ABSTRACT
When asked by Napoleon about the place of God in Newton’s mechanical model physical universe, the great eighteenth-century mathematician, Pierre Simone de Laplace, replied “We have no need of that hypothesis.” Had Laplace been able to anticipate developments in nineteenth-century physics perhaps his response would have been far less sanguine. Buoyed by the tremendous success of Newton’s mechanics, and its eighteenth-and nineteenth-century refinements to describe many of the most prominently observed regularities in the natural world, Laplace and his contemporaries were convinced that they had in hand a complete model of the workings of nature. The few anomalies that remained would no doubt be cleared up by clever scientists, but would not require the insight of a Newton. 1 As indicated by Laplace’s reply to Napoleon, the theological implications of the then increasingly popular mechanistic view of nature were uninteresting at best. A deistic God or blind watchmaker seemed all that could be reconciled with this particular view of the physical universe. Plato’s notion of a “celestial city of the stars” had helped to provide a philosophical foundation for both the Christian tradition and modern science. In accounting for the regular motions of the celestial city’s wanderers, that is, the planets, mechanists felt they had eliminated the need for divine intervention as an explanation of anything.
