Sir Isaac Newton
1643-1727 · Scientific Revolution · Household name
Newton was an English natural philosopher whose work founded classical mechanics and optics. He showed that a falling apple and the orbiting moon obey one law, and set out the mathematics in the Principia of 1687. He read the cosmos as God's geometry laid out in absolute space and time, and could never say how gravity reaches across empty space. In private he denied the Trinity and wrote more on alchemy and prophecy than on physics.
Signature
The position Newton is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful
- Death
- Conditional Immortality
Positions on the 4 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- The Divine
- strongly leans Describable (0 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (79 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence (79 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
16 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Newton refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Non-Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - End of Things
- Apocalyptic Renewal
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience / Pure Reason
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Divine Providence
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal First Cause
What is the origin of reality? - Authority
- Divine Revelation / Rational Expertise
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Law
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Conditional Immortality
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature?