Britain still used the Julian calendar in 1642, and according to that calendar it was on Christmas Day that Isaac Newton was born. There is no question whatever that Newton actually existed and, what is more, he did a lot more for human progress, and therefore peace, than Jesus ever did.
So I am celebrating the birth of Isaac Newton — and if you actually want Peace on Earth, rather than the triumph of some discreditable vengeance cult or another, so will you.
Newton’s calculus, and kinematics, are the backbone of an engineering education; there is no such thing as an engineer of any variety who hasn’t solved hundreds, possibly thousands, of permutations of the block-on-an-inclined-plane problem, and the modern world could not exist without Newton’s genius.
Believe it or not, engineers don’t kill each other over Newton’s equations, either. They have been tested, proved, and universally accepted — they work. There are no embarrassing schisms we must pretend never happened, or others we must pretend don’t exist. A Muslim, Christian, Mormon, or Scientologist engineer uses f=ma as confidently and sure-footedly as a Buddhist engineer. An American engineer can look at a Chinese engineer’s calculations and understand them at once.
All civil engineers, regardless of their religion or nationality or ethnicity, agree that the discharge of a full-flowing pipe, Q, equals the product of fluid velocity and the pipe’s area, vA. There are no reformed hydraulics.
Here is the secret: Every bit of it has been tested, tested again, chewed-over, debated, refined, re-tested. Not any of it is … revelation, knowledge mysteriously dispensed to a select few, and in engineering there are no Holy Men.
You want Peace on Earth? Then take to heart the concluding words of Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not A Christian:
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.