A couple of points before this thread dies a natural death. :-) Mike Smith wrote of Darwin: >he also was religious: at least in the >beginning, as shown by your post that >"he had ceased to believe". So then, >Darwin too at least started out religious
Darwin didn't start out religious in any serious sense. He was apathetic towards religious ideas (whereas his father and grandfather Erasmus were freethinkers), and accepted the tenets of Christianity as a young man without giving them much (if any) thought. Once he started to think about them in the light of his experience of natural science he rejected them. >and his motivation for engaging in the >study of the natural world could well >have been a religious one. I won't bore you with quotations demonstrating that religious ideas played zero role in Darwin's motivation for his life work, and that his passion for science and investigation were his motivations, apparent when he was still a young boy avidly collecting beetles. Louis Schmier wrote: >Newton, for example, felt that his greatest >work was not the Mathamatica Principia, but >his commentary on the Bible. Do we know this for a fact? I know he wrote more on biblical exegesis than science (as he did on alchemy), but it doesn't necessarily follow he regarded the biblical exegesis as greater than his Principia. Einstein spent more time on his efforts (occupying much of the latter part of his life) to discover a unified field theory than on any other area of physics, but I very much doubt he would have said that these efforts constituted his greatest work. Note I'm not saying that Louis is mistaken, only asking for evidence from Newton himself. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=4951 or send a blank email to leave-4951-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
