God & Science - Hillcrest Baptist Church, Raleigh, NC

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It Will Keep a Good Man Down

Ed Handkins

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is a giant in the world of science. The story about his discovery of gravity after watching an apple fall is probably that – a story. People already new something made things fall toward the earth when nothing was holding them up. They already knew they had to hold on when they climbed a tree or a mountain.

What Isaac Newton did was to realize that gravity was the force that every material body exerts on every other body. Gravity is universal.

We need to start with the world view in Newton’s day. They saw the earth as the center of the universe. Copernicus (1473-1543) had proposed a Sun-centered model of the known universe. Galileo (1564-1642) had studied the phases of Venus and the four bright moons of Jupiter and provided strong evidence against the Earth-centered model of the Solar System. Galileo also studied the motions of falling bodies and laid the experimental groundwork for Newton’s laws of motion.

Though many were beginning to believe the Sun was the center of the Solar System they still thought the celestial sphere was an enormous sphere to which the stars appeared to be fixed. There were other spheres that held the planets or “wondering stars.”

Newton did not discover gravity but he did realize that the same force that caused the apple to fall was the same force that acted on the moon and planets. Newton learned from Galileo and studied the careful observations of Tycho (1546-1601) and Kepler (1571-1630). Kepler had used Tycho’s careful measurements and developed three laws of planetary motion. Kepler made a significant revision of the Copernican model.

With the information from those who preceded him, added to his own studies of moving objects, Newton postulate that the same force that acted on the apple acted on the moon and the other planets. He came to believe that gravity really is universal. The same physical law that worked on Earth worked on the Sun, the Moon and the planets. Newton put these down as his three laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation published in his book PRINCIPIA.

Newton did not try to speculate nature of gravity but he did rightly understand the effect it had on all material bodies.

Why should gravity be universal? Why would a ball thrown in the air on some far away world behave the same way it would behave on earth? Why should any physical law be universal?

The only answer is found in creation. There is one God who is also the Creator. The laws of nature are universal because the universe and all that is here was created by one God. The Bible says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8 NIV)