Newton himself viewed gravity as ultimately caused by constant spirit action—the laws of nature are a mode of divine action, not autonomous material processes.

Edward Zilsel's historical research showed that the concept of natural law is not found in Stoic or Greek philosophy but is a juridical metaphor of theological origin, emerging from the idea that God legislates nature like a sovereign legislates laws.

Materialism as a philosophical position is incoherent because material objects necessarily have numerical identity, but numbers are not material objects, creating an internal contradiction within the materialist framework itself.

Universal skepticism created by the evolutionary argument against naturalism is self-refuting: if my ancestors were indifferent to truth, this fact has no bearing on whether my current reasoning is sound, because the standards of valid reasoning are logically independent of the evolutionary history of my cognitive faculties.

Newton's achievement during 1684-1686 included independently developing the calculus, solving problems that had eluded mathematicians for 2,000 years, and inventing the technique of representing nature by differential equations, initiating both a mathematical and physical revolution.

Newton devoted a significant portion of his life and attention to alchemy, writing over a million words on alchemical subjects and conducting experiments, because chemistry did not yet exist as a discipline and alchemy offered the richest schemata of possibilities available to him.

Leibniz proposed in the 17th century that all intellectual endeavors could be reduced to computations and imagined a future in which all knowledge could be mechanized, an idea that may well be our future.

The only consciousness one can be epistemically certain of is one's own; about all others, including those implemented in machines or other humans, one has only analogical inference and probabilistic doubt.

A form of measurable, obvious, and palpable intelligence exists in mechanical systems, and if we are all limited to effectively computable functions, then mechanical intelligence may be the only form of intelligence available to us.

Newton described himself near death as like a boy playing on the seashore, finding smoother pebbles and prettier shells while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him, expressing epistemological humility about human knowledge.

Astrology flourished in 17th-century London with practitioners like William Lilly specializing in finding lost objects and achieving widespread commercial success, suggesting these practices had effective methods they deliberately concealed

The publication of Newton's Principia (1684-1685) coincided with the sudden disappearance of the astrological tradition in London, suggesting a causal connection between Newton's mathematical science and the decline of astrology

Laws of nature are understood by theoretical physicists and mathematicians as filled with primordial energy that not only explains but governs the world with a power to command and shape all existence

Universal skepticism (the claim that nothing can be known) is self-defeating because if universal skepticism is true, then universal skepticism itself cannot be known to be true, making it a statement that undermines its own validity and collapses.

ChatGPT-4 serves as evidence that intelligence can be entirely instantiated in a mechanical system, providing a counter-example to the thesis that intelligence requires biological substrate and thereby showing that mind is reducible to computation.

Proteins are assembled from amino acids according to genetic code, with each position in a protein sequence occupied by one of 20 possible amino acids; the number of possible arrangements grows exponentially as the protein length increases, creating astronomical combinatorial possibilities.

The cell is an unbelievably and unfathomably complex bit of machinery; every time scientists look deeper, they discover additional layers of complexity, so the goal of explaining the emergence of cellular complexity is receding as the complexity keeps increasing with each new discovery.

Academic resistance to Darwinian skepticism demonstrates anti-religious bigotry, which is one of the most important facts of the intellectual world in the United States and the West; this parallels the ideological capture that happened in English and history departments.

Berlinski is skeptical that intelligent design as currently formulated constitutes a complete theory; he is 'warm but distant' toward it, viewing it more as a critique of materialism than as a positive explanatory framework.

Berlinski responds skeptically to consciousness as a philosophical problem, saying that it is a 'fashionable' claim to be puzzled by it, and that the fact that he cannot experience others' sensations is not itself a philosophical problem—it is merely a fact of sensory privacy.