behaviour was put into words by Galilei.

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

It sounds like a very simplistic, black-and-white, Christians=good/atheists=bad description, but, since I haven't researched the history of the Big Bang theory, I'll shut up now.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I think TriangleMan was just countering the opposite simplification from Argos and Farmerjumperdon

I confess that my first reaction to Argos’s question was to think ‘Well, of course one thing has got nothing to do with the other!’, but then I realised that I was only looking at the “hard” sciences.

In math, or physics, or astronomy, I do think religious beliefs and science are pretty much orthogonal these days, although it wasn’t always so (Tycho’s model of the solar system comes to mind).

But, even today, I think religious convictions and science sometimes clash against each other in the “softer” sciences. For example, inspired by my numerous disagreements with Sitchin supporters like A.DIM and Outcast in these forums, I finally decided to get Samuel Noah Kramer’s History Begins at Sumer. I’ve been enjoying it, even though Kramer's writing can be a bit dull at times.

One of the subjects he of course mentions is how certain Biblical tales have Sumerian predecessors. He even goes so far as to say that the Biblical version was based on the Sumerian myth! (Can I use this word without offending Sam5? :P) However, he’s always very quick to add that the Biblical version of the tale is superior. Isn't that a matter of opinion?

Once, he even said that about a text which, he admitted, had still not been well translated at the time, and whose translation was likely to be improved upon further research. So how did he know that the text would be inferior to its Biblical counterpart?! [-X

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Again, I would respectfully disagree. The "a physicist must be an atheist" stereotype is as invalid as the "all Christians oppose evolution" one. As I pointed out several times yesterday, a simple examination of the Nobel winners over the last century shows a whole range of beliefs. Perhaps agnostics and atheists predominate, but I would argue that being religious is not necessarily an impediment to being a productive, or even a great, scientist

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

MY like is not in dispute.

One of the pillars of the scientific method, nowadays, is peer-reviewing, would you agree? Now, how would Newton react, being so secretive, if you said to him that his work had to be reviewed by others prior to publishing? Today, Newton would be crushed by the common university department, the academic establishment (in fact, the establishment had a beef with him that time, for other reasons). There would hardly be room for a scientist (better, a pre-scientist) like him today.

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"Shut up and calculate" R. Feynman