An Apple and a Question That Remains

In the summer of 1665, twenty-two-year-old Isaac Newton retreated to his family's farm at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, fleeing the Great Plague that had closed Cambridge University. There, as he later told his friend William Stukeley, he watched an apple fall from a tree and began wondering why objects always descend straight toward the earth's center. Two decades of rigorous calculation followed. In 1687, with his friend Edmond Halley financing the publication, Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica appeared — revealing a single mathematical law that described the gravitational attraction between every object in the universe, from falling apples to orbiting moons.

It was among the greatest intellectual achievements in human history. Yet Newton recognized its limits. In the Principia's General Scholium, he wrote that "this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."

This is the very humility God calls forth in Job 38: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Who marked off its dimensions? Who stretched a measuring line across it?" Newton stretched a measuring line of mathematics across the heavens — and it was breathtaking. But the measuring line that set the cosmos in place belonged to Another. Science can trace the fingerprints of the Almighty across the universe. Only worship can address the hand that left them.