Before the 17th century, the universe was an unfamiliar and often unpredictable place. Things were explained as the actions of capricious gods, magical forces, or divine will that interfered with the affairs of the world regularly. Along came Isaac Newton.
With his magnum opus, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he didn't just bring new scientific ideas; he offered a completely new account of reality. He defined a universe operating by the precise, predictable, and impeccable clockwork of a gigantic machine. It did more for physics than that; it revolutionized philosophy, religion, and society's understanding of man's position in the universe, creating a picture of a rational, orderly, and perhaps comprehensible cosmos.
Newton's laws of motion - there were three of them - and his law of universal gravitation were the centerpiece of the revolution. These were not specific results; they were universal laws. They stated that the motion of all objects in the universe, from a dropped apple to the orbit of Mars, could be calculated and described using one set of mathematical laws.
The point was that the universe was deterministic. This means that if you could know the location, mass, and speed of all the particles of the universe at some point in time, you would theoretically be able to use Newton's laws to predict their positions and states at all subsequent times. The universe was a giant, complex clock. Every gear, every spring, every pendulum—every planet, star, and grain of dust—operated in an ideal predestined dance according to these immutable laws. There was no room for chance or randomness. Everything was the product of what had gone before.
This mechanistic view inevitably gave rise to a new idea about God. If the universe is a clock, then who made the clock? Newton and his contemporaries were devout men. They saw their scientific work as laying bare the laws decreed by the Creator. It led to Deism, an enormously influential vision. The God of the Deists was the great engineer, the divine mechanic who made the universe as a perfect machine, wound it up, and let it run.
Having done this initial act of creation, this God did not need to intervene with miracles or answer prayers. The universe hummed along by itself, following the perfect laws He had created. This was a wonderful, impersonal, and rational God—a master of math and physics. This idea removed the magic and mysticism of nature, replacing it with a belief in an orderly creator whose creation could be understood by reason and observation.
The social and philosophical impact of this clockwork world was profound. It encouraged the optimistic spirit of the Enlightenment, the "Age of Reason." If the material world operated on rational, discoverable laws, then human society and government surely could too. Intellectuals began to believe that through reason, they could discover natural laws that regulated economics, politics, and morality. They sought to build a "social mechanics" which would create an ordered and just society, as a well-designed clock keeps precise time. The checks and balances of the American system of government are the direct result of this philosophy. It was meant to be a political machine where the executive, legislative, and judicial wheels of authority would blend in a predictable and stable way, so no single element would overwhelm and destabilize the system. Human affairs could be civilized by applying rational principles, it was believed.
It changed humanity's view of itself as well. In the medieval worldview, humans were the focal point of a universe made for them with God actively intervening in their lives every day. The Newtonian universe was big and impersonal, and mechanical. Humans were not the object of divine concern but inhabitants of a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary star, subject to the same cold, mathematical principles that applied to everything else.
This was a scary possibility—a universe that cared not for human suffering and dreams. But it was also a freeing one. It suggested that the universe was not a realm of mysterious spirits but a vast book written in the language of mathematics, and man had been gifted with the logic to interpret it. With an understanding of nature's laws, human beings could command nature to serve their own purposes, resulting in the technology and science that would define the modern age.
The clockwork metaphor was not without its deficiencies and eventually found itself targeted by severe criticism. The image of a deterministic universe seemed to leave human will no freedom. If all the atoms follow foreordained paths, then are human thoughts, choices, and feelings mere illusions? Are we sophisticated timepieces, our actions determined from the cosmic wind-up point?
This was a horribly unsettling notion to philosophers and theologians. It reduced life, consciousness, and creativity to mere mechanical processes. The 19th-century English romantic poets, like William Blake, railed against this "single vision" of Newton's "sleep." They saw it as a stern, disenchanting eye that stripped the world of beauty, wonder, and spirit. To them, such a universe to be explained only in terms of mechanics was a soulless universe.
The Newtonian picture, great as it was, was ultimately left unfinished. With the dawn of the 20th century, revolutions in physics began that the clockwork model could not explain. Einstein's theory of relativity showed that space and time were not absolute and unchanging, such as the architecture of a clock, but relative and interdependent.
Worse still for the idea of perfect determinism was quantum mechanics, which showed that at the subatomic scale, the universe is a matter of probability. Things do not happen because they have been determined; they are a function of chance and uncertainty. The universe began to look less like a cosmic clockwork and more like a game of cosmic probability.
But the legacy of the Divine Clockwork is everywhere. It set out the magnificent maxim of contemporary science: that the universe is ordered, predictable, and explicable to the human intellect. It gave us bold enough to send probes to touch down on Mars, for we are convinced that the laws of motion and of gravity there are identical with those here. It underlies all our technology and engineering. Though we now live in a stranger, less deterministic cosmos than Newton ever imagined, we still do so with the rational optimism he taught us to construct. We no longer perceive God as a clockmaker, but we still labor on the premise that the cosmos is based on a foundation of rational laws.
The Newtonian Worldview was the intellectual revolution that advanced humankind from the age of superstition to the age of science and prepared the ground for the modern period, and revolutionized our relationship with the universe, with ourselves, and with the divine.