Hello js1138! But surely you know that Newton was not an atheist, and you’re just pulling my leg. He was, in fact, a Christian. And he realized the tendency of the mechanical explanation of nature inevitably would lead to the conviction that the world is independent of God. Yet he himself apparently thought that his mechanical laws would, over time, generate such disorder that God would have to step in from time to time to set things right again. This was a rather scandalous idea at the time, I gather; but not for the reason you might imagine. The major objection was theological: to say that God must set his creation to rights meant that there was something defective about His creation; and a perfect God would not do shoddy work!
In his Scholium Generale of 1713, Newton says that God constitutes space and time through his eternity and omnipresence: “existendo semper et ubique, durationem et spatium constitutit.” In short, for Newton space is the form of the omnipresence of God, "the Lord of Life with his creatures." We are speaking here of Newton’s concept of absolute, infinite, empty space that he designates sensorium Dei, which suggests to my mind a quite early articulation of the energetic field concept that, to my knowledge (as flawed and partial as it is), was first made explicit by Michael Faraday.
It’s funny, but we rarely hear about this side of Isaac Newton.
And of course God does not have to push arrows in flight; arrows just follow the principles that he loaded into the system in the singularity of the big bang. (At least that is my present suspicion.)
I for one do not assume or have recourse to miracles in daily life, most days at least – in fact not nearly as much as proponents of macroevolution or abiogenesis do; for what such folks propose would constitute a miracle, IMHO, albeit a “godless one.” FWIW
But now I'm pulling your leg.... :^)
Then again, I don’t say that miracles do not happen.
Have a wonderful New Year, js1138!
I especially appreciate your pointing out the lack of curioisity about why the universe is the way it is and not some other way - and why it is at all. It toubles me that so many shrug at those questions.
More directly, I believe the most important question for any teenager to ask is "what is the meaning of life?" The answer, which is often quite personal, sets one's course for decades to come.
I don't either. I merely say they are never assumed by science. The default explanation will always be naturalistic, and if explanation eludes science, then the default hypothesis will be naturalistic.
There really isn't any other way to conduct science. If you don't imagine naturalistic explanations, you have nothing to test. If you assume supernatural explanations, you have no reason to test.
Arguing from structure demonstrates nothing in the absense of history. The art of science is to imagine a naturalistic history, then test each piece of the history to see if it happens without intervention. You get no proof, but you get plausibility.
Evolution also follows the principles that God loaded into the system. All the evidence is that it does (and there is a huge amount of such evidence), and evolution does not involve the violation of any natural law.