Together with Chris Smeenk, I am writing a piece on Newton's Principia for one of those Oxford Handbook (edited by Jed Buchwald). It's been a swell experience because I learn so much from Chris. It's also been a lot of fun to re-read the Principia with him. Here's a *draft* of our take on an argument we found in the General Scholium:
"Before we turn to analyzing Newton’s argument from (beautiful) design and his views of God, it is worth noting that Newton’s position rules out two contrasting, alternative approaches, both discussed later in the General Scholium: i) that God is constantly arranging things in nature. As he writes, “In him are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other.” No further argument is offered against an hyper-active God. ii) That everything is the product of “blind metaphysical necessity.” This second view is associated with the neo-Epicurean systems of Spinoza and Hobbes (and offered as a plausible thought experiment in Descartes’ suppressed Le Monde). Newton offers an independent argument against that approach, namely that given that necessity is uniform it cannot account for observed variety. Now, this is a telling objection against Spinozism in so far as it is committed to the principle of sufficient reason (and, thus, rules out brute fact). But, it is less compelling objection against necessitatarians that embrace fate. Moreover, in the absence of a discussion of initial conditions of the universe Newton’s claim begs the question. At best he has shifted the burden of proof. But it is not insurmountable: all a necessitarian needs to show is how the laws and the “regular” orbits are possible given some prior situation. One can understand Immanuel Kant’s (1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven as taking up the challenge of accounting for the universe in light of Newton’s laws of motion (while still officially endorsing God’s providence.)"
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