Newton's Laws and a Supreme Being

[Collisionman]

Personally I'm on the border-line between atheist and agnostic however the following statement gets me thinking. It is a statement that every physicist can resite without having to think;

"Every object remains in a state of rest or in uniform motion until acted on by an external force"
-Isaac Newton's First law of motion.

Might this statement suggest that a supreme being exists or existed?

 

[Evo]

Personally I'm on the border-line between atheist and agnostic however the following statement gets me thinking. It is a statement that every physicist can resite without having to think;

"Every object remains in a state of rest or in uniform motion until acted on by an external force"
-Isaac Newton's First law of motion.

Might this statement suggest that a supreme being exists or existed?

What would make you think that? The words "external force"?

 

[Collisionman]

What would make you think that? The words "external force"?

Well let's say I push a ball with my hand, the external force that caused that ball to move would have been caused by me. In the question, I am asking if Newton's Law prove to a certain extent that a force must have had to exist to in order for motion to exist. If there was no force at the beginning of time then there would be no motion, nothing would move. The statement also suggest that there had to be a beginning and that the belief that universe had no beginning or no end is false. If the universe had no beginning then there would be no motion.

 

[robertm]

Also, don't forget that all of our theoretical formulations always are approximate to some degree; and there really doesn't seem to be any way of getting around it. So, though classical mechanics works very well in a range of circumstance (large scale cosmology not being included) it isn't strictly true.

Edit:
If questions of the history and potential beginning of the universe could be answered by employing logical deduction based on Newtonian physics they would have been settled long ago.

 

[Pengwuino]

You're reading way too much into that statement.

 

[wofsy]

Personally I'm on the border-line between atheist and agnostic however the following statement gets me thinking. It is a statement that every physicist can resite without having to think;

"Every object remains in a state of rest or in uniform motion until acted on by an external force"
-Isaac Newton's First law of motion.

Might this statement suggest that a supreme being exists or existed?

Newton certainly did not think so. He thought of his law as purely empirical.

One might ask the same question about Aristotle's law of motion: "Every object remains in a state of rest unless acted on by an external force"

 

[logickills]

I agree with Pengwuino, you are looking far too deeply into the statement. You could put evidence of a supreme being in any statement.

"Where's the beef?" It is not beef that is missing, it is the supreme being. One must look past the metaphorical beef and search for inner protein.

 

[wofsy]

Personally I'm on the border-line between atheist and agnostic however the following statement gets me thinking. It is a statement that every physicist can resite without having to think;

"Every object remains in a state of rest or in uniform motion until acted on by an external force"
-Isaac Newton's First law of motion.

Might this statement suggest that a supreme being exists or existed?

Now that I think about your question I see that Newton's Law must have lead to the question of how did it all get wound up in the first place. You seem to be stating this as how did forces emerge to disturb uniform motion. This must have been external to the uniformly moving bodies.

Newton's Law does seem to say that any form of change must come from something external.

 

[Redbelly98]

"Something external" isn't necessarily a supreme being, it just means another object(s) separate from the one that is observed to have a change in velocity. There is no supreme being implied here.

 

[wofsy]

"Something external" isn't necessarily a supreme being, it just means another object(s) separate from the one that is observed to have a change in velocity. There is no supreme being implied here.

True. But still you have to believe that the question of who wound up the great mechanism came out of Newton's Physics.

 

[Redbelly98]

True. But still you have to believe that the question of who wound up the great mechanism came out of Newton's Physics.

Well, no, I don't. People believed in God long before Newton came along.

 

[wofsy]

Well, no, I don't. People believed in God long before Newton came along.

That's not what I meant. I mean given the Newtonian view that the Universe is a huge mechanism - accepting that - people then wondered how the mechanism , a new concept - got wound up in the first place.

The idea that God would have set a great machine in motion then stood back and let blind laws take over must have been thought provoking.

 

[robertm]

The idea that God would have set a great machine in motion then stood back and let blind laws take over must have been thought provoking.

I don't see how proposing an unseen undefined uncaused causer provokes any thought.

 

[wofsy]

I don't see how proposing an unseen undefined uncaused causer provokes any thought.

In those days I don't think it was a proposal. God was seen as real without question and not undefined. His method of intervention in the Universe and his concept of design was challenged and changed. Today we don't care about all of that. But Newton was certainly aware of it.

 

[ideasrule]

That's not what I meant. I mean given the Newtonian view that the Universe is a huge mechanism - accepting that - people then wondered how the mechanism , a new concept - got wound up in the first place.

Why would you assume the universe started in an "unwound" state? Isn't that just as arbitrary as assuming it started in a "wound" state, which would negate the need for a creator?

 

[wofsy]

Why would you assume the universe started in an "unwound" state? Isn't that just as arbitrary as assuming it started in a "wound" state, which would negate the need for a creator?

You are right. But in those days the wind up was necessary since God preceded and created the Universe. For us this is a dubious assumption. In Newton's day it was virtually undisputed.

The question was not whether God designed the Universe but how.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

"Something external" isn't necessarily a supreme being, it just means another object(s) separate from the one that is observed to have a change in velocity. There is no supreme being implied here.

Couldn't stand it, eh?

 

[hover]

Personally I'm on the border-line between atheist and agnostic however the following statement gets me thinking. It is a statement that every physicist can resite without having to think;

"Every object remains in a state of rest or in uniform motion until acted on by an external force"
-Isaac Newton's First law of motion.

Might this statement suggest that a supreme being exists or existed?

All Newton is saying is that if the net force on an object isn't zero then the object will begin to accelerate. His law says nothing about a supreme being.

 

[Collisionman]

All Newton is saying is that if the net force on an object isn't zero then the object will begin to accelerate. His law says nothing about a supreme being.

Ok, maybe the word 'supreme being' was the wrong chose of wording. And I'm not trying to suggest that 'external force' has anything mystical about it. My question is more surrounding the grander scheme of things and refers more to the beginning of time rather than the present.

You see according to Newton's axioms an object cannot move until a force acts upon it, such as if I were to kick a ball; I am exerting a force on the ball making it accelerate and move. I'm not well experienced in physics yet but I am sure that principle is the same even at the Quantum mechanical level (?).

Now given that motion actually exists, we can move, the planets move, the stars move, the galaxies move, doesn't that suggest that a 'force' had to put those objects motion in the first place. I am not suggesting that a force still exists which makes these objects move but something (according to Newton's laws) had to put them into motion. If this never happened then shouldn't everything in the universe be at rest (not moving) or in a state of constant speed (which every object in the universe isn't)?

 

[JoeDawg]

If this never happened then shouldn't everything in the universe be at rest (not moving) or in a state of constant speed (which every object in the universe isn't)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_movens" is the phrase you are looking for.

Problem, if a first cause exists, then not everything needs a cause, so your rationale for having a 'first' cause dissolves. There could be many things that don't require a cause. Gods unto infinity.

Also, being at rest, is really a relative thing. There is essentially nothing different between being at rest, and being at a constant speed. Its change of speed that implies something has happened.

 

[wofsy]

You see according to Newton's axioms an object cannot move until a force acts upon it, such as if I were to kick a ball; I am exerting a force on the ball making it accelerate and move. I'm not well experienced in physics yet but I am sure that principle is the same even at the Quantum mechanical level (?).

Now given that motion actually exists, we can move, the planets move, the stars move, the galaxies move, doesn't that suggest that a 'force' had to put those objects motion in the first place. I am not suggesting that a force still exists which makes these objects move but something (according to Newton's laws) had to put them into motion. If this never happened then shouldn't everything in the universe be at rest (not moving) or in a state of constant speed (which every object in the universe isn't)?

I like your line of reasoning but can't totally agree with the way you are putting it for a few reasons. But maybe they could be worked out.

First - Gravity is intrinsic to space whenever there are bodies with mass. This means ,I think, that gravity isn't really a force but more a geometric property of space. Yet gravity explains non-uniform motion. Maybe someone who knows some Physics could explain this but it seems that Newton's first Law doesn't really apply for gravity.

But whether it does or not in order for there to have been a time of uniform motion there would have been a time without gravity which I assume means without bodies with mass so there would have been no bodies with uniform motion anyway. So the idea that the Universe got started when acceleration replaced non-uniform motion seems to be wrong.

Second - In Quantum Mechanics change occurs stochastically and I do not think that this is at all like uniform motion. Uniform motion - or any kind of motion - is a macroscopic approximation to the behavior of a fundamentally random process. So Newton's view of things is outdated and no longer explains motion or forces.

Also I think that force in Quantum mechanics is replaced by momentum and energy. Force doesn't really exist. Rather there are Quantum mechanical phenomena - I think sharing of particles but don't quote me on this - that replace classical potentials. For instance I think electrostatic potential is replaced by a QM sharing of a photon.

I think though that interpreting gravity Quantum mechanically has been a problem but as I said before gravitational force is replace by space-time curvature.

Third - If the Universe were in an early state where there were no masses and thus no uniform motion in Newton's sense there still may have been Quantum mechanical randomness. Even if there was no time, this randomness could still cause change perhaps (I don't really know what I am talking about) and maybe just by chance a random event kicked off the creation of the Universe that we live in. This could have been the prime mover for the universe in its current incarnation - a random event.

Fourth - While it is true that uniform motion is relative, in a world without forces there would be an absolute frame of reference and one could restate your question by asking when did the absolute frame of reference disappear and General Relativity take over?

Fifth - While Newton's Laws may not have always been true it is hard to imagine the Universe arising from nothing. Even if there were a creator how could he have created something from nothing? It seems more plausible that the Universe is historically immortal and exists perhaps because it is intrinsically indestructible.

A pious friend of mine argues that there Universe could not have existed - at least as we know it - before time. Yet something must have existed or else the Universe would have arisen from nothing. For him this is the Prime mover, the existence of a lawful enitiy prior to time.