Newtonian Physics

Before Newton, the force was a dogma; objectively speaking it was a spirit calling forth to motion the matter of this world. Newton understood, for the first time, that the possibility of imaginatively working with force rests upon its appreciation, therefore its measurement. And further, the key of understanding of the process of force measurement is only revealed by the attitudes of our body – the only ones we can control and understand, because they affect us directly. For, what doesn’t affect us directly sinks into oblivion, due to our indifference. Consequently, if it comes to create a new dogma about the force, then it should stay under the call of what doesn’t leave us while we can think with the possibility of action – our body.

Using a word of Mircea Eliade, one can say that Newton desecrated the force bringing it to the understanding and use of man, exactly the way Prometheus of the old desecrated the fire in order to be used by man. This process had tremenduous consequences upon social man. The first – and the most significant one – among these is obviously the technological development. If this can be regarded positively, there are, however consequences manifestly negative. And we don’t mean here necessarily those consequences that made the late Professor Albert Tarantola, for instance, to have second thoughts about science, but some deeper ones. Indeed, desecrating force means desecrating many other concepts, and we are not sufficiently prepared for these, a fact acutely perceived by Newton himself.

In the science created by Newton the human body found out itself connected with the whole Universe, and it is only as such that the Universe was filled with matter, in the form of the bodies falling under our senses. Only as such the science describes Nature as “objective”. Speaking from a religious point of view, this connection of the body sustaining the life with the wole Universe is in fact foretold in many of the creation myths of different people on Earth. The well-known archetype of these is the Babylonian myth of creation Enûma Elish, in which the god Marduk kills the sea goddess Tiamat, in order to create from her body the earth and the heaven (One doesn’t kill a god just like that!). Furthermore Marduk also killed Tiamat’s husband Kingu, from whose blood he created the men, so that they should accomplish the works of gods. In such myths the body is always preceding the matter.

The matter in the modern acceptance is however a purely human concept, created by Newton in order to offer an objective base to the force. Empirically our senses tell us that the bodies outside ours too suffer the same consequences under similar conditions. And those similar conditions are unveiled in motion. In motion we experience with our body a centrifugal force and assign it as a cause of centrifugal motion of inert bodies; at the sudden stop of motion we experience the inertia as a force, and assign it as a cause of the disintegration or of changing the form of an inert body suddenly stopped. Even the eagle uses nowadays this property (one wonders for how long, and by what practical observation – if any?!) which helps him peck the marrow of a bone, by raising it in the sky and leaving it fall over a cliff, in order to break it. In a word we always notice the force as a mean of destruction and external changing.

The New Testament, considered as philosophy, is the only philosophy totally opposed to the scientific one. Implicitly – by acts – or explicitly – in teachings – the New Testament carries the idea that the attitudes of the human body reveal especially the harmony, without which one cannot even think to make a concept out of force. The harmony is that allowing a human body to assume the attitudes of response to the external and internal actions upon it, consequently also to forces. Therefore not the force – to which the science stopped in chosing its principles – is primary, but the harmony, allowing us to notice the force in the first place. This idea is continuously iterated by Jesus, and opposed to the human concept of force at the risk of His own peril.