In 1686, Issacs Newton presented his three laws of motion in the “Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis.” His law of motion states that:
- An object at rest remains at rest, and an object that is moving will continue to move straight and with constant velocity if and only if there is no net force acting on that object.
- The acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied.
- Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first.
These three laws fundamentally changed science by providing a mathematical model to describe the motion of objects. French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace, who lived from 1749 to 1827, speculated that since the laws of motion were exact and predicted the motions of every possible particle under every kind of force and interaction, the future of every particle in the universe was preordained. According to this view, there is no free will, no need for God, and no random events; the so-called “random events” are just the lack of adequate knowledge to predict the outcome. The world is like a giant clockwork, and God is the clockmaker who designs, winds it up, and lets it run freely. This worldview is sometimes referred to as Newton’s clockwork universe, although Newton himself was a practicing Christian and never made such an analogy. Most scientists in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century held this worldview.
When computer programmers create a complicated program, they sometimes create a “back door” so the creator or some superuser can examine and modify the program’s state. Does God interact with the world through such a “back door”? Recently, there has been much interest in the new science of chaos, which many view as the key to understanding how God interacts with the world. This is completely opposite to Newton’s clockwork universe.