The Scientific RevolutionIn Europe, the fragmenting of religious doctrine that accompanied the Protestant Reformation, the sudden linkup with the Americas, and the continuing flow of knowledge from distant parts of Afroeurasia produced multiple shocks to the Christian worldview. Such newness and change provoked a searching examination of the place of humans in the cosmos and nature. In the absence of any single controlling religious authority to stop them, scholars like Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton put forward philosophical and scientific ideas that challenged older ways of thinking.
Most important, they argued that the universe operates according to natural laws, which human reason and careful observation may discover and explain. The resulting Scientific Revolution was in many ways the logical outcome of Afroeurasia’s total legacy of scientific and philosophical creativity. It was also, however, a dramatic break with the long world trend to rely mainly on priests, spiritual sages, and other religious authorities to explain all things. In the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, a great debate over the relative merits of science and faith as the proper measure of reality, gathered steam in Europe and began to penetrate other parts of the world. |