Newton ... once wrote: "[W]here natural causes are at hand God uses them as instruments in his works, but I do not think them sufficient alone for ye Creation."
For Newton, God maintained and interacted with everything in the physical universe, which he called the "divine sensorium."
Jay Richards, God and Evolution, Discovery Institute, Seattle, 2010
Where did the clockwork universe theory originate, then, if not with Newton? Readers might be surprised to learn that the notion of the clockwork universe is not a product of the mechanistic science of the 17th century, as is popularly assumed. In fact, it was commonly used in the Middle Ages, and certainly goes back at least as far as the 14th century.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank, who is the author of a recent best-seller entitled, About Time: From Sun Dials to Quantum Clocks, How the Cosmos Shapes Our Lives (Oneworld Publications, Oxford, 2012), contends that mechanical clocks, which became widespread in Europe in the 14th century, radically changed the way we view the cosmos itself, as the metaphor of the "clockwork universe" began to take hold. An excellent review of Frank's book, by science journalist Dan Falk, can be found here.
Frank quotes from the writings of the medieval philosopher, mathematician and scientist, Bishop Nicole d'Oresme (1330-1382), who described the world as "a regular clockwork that was neither fast nor slow, never stopped, and worked in summer and winter." As for the planets circling above, Oresme found them "similar to when a person has made a horologe [a clock] and sets it in motion, and then it moves by itself."
Oresme played a very important role in popularizing the clockwork universe metaphor. However, the roots of the metaphor can be traced back to the 13th century and beyond. As we shall see, the metaphor of the universe as a machine is a very ancient one.
The true origin of the clockwork universe metaphor
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