Enlightenment Thinkers: Galileo, Bacon, Descartes

Enlightenment Thinkers: Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and Newton revolution in human thought took place during the period of history called The Enlightenment. The great weakness of the old paradigm, religion, lay in it superstition. The new paradigm, physical science, corrected for this weakness by establishing a new mind in which only the evidence of the physical senses could lead to knowledge. Galileo heralded the great change, and so he is often called the Father of Science.

In this essay we will consider Galileo and three other thinkers who were crucial to the Enlightenment -- Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. Because the church perceived science as a threat, Galileo was forced to recant his views about the sun being the center of the solar system. His views were not just theories, however -- he had observed the planets and their movements through a telescope and found that Copernicus was right. Galileo was the first person to use a scientific instrument to study the universe.

Through its use he developed a different relationship to nature than had previously been common. Instead of viewing the heavens with a naked eye and feeling a part of nature, he observed the planets with an instrument, thus, removing himself from being a part of nature to studying it as though it were objective and separate from himself. Galileo viewed reality as objective and autonomous -- independent from human beings and their activities.

Nature was no longer experienced but observed and studied, and only the scientific worldview of a quantifiable material reality was significant or "real." Nature came to be seen as objective, clocklike, and mechanical. In this view, any alternative views of reality -- intuition, for example -- were rejected as legitimate roads to knowledge or understanding. Galileo did away with superstition by developing a new kind of logic -- "induction and deduction, observation and mathematics, were essentially wedded, and the natural kinds and syllogistic inferences of Aristotle relegated to oblivion" (p. 79).

He saw this as necessary in order to "read" the universe. The old Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning was useless to science. Math was everything. Although the church censored Galileo, he did not seek to discredit the existence of God or challenge the authority of the Bible. He said, in fact, that the Bible teaches, "the glory and greatness of Almighty God are marvelously discerned in all his works and divinely read in the open book of heaven" (p. 80). Science brought progress.

A characteristic of the Enlightenment period was its belief in progress and the possibility of controlling nature. In England, Francis Bacon was a philosopher, scientist, and politician who conceptualized scientific inquiry as hypothesis and data, or question and answer. Bacon imagined a new world that human beings would create through science and technology. "Bacon's idea was no less than a complete mastery of nature" (p. 81). Through science, he believed, everything in the world could be made to benefit human beings. Bacon's view of creation was a radical anthropocentrism.

"He viewed prescientific people as barbarians who lived in a godforsaken wilderness without the benefits of civilization" (p. 81). Science could (and should) re-make the world as rapidly as possible. Bacon has come to be a symbol of everything modern environmentalists question today. Like Galileo, Bacon couched his arguments in "biblical precepts, allegories, and metaphors" (p. 82) because he had to find a bridge from the old paradigm to the new one. He argued that science could restore man to the dominion he enjoyed before the "Fall" (caused by ignorance).

Some scholars argue that Bacon never saw any environmental change as undesirable and viewed all science as good. Rene Descartes also profoundly influenced the modern idea of nature. He argued that mind and matter are distinct and separate from each other, "and that the natural world is a machine" (p. 86). Like Bacon he believed that science would create a new world and triumph over nature. All reality would be explained through the use of scientific method, and social benefits would be a result because superstition and irrationality would be gone.

The scientific method would make humans "the masters and possessors of nature" (p. 87). Knowledge was not in what others thought, or "what we ourselves conjecture," but "what we can clearly and perspicuously behold and with certainty deduce; for knowledge is not won in any other way" (p. 87). His most important contribution to the new view of nature was that animals were merely machines in a mechanical, clocklike world.

This view led to the belief that animals have no feelings or intelligence and are only valuable in terms of human use and exploitation. The prehistoric idea of living in harmony with nature and other animals fell into obscurity. The so-called "unique position" of human beings has dominated Western culture ever since and formed a philosophical basis for industrialism or "the reshaping of matter and energy to a form more suitable for human use" (p. 89).

Isaac Newton was a physicist -- and a great genius -- who was born the same year that Galileo died. He developed the System of the World in which he explained change as "the mechanical repetition of a predictable and determinate sequence of phenomena" (p. 90). Using mathematics he rendered the material world intelligible in a way.