Dogmatic insistence upon them is, consequently, religious in the bad sense, i.e a credo quia absurdum.
The positive content to which they've led doesn't necessitate the aspects of the premises that imply the absurdities. It can be sublated in an ontology with logical space for internal relations, self-determination and final causation. Marx's "materialism" allows for this, as is shown for modern science by Whitehead (whose ontology is very like Marx's).
The absurd features of Newton's "science" express his psychopathology. As pointed out by Keynes, he was an extreme obsessional neurotic with the unmastered sadism and the "interests" this implies. Disputing the conventional view of Newton as "the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason", Keynes claims that "in vulgar modern terms Newton was profoundly neurotic of a not unfamiliar type, but - I should say from the records - a most extreme example." (Keynes, Essays in Biography, Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 364)
"As many hundreds of pages of unpublished manuscript survive to testify, Newton was seeking the philosopher's stone, the Elixir of Life and the transmutation of base metals into gold. He was, indeed, a magician who believed that by intense concentration of mind on traditional hermetics and revealed books he could discover the secrets of nature and the course of future events, just as by the pure play of mind on a few facts of observation he had unveiled the secrets of the heavens. Whilst his work looked forward, and led the way, to all the horrors of modern science, his own spirit looked back beyond the middle ages to the traditional mysteries of the most ancient East." (X p. 377)
Interpreted in this way, the "horrors of modern science" express the unmastered sadism characteristic of obsessional neurosis.
These features of Newton's personality are also evident in his behaviour as Warden and Master of the Mint and in his dispute with Leibniz. This is demonstrated in Frank Manuel's psychobiography, A Portrait of Isaac Newton.
At the Mint, Newton was remorseless in his pursuit of counterfeiters and clippers.
"One side of Newton relished these interrogations in the Tower, as he ferreted out criminal evil with perseverance and without pity. The plots against him only whetted his appetite for more quarry. He would prosecute or relent, allow bail or get a man put in chains, threaten recalcitrants with reprisals or dangle the promise of a pardon in exchange for solid information about other rascals. He was like the God of Deuteronomy whom he knew so well: 'I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal.' He would rage at prisoners and their wives and mistresses with impunity - all in a holy cause. In the Mint Newton was gratified with the exercise of naked power over fellow creatures. The Inquisitor may or may not be relieved of his own guilt by discovering it and punishing it in his victims. There are those who hold that the revelations of the criminal evoke dangerous hidden parallels in the inquisitor and that the expression of righteous indignation is anything but therapeutic for the prosecutor. Newton was not wholly delivered from the bondage of his anger by ranting at prisoners, for there was an inexhaustible font of rage in the man, but he appears to have found some release from its burden in these tirades in the Tower. With such avenues available to him, he never again suffered a psychic breakdown like the one in 1693. He no longer needed beat his head against the bars of his inner consciousness. There were other human beings upon whom he could vent his wrath." (Manuel, pp. 234-5)
"For more than three decades the colossal wrath of Isaac Newton found victims in the Tower. At the Mint he could hurt and kill without doing violence to his scrupulous puritan conscience. The blood of the coiners and clippers nourished him." p. 244
Keynes finds the same "remorseless" "sadistic puritanism" in Hayek and invokes it to explain, among other things, Hayek's immunity to a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Ted