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word.”
    God saw every sparrow that falls, but that was only for starters. If God were to relax his guard even for a moment, the entire world would immediately collapse into chaos and anarchy. The very plants in the garden would rebel against their “cold, dull, inactive life,” one Royal Society physician declared, and strive instead for “self motion” and “nobler actions.”
    To a degree we can scarcely imagine, the 1600s were a God-drenched era. “People rarely thought of themselves as ‘having’ or ‘belonging to’ a religion,” notes the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, “just as today nobody has ‘a physics’; there is only one and it is automatically taken to be the transcript of reality.” Atheism was literally unthinkable. In modern times, we presume that either God exists or He doesn’t. We can fight about the evidence, but the statement itself seems perfectly clear, no different in principle from either there are mountains on the moon or there are not.
    In the seventeenth century no one reasoned that way. The idea that God might not exist made no sense. Even Blaise Pascal, one of the farthest-ranging thinkers who ever lived, declared flatly that it would be “absurd to affirm of an absolutely infinite and supremely perfect being” that He did not exist. The idea was meaningless. To raise the question would be to ponder an impossibility, like asking if today might come before yesterday.
    For Newton and the other intellectuals of the day, God also had another aspect entirely. Not only had He created the universe and designed every last feature of every single object within it, not only did He continue to supervise His domain with an all-seeing, ever-vigilant eye. God was not merely a creator but a particular kind of creator. God was a mathematician.
    That was new. The Greeks had exalted mathematical knowledge above all others, but their gods had other concerns. Zeus was too busy chasing Hera to sit down with compass and ruler. Greek thinkers valued mathematics so highly for aesthetic and philosophical reasons, not religious ones. The great virtue of mathematics was that its truths alone were certain and inevitable—in any conceivable universe, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and so on. 8 In the Greek way of thinking, all other facts stood on shakier ground. A mountain might be precisely 10,257 feet tall, but it could just as well have been a foot higher or lower. To the Greeks, historical facts seemed contingent, too. Darius was king of the Persians, but he might have drowned as a young boy and never come to the throne at all. Even the facts of science had an accidental feel. Sugar is sweet, but there seemed no particular reason it could not have tasted sour. Only the truths of mathematics seemed tamper-proof. Not even God could make a circle with corners.
    Seventeenth-century thinkers rejected the Greeks’ distinction between truths that have to be— two and two make four— and truths that happen to be— gold is soft and easy to scratch . Since every facet of the universe reflected a choice made by God, chance had no role in the universe. The world was rational and orderly. “It just so happens” was impossible.
    But the seventeenth century found its own reasons for regarding mathematics as the highest form of knowledge. The huge excitement among the new scientists was the discovery that the abstract mathematics that the Greeks had esteemed for its own sake turned out in fact to describe the physical world, both on Earth and in the heavens. On the face of it this was absurd. You might as well expect to hear that a newly discovered island had proved to be a perfect circle or a newfound mountain an exact pyramid.
    Sometime around 300 B.C. , Euclid and his fellow geometers had explored the different shapes you get if you slice a cone with a knife. Cut straight across and you get a