The brilliant Isaac Newton could harmonize Aristotle’s super- and sub-lunar worlds, show that nature’s laws were universal and in the process explain how the solar system worked, but the Cambridge professor could not explain how the solar system arose or how it will end. Most troublesome was his finding that the planets circling about the Sun formed one giant accident waiting to happen. One day the planets were liable to careen about and the only solution seemed to be an occasional divine finger to adjust the errant machine. That sent Newton’s continental nemesis Gottfried Leibniz into his own instability, for the Lutheran co-founder of calculus could not envision God creating a less than optimal world. Certainly not a world so crude so as to be in need of occasional adjustment. Newton also said that his new physics was not capable of evolving the solar system in the first place. Like Adam’s naval, the planets had to get their start somehow other than their normal operation. Did God then also have to interfere with His creation to set the planets initially in their orbits and with the proper speeds? Read more