The Massive Ark on the Moon (very OT, but of high interest)

Mar 4, 2016 - 11:00am PT
He also predicted when Yeshua (Jesus) would return according to all his studies of the subject, 100s and 100s of pages of studies regarding this. His best prediction was not before 2060 AD.

if the "He" references Newton, then it is important to point out that Newton didn't believe it was possible to make such predictions from the Bible, and did not make them himself except to show the futility in such an effort.

That is another interpretation, and a more scholarly one, then the posthumous-born-again appropriation of Newton's spiritual activities.

From the transcpit ...

NARRATOR: Newton was eventually excused from becoming a minister. But he wrote more about theology and alchemy than science and math combined.

Only recently made available to the public, at the National Library in Jerusalem, these documents are now revealing that for Newton, religion and science were inseparable, two parts of the same life-long quest to understand the universe.

SIMON SCHAFFER: Newton himself wanted to design a universe in which God was absolutely present and absolutely powerful. There's an enormous irony there. In the 18th century, gangs of interpreters, most of them French, will take the God out of Newton's world. It's a very common image of what the Newtonian world was, that it was soulless, that it was mechanical, that it really wasn't theologically motivated at all.

GALE CHRISTIANSON: Now, ironically, that's very anti-Newtonian, because Newton argued that God had to be present, you couldn't read him out of the universe.

SIR ISAAC NEWTON (Dramatization): The most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.

NARRATOR: Newton owned more than 30 Bibles, and he examined them as rigorously as he did the natural world. Correlating Biblical passages with astronomical information, he re-dated ancient history, drawing up elaborate charts and chronologies that show civilization starting around 980 B.C.

JED BUCHWALD: I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of computations and workings and re-workings where he tries to probe this over a period of close to 30 years. Time and time again, he'll come back to it, calculating and recalculating, trying to make it work, just the way he tried to make his theories of light work.

NARRATOR: With the same fervor that he brought to science and math, Newton also combed the Bible for keys to the future.

STEPHEN SNOBELEN: What he was trying to do is determine when the end would come, when Christ would return, when all the apocalyptic events of the end times would, would come to a head.

NARRATOR: And that date is now alarmingly close: the year 2060.

JAMES FORCE: Newton is not a man who keeps his theology in a box that he brings out only on Sundays, and then a man who does his science as a working man the rest of the week. Newton sees his work as a seamless unity, and his project is to understand the truth of God.

PAMELA SMITH: Most people today think of religion and science as completely different spheres. In Newton's day, science, the investigation of the natural world, was a part of religion. It was...all questions, in some ways, ended in divine knowledge.

NARRATOR: Alchemy and religion might have continued to dominate Newton's thoughts, but in his early 40s, he received a surprise visit that would refocus him on physics. It was the astronomer Edmond Halley, now known for the comet named after him. He asked Newton an esoteric sounding question about planetary orbits.

EDMOND HALLEY (Dramatization): My question is this: What kind of curve would be described by the planets, supposing the force of the attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it?

SIR ISAAC NEWTON (Dramatization): An ellipse.

EDMOND HALLEY (Dramatization): An ellipse? How do you know?

SIR ISAAC NEWTON (Dramatization): I've done the calculation.