期刊名称：The new Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society
印刷版ISSN：1543-1215
电子版ISSN：1555-5569
出版年度：2015
期号：44
出版社：Ethics and Public Policy Center
摘要：Although Isaac Newton was known as a highly devout man during his lifetime, doubts about his religious orthodoxy began to circulate immediately after his death. Chiefly responsible for these rumors was William Whiston, Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and a champion of his scientific work. Soon after Newton’s death, Whiston published a short account of his private religious convictions in A Collection of Authentick Records (1728), proclaiming that Newton had held what most of his contemporaries thought of as scandalous and even heretical views about the doctrine of the Trinity. According to Whiston, Newton believed that the doctrine was a terrible fabrication devised in the fourth century and that Athanasius, the great Alexandrian bishop, was “the grand and the very wicked Instrument of that Change” and the architect of the corruption of original Christianity.
