Abstract
The theory of gravity that emerged out of the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton is seen as a significant milestone in the progression of scientific discovery; it was not, however, received with universal acclaim. In England, a particularly influential group emerged that comprised a reaction against the perceived heterodoxy of Newton’s work and its lack of sufficient corroborative evidence. Started by John Hutchinson (1674–1737), these anti-Newtonians perceived within Newton’s system certain challenges to Christian metaphysical claims. The Hutchinsonians’ peculiar claim to cosmological evidence within the “heavenly” language of the Hebrew Bible, along with Newton’s perceived heterodox views, fueled their disdain for Newtonian mechanics. Starting from a consideration of Hutchinson’s Moses’s Principia as a response to Newton, this chapter considers how Hutchinson used a particular interpretive approach to the Bible as the source of evidence for his cosmogony. This chapter takes into account the broader issues that come into play as theologians sought to respond to the various options for evidentiary sources. This was a time when, in England, society at large began to experience a perceived split between science and religion, leading to numerous reactions, rejections, and accommodations.
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Notes
- 1.
This does not always mean that there are not contradictions between theories. There is the famous disconnect between the General Theory of Relativity and the cluster of laws that govern quantum physics. They contradict each other, yet both theories appear to be true and consistent within their respective areas of application.
- 2.
To cite a standard text, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964), vol. 1, 32, 1, where he shows that God’s triunity cannot be known except by divine revelation. Aquinas speaks a great deal about the relation between reason and faith and does not construe them as separately as is often assumed in modern discourse.
- 3.
In this chapter I am working within the context of the English Enlightenment, as opposed to other “Enlightenments,” such as that of the Scottish and French. This period generally comprises the time following the end of the English Civil War(s) to the end of the eighteenth century (1650–1800). Important figures of this time were Isaac Newton in the realm of science, and Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in politics, and philosophy, respectively—though a hard and fast distinction between the three is somewhat anachronistic. Nonetheless, much of what I am saying about the nature of reason also emerged out of the other “Enlightenments.”
- 4.
It is important to emphasize the hopefully obvious point that, since Scripture is the “evidence” for faith, it is its interpretation which is the source of any conflict between the Bible and natural philosophy/science. Today, for instance, there are few to no Christians who see the theory of gravity as having any kind of competition with the Bible’s account of the world.
- 5.
John Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory,” History of Science 24 (1986): 335–381.
- 6.
Examples of such “deists” or “freethinkers” include John Toland (1670–1722) and Anthony Collins (1676–1729).
- 7.
C. B Wilde, “Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth Century Britain,” History of Science 18 (1980): 1–24.
- 8.
A general (somewhat biased) overview of Hutchinson’s academic life can be found in Robert Spearman, A Supplement to the Works of John Hutchinson, Esq; Being an Index and Explanation of all the Hebrew Words Cited in the Second Part of his Moses’s Principia. With Additional Remarks, By the Late Learned Robert Spearman, Esq. (Charing Cross: W. Faden, 1776), i-xiv.
- 9.
J. M. Levine, “Woodward, John (1665/1668–1728),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/article/29946 (accessed May 14, 2016).
- 10.
Hutchinson was by no means the only thinker to consider Hebrew as a unique language that held secrets for its admirers. In the seventeenth century, it was quite fashionable for antiquarians to study Hebrew in order to “recover some of the prelapsarian congruity between words and things, thereby restoring humankind to a condition of purity.” See Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17. Lewis’ work provides a broad background for this admiration of the Hebrew language during Hutchinson’s time.
- 11.
David S. Katz, “‘Moses’s Principia’: Hutchinsoniansim and Newton’s Critics,” in The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, 201–211 (Dordrecht: Springer, 1994), 203.
- 12.
Rob Illiffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 12. Indeed, while Illiffe argues that Newton’s was a “rational Christianity,” the whole point of Illife’s book is to reveal the hitherto unknown depth of Newton’s theological and biblical interests, the sheer volume of which dwarfed his studies in “natural philosophy.”
- 13.
See, for instance, Stephen D. Snobelin, “The Unknown Newton: Cosmos and Apocalypse,” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society 44 (2015): 76–94, with respect to Newton’s fascination with the Apocalypse of John. It is in fact a caricature of Newton to regard him as a kind of proto-deist (though he was eagerly taken up by deists, as I mention below), as the vast bulk of his writing was religiously oriented. This is shown conclusively in Illiffe’s account, as I reference above.
- 14.
Moses’s Principia was actually a direct response to the work of Dr. Woodward, with whom Hutchinson had had a falling out, and indirectly an attack on the Newtonian system. Because of the title of the writing, most analyses of Hutchinson have assumed rather incorrectly that it was just a rejoinder to Newton; Woodward, however, was very much a target for Hutchinson’s attacks.
- 15.
Robert M. Andrews, Lay Activism and the High Church Movement of the Late Eighteenth Century: The Life and Thought of William Stevens, 1732–1807 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 113.
- 16.
John Hutchinson, The Philosophical and Theological Works of the Late Truly Learned John Hutchinson, Esq. (London: Printed for J. Hodges, 1748–9), vol. 2, 455–6. In the rest of this chapter, I will cite this as Hutchinson’s Works with the volume and page number.
- 17.
See, at a popular level, Brian Koberlein, “How We Know Gravity is Not (Just) a Force,” Universe Today, January 30, 2014 <http://www.universetoday.com/108740/how-we-know-gravity-is-not-just-a-force/> (accessed September 2, 2015).
- 18.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 1, 263. See also vol. 5, 24 and 118, which argues that the forces between objects must be “mechanical,” meaning a cause-and-effect process that uses intermediate means, i.e., not through a vacuum or void.
- 19.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 11, 2.
- 20.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 2, 27. The meaning of “occult” had a “drift in meaning” during the late sixteenth century (see Keith Hutchinson, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” Isis 73 (1982): 233–253, at 250). This drift was from a meaning in which “occult” comprised both the terms “insensible” and “unintelligible.” The later deployment of the term during Newton’s time split the bond between insensibility and unintelligibility in favour of the latter with respect to gravity’s causative mechanisms. Thus, there can be a discussion of effects without offering explanations of causes. Hutchinson here is siding, to some extent, with Leibniz, who also objected to the “occult” qualities of gravity, in the older sense of the term. There is, however, very likely a further meaning to “occult” that is entangled with the other meanings, which is that Newton’s “action at a distance” implies something dark or sinister. For an updated analysis of the interplay of meanings of “occult,” see Florian Sprenger, “Insensible and Inexplicable – On the Two Meanings of Occult,” Communication + 1 4 (2015): 1–24.
- 21.
John C. English, “John Hutchinson’s Critique of Newtonian Heterodoxy,” Church History 68 (1999): 581–597, at 585.
- 22.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 1, 45.
- 23.
C. B. Wilde, “Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philosophy,” 12. Wilde points out that this is what Hutchinson interprets Newton to assert. It does not appear to be the case that Newton actually thought this, as Wilde notes that Newton’s speculations continue to suggest that “the aether [a substance filling space that has an unknown role in gravity’s action] has continued ever since by the power of nature and therefore independently of divine agency.”
- 24.
See C. B. Wilde, “Matter and Spirit as Natural Symbols in Eighteenth-century British Natural Philosophy,” The British Journal for the History of Science 15 (1982): 99–131, at 103, where it is argued that under the Newtonian system a “spiritual agent” must be at work in gravity.
- 25.
This is not entirely an accurate assessment in consideration of Newton’s significant works on biblical exegesis. I say this only in terms of relative comparison. Many deists, especially Spinoza, undercut the importance of the Bible to religion, whereas Newton was devoted to the centrality of Scripture—despite Hutchinson’s opinion of his heterodoxy. John Toland’s immanentist perspective can be discerned just from the title of one of his works: Socinanism Truly Stated, by a Pantheist (1705).
- 26.
C. B. Wilde, “Matter and Spirit as Natural Symbols,” 101.
- 27.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012), 49.
- 28.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 2, 39–40.
- 29.
See, for example, Michael Friedman, “Newton and Kant on Absolute Space: From Theology to Transcendental Philosophy,” in Interpreting Newton: Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Janiak and Eric Schliesser, 347–359 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 347–348.
- 30.
Geoffrey N. Cantor, “Revelation and the Cyclical Cosmos,” in Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences, ed. Ludmilla J. Jordanova and Roy S. Porter, 3–22 (Manchester: The Alden Press, 1978), 5.
- 31.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 5, 149.
- 32.
Ibid., 239.
- 33.
Cantor, “Revelation and the Cyclical Cosmos,” 20.
- 34.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 3, 78–79.
- 35.
Ibid., vol. 5, 99–100.
- 36.
For example, as Wilde says with reference to Hutchinson’s philosophical orientation, “Man [sic] in this world can receive ideas only through the senses.” (Wilde, “Hutchinsonian Natural Philosophy,” 3).
- 37.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 5, 7.
- 38.
There is a sense of anti-Semitism in this view, as Cantor makes clear in “Revelation and the Cyclical Cosmos,” 19, even while re-appropriating the importance of the Hebrew Scriptures. At the time, a distinction was often made between the “Hebrews” of the Old Testament and the Christ-rejecting “Jews.” This false dichotomy funded this anti-Semitism, juxtaposed with a deep reverence for the beauty of the Hebrew language and the “Hebrew” people of biblical times.
- 39.
C. B. Wilde, “Hutchinsonian Natural Philosophy,” 3.
- 40.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 2, xxxii.
- 41.
For an example of Hutchison analyzing “the Names” in Hebrew, see Works, vol. 4, 258.
- 42.
See David S. Katz, “The Hutchinsonians and Hebraic Fundamentalism in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Sceptics, Millenarians, and Jews, ed. David S. Katz and Jonathan I. Israel, 237–255 (Leiden: Brill, 1990).
- 43.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 9, 391–392.
- 44.
For a more complete outline, see Cantor, “Revelation and the Cyclical Cosmos,” 7–12.
- 45.
For Hutchinson’s account of creation, see his commentary on Genesis 1 in Works, vol. 1, 1–56.
- 46.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 2, 340.
- 47.
Robert M. Andrews, “Lay Activism and the High Church Movement,” 114.
- 48.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 5, 225–226.
- 49.
James Turner. Philology: The Forgotten Origin of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 78.
- 50.
David S. Katz, God’s Last Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 207.
- 51.
William L. Sachs, The Transformation of Anglicanism: From State Church to Global Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 21.
- 52.
For more detail on the nature of the old High Church, see Robert L. Knetsch, A Darkened Reading: A Reception History of the Book of Isaiah in a Divided Church (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014), chap. 4. It is true that all church party factions can be seen in a deeply political light; the old High Church party, however, can be distinguished by its decidedly English character, connected to the centrality of the Crown, rather than parliament.
- 53.
By the time of the emergence of the Tractarians, there was no longer any question about the centrality of the Crown; the Whigs had truly become an oligarchy by the middle of the nineteenth century, and the Crown was essentially reduced to the symbolic status it obtains today. That meant that the Church of England became less central to the life of the state.
- 54.
Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45. My inserted “sic” is provisional as I do not know what Nockles means by Hutchinson’s “psycho-theological” theories and strongly suspect he means to say “physico-theological,” the term usually ascribed to Hutchinson’s work.
- 55.
E. A. Varley, The Last of the Prince Bishops: William Van Mildert and the High Church Movement of the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 41.
- 56.
John Friesen, “Hutchinsonianism and the Newtonian Enlightenment,” Centaurus 48 (2006): 40–49.
- 57.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 5, 141–142.
- 58.
English, “Hutchinson’s Critique of Newton,” 589.
- 59.
Hutchinson, Works, vol. 3, 3.
- 60.
Ibid., vol. 2, xxix.
- 61.
English, “Hutchinson’s Critique of Newton,” 591.
- 62.
For example, Hutchinson, Works, vol. 5, 9.
- 63.
An exemplar of this would be the freethinker Anthony Collins, a contemporary of Hutchinson. See Katz, God’s Last Words, 145: “Among the more interesting of [Collins’] followers was Thomas Bullock [. . .] who argued that Christianity was not based on the Old Testament at all, but was a completely new religion introduced by Jesus.” It is no accident, therefore, that Hutchinson used the Old Testament for his apologetic efforts. The Unitarian movement challenged the traditional Trinitarian framework as well as some forms of proto-Marcionite readings of the Bible, that is, a rejection or denigration of the Old Testament’s value as scripture.
- 64.
Galileo notwithstanding. And, in that case, there was a great deal of politics that played no small part in the conflict.
- 65.
Cadoc D. A. Leighton, “‘Knowledge of Divine Things’: A Study of Hutchinsonianism,” History of European Ideas 26 (2000): 159–175, at 172.
- 66.
Nigel Aston, “From Personality to Party: The Creation and Transmission of Hutchinsonianism c. 1725–1750,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25 (2004): 625–644, at 637.
- 67.
I am not claiming that Hutchinson inspired Old Testament studies in general—Robert Lowth could be one among many to make that claim. Rather he was one among a few who motivated exegetes to recover the once-common Christological appreciation of the Old Testament by the use of typology and figuration. This is where his High Church credentials begin to show: those of that party tended to look to the early Church Fathers and the kind of engagement they had with the Bible. A deeply Christological tenor shaped this approach.
- 68.
Derya Gurses Tarbuc, “John Wesley’s Critical Engagement with Hutchinsonianism 1730–1780,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 35–42.
- 69.
Katz, God’s Last Words, 162.
- 70.
Varley, The Last of the Prince Bishops, 41.
- 71.
It was in Opticks that Newton put forth perhaps his most damning speculation (in the eyes of thinkers like Hutchinson) that the universe was the “sensorium” of God. This would put Newton firmly on an immanentist footing, though it would hardly confirm a belief that he was ultimately deist or Spinozist.
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Knetsch, R.L. (2018). Hutchinsonianism, Newtonian Science, and the Question of Evidence in a Fragmenting World. In: Lancaster, J., Raiswell, R. (eds) Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 225. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91869-3_10
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