God: Reasons not appreciated by all minds. Reasons of the materialists.

Newton was deeply convinced of the existence of a God as an infinite, all-powerful, eternal, and creative Being, a master who established a relationship between himself and his creatures.

Without this relationship, the knowledge of a God is only a sterile idea.

He does not say “my eternal,” “my infinite,” because these attributes have nothing to do with our nature,

But we say, my God. We must understand the master and preserver of our lives, and the object of our thoughts.

In several conferences I had in 1726 with Dr. Clarke, Newton always pronounced the name of God with a remarkably reverent and respectful air.

All of Newton’s philosophy necessarily leads to the knowledge of a Supreme Being, who created everything, freely arranged everything.

For, if according to Newton (and according to reason) the world is finite, if there is a void, then matter does not necessarily exist; it therefore received existence from a free cause.

If matter gravitates, as has been demonstrated, it does not gravitate by its nature, just as it is extended by its nature: it has therefore received gravitation from God[1].

If the planets rotate in one direction rather than another, in a non-resistant space, the hand of their creator has therefore directed their course in this direction with absolute freedom.

It is far from being the case that the so-called physical principles of Descartes thus lead the mind to the knowledge of its Creator.

God forbid that by a horrible slander I accuse this great man of having misunderstood the supreme intelligence to which he owed so much, and which had raised him above almost all the men of his century!

I only say that the abuse he sometimes made of his mind led his disciples to precipices, from which the master was very distant.

The Cartesian system produced that of Spinoza.

I have known many people whom Cartesianism has led to admit no other God than the immensity of things.

On the contrary, all Newtonians are theist.

Descartes says that:

• the world is infinite
• movement is always in the same quantity [conserved]
• ‘Give me movement and matter, and I will make a world’

These ideas exclude the idea of single infinite author of movement and the organization of substances.

Of all the proofs of the existence of a God, that of final causes was the strongest in Newton’s eyes.

The infinitely varied designs that burst forth in the largest and smallest parts of the universe. These show that, by dint of being perceptible, is almost despised by some philosophers.

But finally, Newton thought that these infinite relationships, which he perceived more than anyone else, were the work of an infinitely skillful craftsman. [2]

He did not much appreciate the great proof that is drawn from the succession of beings.

It is commonly said that if men, animals, plants, everything that composes the world, were eternal, one would be forced to admit a series of generations without a cause.

These beings, it is said, would have no origin of their existence. They would have no external origin, since they are supposed to go back from generation to generation, without beginning.

They would have no internal origin, since none of them would exist by itself. Thus everything would be effect, and nothing would be cause.

He found that this argument was based only on the ambiguity of generations and beings formed by one another: for the atheists, who admit the full, respond that, strictly speaking, there are no generations, there are no produced beings, there are no several substances.

The universe is a whole, existing necessarily, which develops without ceasing; it is the same being whose nature is to be immutable in its substance, and eternally varied in its modifications; thus the argument drawn only from beings which succeed one another would perhaps prove little against the atheist, who would deny the plurality of beings.

The atheist would call to his aid those ancient axioms that nothing is born from nothing, that one substance cannot produce another, that everything is eternal and necessary.

It would therefore be necessary to combat him with other weapons.

It would be necessary to prove to him that matter cannot have any movement of itself; it would be necessary to make him understand that if it had the least movement of its own, this movement would be essential to it: it would then be contradictory for there to be rest.

The atheist replies that:

• there is nothing at rest
• rest is a fiction
• rest is an idea incompatible with the nature of the universe
• an infinitely fine matter circulates eternally in all the pores of bodies
• there are always equally motive forces in nature
• this permanent equality of forces proves a necessary movement

Then it is still necessary to resort to other weapons against the aetheist.

I do not know if there is any metaphysical proof more striking, and which speaks more strongly to man than this admirable order which reigns in the world.

If ever there has been a more beautiful argument than this verse: Cœli enarrant gloriam Dei. So, you see that Newton offers no other argument at the end of his Optics and his Principles.

He found no more convincing and beautiful argument in favor of the Divinity than that of Plato, who makes one of his interlocutors say: You judge that I have an intelligent soul because you perceive order in my words and actions; judge then, by seeing the order of this world, that there is a supremely intelligent soul.

If it is proven that there exists an eternal, infinite, all-powerful Being, it is not equally proven that this Being is infinitely beneficent in the sense we give to this term.

This is the great refuge of the atheist.

If I admit a God, this God must be goodness itself.

He who gave me being owes me well-being.

But I see in the human race only disorder and calamity; The need for eternal matter is less repugnant to me than a Creator who treats his creatures so badly.

One cannot satisfy, he continues, my just complaints and my cruel doubts by telling me that a first man, composed of a body and a soul, angered the Creator, and that the human race bears the penalty:

1. If our bodies come from this first man, our souls do not come from him, and even if they could, the punishment of the father in all the children seems the most horrible of all injustices

2. The Americans and the peoples of the ancient world, the Negroes and the Lapps, are not descended from the first man.

The internal constitution of the organs of the Negroes is a palpable demonstration of this; no reason can therefore appease the murmurs which rise in my heart against the evils with which this globe is flooded.

I am therefore forced to reject the idea of a Supreme Being, of a Creator whom I would conceive to be infinitely good, and who would have caused infinite evils, and I prefer to admit the necessity of matter, and of generations, and of eternal vicissitudes, than a God who would have freely created unhappy people.

One replies to this atheist: The word good, of well-being, is equivocal. What is bad in relation to you is good in the general scheme of things.

The idea of an infinite Being, all-powerful, all-intelligent, and present everywhere, does not revolt your reason: would you deny a God because you had a bout of fever? He owed you well-being, you say; what reason do you have to think this way?

Why did he owe you this well-being?

What treaty had he made with you? So all you lack is to be always happy in life to recognize a God? You, who can be perfect in nothing, why should you claim to be perfectly happy?

But I suppose that, in a hundred years of continuous happiness, you have a headache: will this moment of pain make you deny a Creator?

There is no appearance.

Now, if a quarter of an hour of suffering does not stop you, why should two hours, why a day, why a year of torment, make you reject the idea of a supreme and universal artisan?