The Problem with Christians

[Pat Mustard]

I'm sorry; what?? Newton has been regularly peer-reviewed for centuries.

And it's a bald-faced lie. It was before the time of scientific journals, but not before peer review. Back then, the few major intellects wrote books and then criticized the works directly, in papers/essays. From one history article about Isaac Newton I found in a quick search:


"Newton was not without his critics, however. Many in the scientific community objected to Newton’s idea of gravity. They said that since he had no logical evidence or proof, then gravity was little more than a supernatural idea. Critics were especially vocal in France where Rene Descartes was the scientific guru that everybody looked up to. The Germans at the time were not too keen on some of Newton’s ideas, either, because they looked up to Gottfried Leibniz. Of course Newton's ideas were so cutting edge that many smart people of that time couldn't figure him out. When the Principia Mathematica came to print in 1686 many of the leading scholars couldn't understand what the whole point of calculus. I'm sure most high school students can sympathize. Many questioned Newton about the practicality of a book of abtract formulas and equations that didn't seem to have much to do with anything to do with "the real world".

The English also felt that Newton’s theories left no room for divine intervention as his laws proposed that the universe ran in a strict clockwork-like operation. In some cases, he was even accused of advocating for deism or, worse yet, atheism.

Newton addressed many of the criticisms from his critics when he published the second edition of the Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1713."

- From http://www.gohistorygo.com/#!isaac-newton/c1yfd

(Bold emphasis my own.)

From your quoted bit, they mischaracterise German distrust of Newton, because German natural philosophers thought Newton had stolen the ideas of the Calculus from Liebniz and passed them off as his own, while English natural philosophers argued the opposite. This ugly little spat actually lead to a long period of German and British mathematicians not talking to each other, most likely to the detriment of the British mathematical community (as Liebniz's differential & integral methods have more applications).

Modern supposition is that both men developed the branch of mathematics independently and almost at the same time (much like Darwin and Wallace on natural selection, though those two gents settled the matter far more amicably). (wiki)