Newton and Natural Theology

Abstract

The publication of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia led not only to a revolution in physics, but also gave rise to a new set of directions in natural theology. The mechanistic image of the physical universe that arose from Newton's physics was best explained, according to Newton's contemporaries and followers in the 18th and early 19th centuries, by an appeal to the powerful hand of a wise designing God. Despite critiques by Hume and Kant, that natural theology held broad appeal among scientifically minded people until the work of Charles Darwin proposed a new type of explanatory mechanism that radically undercut the fundamental directions of Newtonian natural theology.