It seems, at first glance, that science and religion have been involved in a relentless historical conflict. The American chemist and physiologist John William Drapper was the first to explicitly suggest the existence of a permanent antagonism. He did so in a book he published in 1874, History of the Conflicts between Religion and Science. The latter, according to Drapper, always ended up victorious.
Does this vision correspond to the facts? Jaume Navarro categorically denies this in Science-religion and its invented traditions (Tecnos, 2022), a book dedicated to showing a past full of complexities. Along the way, he destroys powerful myths that have become consolidated in our imagination. It is not true, without going any further, that the medieval Church defended flat earthism.
The great scientific minds of the 16th and 17th centuries were not enemies of faith, but quite the opposite. As Navarro points out, Bacon, Kepler and Newton were convinced that knowledge helped them get closer to God. Newton, for example, wrote that the wonders of nature implied the existence of a creator: “This wonderful system of the Sun, the planets and the comets can only come from the advice and control of an intelligent being.”
The discoverer of the law of universal gravitation was, therefore, not just a rationalist who believed only in the scientific method. He dedicated a lot of effort to searching the Bible for hidden secrets that would allow him to find out the date of the end of the world. He came to the conclusion that history would not end before the year 2060. What did he base his calculation on? In an interpretation of the book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, from which he extracts the idea that the Antichrist would rule for 1,260 years. He arrives at this figure by interpreting that the 1,260 days of the biblical text refer, symbolically, to that period of time.
Newton begins counting from the year 800 because that date meant, in his opinion, that the Roman Church became a political power after the imperial coronation of Charlemagne. A time of “apostasy” began with this. The English physicist, in this, reflected Protestant prejudices against Catholicism.
But his prophecy of the end of the world has nothing to do with the Dantesque images of some disaster films. It does not mean that the Earth is going to be destroyed. It refers to the fact that humanity will enter a new phase thanks to the return of Jesus Christ. That, according to Newton, could also happen after 2060, but in no way before.
The academic community was aware of these reflections, but the rest of the population was not. Already in the 21st century, with the discovery of some manuscripts, the news hit the media and caused a commotion. That was not what people expected from a prince of science! But his annotations consist only of a private work, not intended for publication; Newton, in fact, was horrified by all attempts to put a date on the end of time. He believed it was a way to discredit the Holy Scriptures, because the predictions, “rash conjectures of fanciful men,” were always going to fail. He was convinced that it could not be any other way, since Jesus would return to Earth unexpectedly: “Christ comes like a thief in the night, and it is not for us to know the times and the seasons that God has set in his own chest".
By current standards, his belief in alchemy is not much more understandable either. For the famous physicist, it was possible to manufacture gold and silver. One of his manuscripts shows the instructions to obtain “philosophical mercury”, an indispensable substance for anyone who wanted to get hold of the philosopher's stone, the great tool that would allow him to get out of poverty once and for all. Once the gold was manufactured, the next step would be to achieve immortality. Who said the word “impossible” was in the dictionary?
However, before smiling skeptically, let's look at the time. Newton saw no contradiction between his theological and esoteric interests, on the one hand, and his dedication to science, on the other. In his view of the world, the material and the spiritual were not separate realities, but two halves of a single reality. What he practiced was not a discipline as we understand it now, but “natural philosophy.” This form of knowledge involved studying both nature and the intervention in it by the hand of God.
In short, Newton is a more complex figure than we usually think. The initiator of the Age of Reason? The economist John Maynard Keynes denied, in the 20th century, that he was like this. Because of his mentality, he considered him “the last of the magicians, the last Babylonian and Sumerian.”
