Why was Newton a theist?

[polymath257]

The guy who proposed the big bang theory was as well.

Wasn't the guy who camed up with the name "big bang" making fun of the person who actually came up with the theory? Last I read he was a theist who couldn't believe the universe started like that, so he made fun of it and said it was like everything just started out of nowhere in a "big bang" (that whole nonsense where theists compare the only alternative to God is the universe coming out of "nowhere" and yet they act as if God can do the exact same thing)....

Was the guy who came up with theory a theist as well? Or just the guy who made fun of it and named it?

But yeah, sure there are intelligent people who identify as theists at least. Although when you look at what they actually believe it doesn't seem very clear that they actually believe in anything concrete.

But yeah, there are also even otherwise intelligent theistic scientists who are even fundamentalist Christians who literally believe crazy things like Jesus literally rose form the dead totally non-metaphorically. It's crazy but the human mind is irrational and does what it needs to do to cope, no matter how irrational, regardless of how intelligent the person is.

And let's face it, it's mostly just down to upbringing. If an intelligent scientist was raised Hindu, they'd instead be an intelligent Hindu scientist instead of an intelligent Christian scientist. It mostly just boils down to indoctrination the vast majority of the time.

I was never indoctrinated, but hell, if I was indoctrinated hard enough maybe I'd believe in some silly nonsense myself. And it would entirely depend on which old dusty book had been preached at me over and over as a child, and how little I'd been informed of alternative truths from a young age (and given enough alternatives you may realize it's all bullshit).

I was taught about multiple religions as a child, and I wasn't told that any of them were true of false. My parents were spiritual and had their own private beliefs, but never really talked about them to me much unless I asked them.

So, I had a very objective perspective because I wasn't told what to think I was taught how to think.

Lemaitre was *one* of the people who came up with the Big bang model. Others were Friedmann (an atheist, if I recall correctly), Robertson, and Walker (I don't know their affiliations).

The person who coined the name 'Big Bang' was Hoyle, who was an *atheist* and proposed the Steady State model for the universe (as well as working through the nuclear reactions for stars).