<< Before Newton, angels were pushing the planets around. >>
Back in Newton's time, he was roundly criticized by religious folks for making science atheistic -- and if he had revealed his rejection of the Trinity, he could have lost his job and his reputation. Today, creationists like to use him as evidence of creationism, because, don't you see, he believed in God and in divine design.
In fact, we even had one recently in here who was using Pythagoras -- PYTHAGORAS -- for the same purpose! I guess that means we should avoid beans and never poke a fire with a stick, which Pythagoras's cult also taught. LOL!
Before Newton the Cartesian mechanistic model of gravity prevailed. The main criticism of Newton came from rationalists like Leibniz who made the entirely reasonable criticism that his model of gravity constituted "action at a distance." Leibniz's point was that Newton's model was in effect positing a miracle-- hardly an argument that it had "made science atheistic."