If they can do the work, whether they believe it is based on observable truth or a lie or an illusion is not really relevant.

The sanity or motives of a student who claims to be dedicating his or her life (or a big chunk of it, anyway) to a system of thought that he or she considers an error at best and a demonic lie at worst are another story.

There are many people from the past, genius-level people in their fields, who would have many forehead slapping moments as they learned what their fields had found out since their day. We’ve simply learned as we went along through the centuries — is this really so unbelieveable? Is it really such a hard concept for rightwingers to understand?

Of course, his own brand of Protestantism is also rather unorthodox. He was a Unitarian (although not in the contemporary sense of Unitarian Universalism), convinced that the trinity was an error introduced by Augustine. This held out a bit of a problem when he was being considered for a chair at Trinity College…

The U.K. was not at the time, nor is it still, organized on the principles of the separation of church and state. We are.

Newton kept most of his alchemical thinking deeply hidden; it didn’t come out till long after his death, when that collection of papers was found. In any case, he was appointed the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics (the current holder is Stephan Hawkings, by the way), and one of the criteria was that the holder could not be active in the Church. Newton used that to appeal to Charles II that he not be required to take Holy Orders, his appeal was accepted, and he never did. So, while he had his mystical side, when the state tried to make a him a man of the cloth, he refused.

Newton’s laws did more than other single intellectual act to bring on the enlightenment, by removing the need for an interventionist God. He did more to rid the world of superstition than probably any other person.

As Warden of the Royal Mint, he had his share of experience with conmen and grifters; he had several convicted, drawn, and quartered. While he did try and find hidden messages in the Bible, this too he tried to do with intellectual rigor, and his purpose was at least partially “to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.” I have a feeling that he would have a lot to say about our current batch of ecclesiastical grifters, and that it would not be very complementary.