The Pastor Who Tried to Prove God and Accidentally Predicted Death

Last reviewed: 7 March 2026

In the 1680s, a Lutheran pastor in the Silesian city of Breslau began counting the dead.

His pastoral duties did not require it, but Caspar Neumann believed that if God had designed the world, then the patterns of human death would reveal that design. Superstition said you were more likely to die in your 63rd year, or when the moon was full. Neumann thought that was nonsense. He believed God’s creation was rational, orderly, and mathematically elegant. As was the thinking at the time, what was known as physico-theology.

So he set out to prove it.

He pulled years of birth and death records from his parish registers, organised them by age, and began looking for the fingerprint of God in the numbers.

What he found instead was something nobody expected. Death follows predictable statistical patterns. And he had absolutely no idea what he had done.

The Data Travels Across Europe

Neumann sent his findings to the greatest philosopher-mathematician in Europe: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, co-inventor of calculus. Leibniz recognised something important in the Breslau numbers. In a letter dated 24 May 1692, he passed the data to Henri Justel, the Royal Librarian in England, who presented it to the Royal Society in London.

The Royal Society handed it to one of their members for analysis. His name was Edmond Halley. Yes, the exact Halley you know for the comet.

What you probably do not know is that Halley used this Lutheran pastor’s parish death records to construct arguably the first scientific mortality table based on population data. It appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1693.

But here is the first twist. Halley was not thinking about insurance. He was trying to solve a government finance problem. European states were selling life annuities to fund wars, and they were pricing them catastrophically badly. A 30-year-old and a 70-year-old could buy the same annuity for the same price. Halley realised that Neumann’s mortality data made it possible, for the first time, to calculate what an annuity should actually cost based on the buyer’s age.

He published his table, showed the mathematics, and made it available to anyone who wanted to use it.

Nobody in the insurance industry paid any attention whatsoever.

The Industry That Ignored Its Own Mathematics

The first life assurance office in England, the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office, was founded in 1706. It was chartered by Queen Anne and limited to 2,000 members.

The Amicable completely ignored Halley’s mathematics. It charged every member the same flat annual contribution regardless of age, with entry restricted to those aged 12 to 55. When a member died, the pot was simply divided among the families of the deceased that year. No age-based premiums, no actuarial calculations, no mortality tables.

The mathematical tools to run a proper life assurance office had existed since 1693. The insurance industry carried on without them for nearly 70 years.

The Refugee Who Tore Out Newton’s Masterpiece

Halley had built the mortality table, but it sat unused by the insurance industry for decades. The man who turned it into usable financial mathematics was not English at all.

Abraham de Moivre was a French Protestant, driven out of France by the persecution of the Huguenots in 1685. He arrived in London as a refugee and scraped a living as a private mathematics tutor, walking miles across the city between pupils. When he first saw Newton’s Principia Mathematica at the Earl of Devonshire’s house, he realised it was beyond anything he had encountered. Too poor to buy a copy and too busy to sit and study one, he tore the pages out and carried them in his pocket, reading between lessons as he walked.

The approach paid off handsomely. He became one of Newton’s closest mathematical friends. Newton would collect de Moivre from his regular coffee house each evening and bring him home for conversation. In old age, when people came to Newton with questions about the Principia, he would wave them away: “Go to Mr. de Moivre. He knows these things better than I do.”

In 1725, de Moivre published Annuities upon Lives, taking Halley’s mortality data and transforming it into practical financial formulas for pricing annuities based on age. It has since been described as a foundational text for life insurance as a mathematical field.

Yet de Moivre, like so many in this story, remained poor throughout his life. His French origins barred him from any university position. A contemporary described him as “struggling with want and misery.” He spent his final years in coffee houses, advising gamblers on the odds for small fees. He died in 1754 at the ripe old age of 87, having gradually slept longer and longer each day until he simply did not wake up — something he apparently predicted.

Among his pupils was a mathematician named James Dodson.

The Man Who Was Too Old

Some time in the early 1750s, Dodson tried to join the Amicable Society. He was refused because he was over 45 years old. That rejection would change the course of financial history.

Dodson was a Fellow of the Royal Society and Master of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital. Trained by de Moivre, who had been trained by studying Newton, the intellectual lineage ran directly: Newton to de Moivre to Dodson.

Dodson looked at the Amicable’s flat-premium, age-capped model and saw immediately that it was fundamentally wrong. Using Halley’s mortality framework and his own mathematical skills, he developed something revolutionary: the level premium system. Premiums calculated by age, based on mortality data, constant for the life of the policy. The excess collected in early years would accumulate to meet the higher mortality costs of later years.

In early 1756 Dodson wrote his founding treatise. He called a meeting on 2 March 1756 to present his proposals. A committee was formed and a petition for a Royal Charter was submitted.

Then, on 23 November 1757, James Dodson died. He was just 52 years old.

He died in poverty, leaving three motherless children with no provision. His friend William Mountaine petitioned Christ’s Hospital, stating that Dodson had died “in very mean circumstances, leaving three motherless children unprovided for: James, aged 15, Thomas, aged 11 and three quarters, and Elizabeth, aged 8.”

The two youngest were taken in by the hospital as charity cases.

The man who invented the mathematics of life assurance could not get insured himself, and died without the very protection he had created for others.

The Eccentric Who Made It Happen

After Dodson’s death, leadership of his project passed to one of the most extraordinary characters in British commercial history.

Edward Rowe Mores was born in 1731 at Gore Court in Tunstall, Kent. His father was a country rector, his mother the daughter of a City merchant. When his father died in 1740, the nine-year-old Edward inherited a considerable estate.

Mores was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and Queen’s College, Oxford, where he published his first scholarly work at the age of 19. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries at 21, and became an expert in heraldry, typography, and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. None of it had anything to do with mathematics. He was a classics and antiquities scholar, not an ‘actuary’.

He was also deeply eccentric. He sometimes dressed in the academic robes of a Dominican friar and claimed a doctorate from the Sorbonne that he may never have earned. He believed passionately in the superiority of Latin and spoke exclusively in Latin to his own children. He married his stepsister, Susannah Bridgman, in 1753.

This unlikely figure was the man who created modern life assurance.

The charter petition that Dodson had set in motion was still grinding through the system, and three established companies (the Amicable, Royal Exchange, and London Assurance) were actively lobbying against it. They did not want a scientifically-run competitor exposing how badly they were pricing their own products. Some things never change!

In 1761, the Attorney General and Solicitor General refused the charter. Their reasoning has a bitter irony for anyone who knows how the story ends: “It appears to us altogether uncertain whether this project will or can succeed in the manner it is proposed; and if the success is uncertain the fund for supporting it, which is to arise from the profits of the undertaking, will be precarious.”

Mores did not give up. If the Crown would not grant a charter, he would do it by private deed instead. He recruited sixteen other subscribers and on 27 September 1762, they executed the Declaration of Trust for the Society for Equitable Assurances on Lives and Survivorships.

The world’s first actuarially-priced life assurance office was open for business, and Policy Number One went to Edward Rowe Mores himself. Even the name was a deliberate provocation. Dodson had chosen the word ‘equitable’ to reflect that his society would price assurance fairly, by age and risk, in contrast to the Amicable’s crude one-size-fits-all approach that had rejected him for being too old.

Mores also coined the title for the Society’s chief official. He called it the Actuary, borrowing from the Latin actuarius, the official who recorded the proceedings of the Roman Senate. It was, according to the definitive academic study by M.E. Ogborn, possibly an act of “antiquarian whimsy.” From that whimsy, an entire global profession took its name. And indeed the world’s first ‘Actuary’ was a classics and antiquities scholar!

The Aftermath

Mores fell out with the other founders within seven years. By 1769 he had walked away from the Society he had created. He spent his final years collecting ancient printing types and falling into what his biographers politely call “negligent and dissipated habits.” He died of gangrene on 28 November 1778, aged 47, and was buried beside his wife in Walthamstow churchyard.

The Equitable, meanwhile, thrived for nearly 240 years. It pioneered age-based premiums, actuarial valuations, reversionary bonuses, and interim bonuses. Its policyholders included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wilberforce, and Sir Walter Scott. At its peak in the 1990s it had 1.5 million policyholders and £26 billion under management.

Then it collapsed, catastrophically. The guaranteed annuity rate crisis of 2000 exposed decades of mismanagement. Hundreds of thousands of policyholders lost half their life savings. The world’s oldest mutual insurer closed to new business on 8 December 2000 and was eventually absorbed into Utmost Life and Pensions in January 2020.

The Attorney General’s warning from 1761 had proved prophetic. The fund had, ultimately, proved precarious.

Where the Story Lives

The founding documents of the Equitable — the Declaration of Trust executed on 27 September 1762, the record of Policy Number One issued to Edward Rowe Mores, the earliest policyholder registers, the original proposal forms asking applicants to declare their health and whether they had survived smallpox, even James Dodson’s original premium tables — all of them survive.

They are held in the archive of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries at Staple Inn, High Holborn, London. Staple Inn is a Tudor building with a Grade I listing, the last surviving Inn of Chancery.

The documents that represent the birth of modern life assurance are sitting in a Tudor building in the heart of London, available to researchers by appointment.

I intend to go and see them.

The Point

Today the global life insurance industry manages assets measured in the trillions. It employs hundreds of thousands of people. Its actuaries use computational tools that would have been unimaginable to Halley, de Moivre, Dodson, or Mores.

But every single calculation they make rests on one foundational insight: that while individual death is unpredictable, population mortality follows stable, measurable, mathematical patterns.

That insight exists because a Lutheran pastor in 1680s Silesia, operating in a tradition that believed God’s creation must be rational and orderly, pulled out his parish death records and started counting.

He was trying to scientifically prove God. He became the catalyst for predicting death.

The whole of life policies that protect families from inheritance tax today trace their intellectual lineage directly back to that parish register in Breslau.