"St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) distinguished between scientific knowledge, discoverable by the human mind, and divine knowledge, 'higher than man's knowledge. Divine knowledge could 'not be sought by man through his reason, nevertheless, once revealed by God [it] must be accepted by faith' . . . . Newton proved, however, that the entirety of the universe, at least its physical parts, was knowable and discoverable by human beings. This new belief, a belief in the unfettered entitlement to knowledge, was the most important intellectual development . . . of the last millennium" (New York Times Magazine, Sept. 19, 1999).

Newton explained a wide range of previously unrelated phenomena: the eccentric orbits of comets; the tides and their variations; the precession of the Earth's axis; and motion of the Moon as perturbed by the gravity of the Sun.

The graphic below is of the Copernican universe with the sun at the center. The old view of the universe was the Ptolemaic model with the earth at the center. When people believed in the Ptolemaic universe they felt themselves to be more central to God's creation. The discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo shook people's complacency about their importance to God. Newton, of course, supports the newer Copernican model of the universe but he believed in a bounded universe (a universe with boundaries) which is quite different from the twentieth century view of the universe.