
Originally Posted by
hitch22
True, both are great intellectuals and both said those words. But I would be more circumspect in choosing characters to defend, say, Christianity. Perhaps in defense of theism in general...but still I haven't seen any intellectual debates employ this tactic. I'll tell you why.
Isaac Newton does not believe in the Trinity. He harbored the heretical anti-Trinitarian belief called Arianism. Below is Newton's criticism of this verse from 1 John 5:7: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one."
* Newton's Anti-Trinitarianism is well documented in his biographies.
As great an intellectual as he is, Newton wasn't spared from believing in wacky stuffs like alchemy and he would spend nights locked up in his room, trying to transmute lead into gold. And then there's his famous exchange with Leibniz. When Newton couldn't explain why the stars wouldn't collapse into each other, he proposed that God actively intervened to put orbits on an even keel. Leibniz teased him on this by asking why God couldn't have got it working right in the first place. Of course, Einstein showed why this is so without the need to invoke divine intervention.
On Francis Bacon. Yes, another great philosopher and scientist, father of the Baconian method (the scientific method). Does he use reason for his belief in God? Apparently not, for he said in his De augmentis: "The more discordant, therefore, and incredible, the divine mystery is, the more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith." To put in another way, the greater the absurdity, the stronger his belief in it.
Bacon believed that religion and philosophy must be separated and he admittedly observed a positive correlation between Atheism and civil times.
Lastly, Bacon was said to be a "pederast"...a pedophile in today's terms. His own colleague at the Parliament, Simonds D'Ewes, wrote about Bacon:
Even Bacon's mom complained about his son's companions.