that God compelled the heavenly bodies to obey the laws, which He had prescribed for them. For Isaac Newton, it was a God-driven universe.
Mathematics is slightly different, because it depends on the validity of the axioms on which it is based. The simplest example is Euclid's geometry, which is based on the axioms that go to make up three dimensional Euclidean space. Insofar as those axioms are valid, the geometry is valid. But the conclusions are not valid for (say) spherical geometry. With more complicated mathematics, the axioms will be more complicated; but the mathematics will still depend on their validity. The result is that there is necessarily a chasm between mathematics and experience, except in the theory of numbers.
How many men have ignored the experience that “The Truth” can never be imprisoned in man's artistic creations, or in his scientific equations? Martin Luther, gigantic hero that he was, knew perfectly well that it is the spirit that breathes life, and the letter that breathes death; yet even he proclaimed that “the Word of God” was contained in the clear words of scripture. He promptly got into his dispute with Zwingli about the correct Biblical interpretation of the simple words of the Eucharistic message, “This is my body”. The result of his tragic inability to reach some compromise was that the Reformation became politically unviable; and it needed the glorious victory of Gustavus Adolphus, a knight in shining armour if ever there was one, at Breitenfeld to rescue Protestantism from total destruction by the dark forces of the Counter-Reformation. If the Reformation had been extinguished on the Continent, our turn in Britain would have come next, and the myth of papal infallibility in interpreting the scriptures would have plunged the European mind again into black night. The civilised world was priest-ridden in those days, and the ability to read the Bible in the vernacular, and interpret it in the light of one's own intelligence, amounted to freedom of thought. It is salutary to reflect that what we have inherited at moments in the past hung by a thread, and that we should…