Newton and the Trinity

In his contribution to John Paul II on Science and Religion: Reflections on the New View from Rome , T.F. Torrance claims that Maxwell’s investigations into field phenomena arose from theology, specifically from a Trinitarian dissatisfaction with Newton’s universe:

“Clerk Maxwell’s belief in the God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ made him question whether the universe created by the Wisdom of God did really behave in the way described by Newtonian mechanics. The crisis came when he failed again and again to find a Newtonian mechanistic explanation for the behavior of electromagnetism and light. It was through allowing Christian thought (such as the understanding of interpersonal relations derived from the doctrine of the Holy Trinity) to bear upon his scientific thinking that he came up with the conception of the continuous dynamic field, to which Einstein was to point as introducing the most far-reaching change in the rational structure of science and our understanding of nature.”