The clockwork universe theory compares the motions of everything in the universe to the innards of a mechanical clock. This idealized clock continues ticking along, as would a perfect machine, with its gears governed by the laws of physics, making every single aspect of the device completely predictable. Since Newton unified the description of terrestrial and heavenly motion, scientists originally had good reason to believe that the universe was completely deterministic at least in principle.
This was not incompatible with the religious view that God the creator wound up the universe in the first place at the Big Bang; and from there the laws of science took hold and have governed most everything since; aka Secondary Causation. But it did tend to undermine the notion that God's instant-by-instant attention was required for the universe to function as expressed in the theory of Occasionalism.
The clockwork universe was popular among deists during the Enlightenment, when scientists demonstrated that Newton's laws of motion, including the law of universal gravitation, could explain the behavior of falling objects on earth as well as the motion of the planets to within the limits of the observational accuracy of the day.
Read more about Clockwork Universe Theory: Opposition, World-machine, Objections Due To Free Will, Objections Due To Entropy, Objections Due To Quantum Mechanics, Objections Due To Axiomatic Mathematics, Objections Due To Chaos Theory, Art
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