>"Well, there's my professional system of belief, and there's my personal awareness, and I strive to keep them separate at all times." Just for the record, i co

>"Well, there's my professional system of belief, and there's my personal awareness, and I strive to keep them separate at all times." Just for the record, i couldn't manage to do that. Neither could Newton. Actually your comment made some things about Newton's work clearer to me. I would say that for Newton his research into orbits (and Principia is mainly a book about orbits) was no different than his work on the Christian origin. All of Newton's work is religious. This is what Newton wrote in his Optics: God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable movable particles. (Isaac Newton, Optics, 1704, Book III, page: 375) This quotes reveals two things. 1. Newton considers himself to be a prophet who is privvy to the way God created the world. And this idea was enforced later by Newton’s disciples. The idea being that, god created the world for Newton to discover (god created newton and all was light...) 2. That this is secretely Newton’s zeroeth law. Because Newton’s entire doctrine is based on the dogma of atomic materialism. Without the assumption of the doctrine of atomic materialism Newtonian edifice falls apart. This quote clearly shows that when Newton was researching orbits he believed he was unraveling the secrets of god’s work. He was doing religious work and not what we would call “physics” today. But Newtonian mythology is so strong that even otherwise enlightened people consider a blasphemy to question Newton and even to mention his name without the qualifier “genius”. A previous commenter who wrote something similar >It is more than just a passing interest. There would be no Newtonian physics without religion. was heavily downvoted. I agree with the main idea but it is very misleading to call what Newton was doing “physics” because he was not. There was no such discipline at the time.