In "The Imagined Conflict", chapter 6 "Evolution and Purpose", ends like this:
Newton’s law of gravitation was a breakthrough because it united the large and small. It could describe everything from how stones fell on Earth, to the stability of planetary orbits. The world seemed to work like a clock, just like the early mechanical clocks. The prime example is the one from 1386 in the cathedral in Salisbury, England, which is the world’s oldest functioning clock. This mechanistic view of nature took over from the more organic view that the Medieval Age had from Aristotle. It played a crucial role during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when Laplace also came up with a description of how a planetary system could form. In principle, everything could now be calculated, if the initial conditions were known. It was believed that these laws not only described nature but also explained why nature works. They had forgotten the insight of Newton, Boyle, Kepler, and Galileo that the laws were just describing how, not the why of the universe.
