hi dig,
Newton was an Arian heretic, supposedly. At least, insofar as he was not a Trinitarian.
I think what wavydog is saying is that even one of the greatest physicist/mathematician required a God to make sense of his universe.
On the other hand, Newton inhabited an era whose basic assumptions were different from our own.
One of the great intellectual shifts since Newton has been to make it a harder argument to provide a purposive role for man within creation.
Oddly, I think that Newton's universal rules of the universe helped make that happen. The sequence of shocks included Copernicus' solar system (earth not central), Galileo's telescope (see!), James Hutton's geology (most of the time, there were no humans on this planet), Darwin's descent (humans are apes), Freud's psychology (boy are we weird) and Edwin Hubble's extragalactic astronomy (worlds beyond the milky way).
Einstein's God was no longer a personal one. The universe seemed too large and man too insignificant. And this led to a sense that humans should be humble about their own importance. And yet this thing called homo sapiens is still capable of wondering about the scope and complexity of creation.
Someone once said - the universe we observe has precisely the properties we would expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference .... I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.*
That same person also wrote - It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us . . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.*
How was this pitiless but varied architecture constructed? It's a question that goes beyond all science. Beginnings are the mystery. To go full circle, a dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. — Let each man hope & believe what he can.*
Or so they say.
All starred quotes from ole man Darwin.
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