Scientific Revolution and its impact on modern thought

¶ … middle ages, scholastic thinking was structurally limited by the Catholic Church, which considered itself the arbiter of such matters. However, thanks to changes in the sciences and in the methodologies used to approach them, the sheer weight of evidence was able to defeat some of the old dogmas that restricted thinking. Changes in science took on mathematical, experimental, and political dimensions and eventually gave enlightenment thinkers the objectivity needed to approach almost every subject from a rational angle, including political theory. In the history of European culture and perhaps even for humanity as a whole, the emergence of the enlightenment was one of the most divisive turns of events to ever occur, and ultimately one of the most rewarding.

The development of modern mathematics was spearheaded by Newton in England and DesCartes in continental Europe, but was inspired by astronomy. Some place the start of the Scientific Revolution was the publication of 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium' by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, while others wish to extend it into the 18th century. What is evident, however, is that a series of new discoveries began with the technology of the Renaissance, was stoked by the revolutionary anti-Catholic movements in northern Europe, and culminated with the 'Age of Reason.' The Polish prelate Nicolaus Copernicus was among the first men to question the nature of the world as classical Greek scholars had defined it. Copernicus developed a comprehensive heliocentric theory of the universe, and worked closely with Rheticus, who developed the science of trigonometry. Until the middle of the sixteenth century no scholar in the Latin West had systematically questioned the system of Claudius Ptolemy (ca. A.D. 100-170) that placed an immobile earth at the center of the universe, with the planets, as well as the moon and the sun, orbiting around it. This theory was backed by the force of the Catholic Church and reflected many presumptions derived from the creation story of the Christian religion.

It was thought that in Earth were not alone but one of many stellar bodies, the plentitude principal would dictate that all of these stellar bodies would be inhabited because God, in his perfection, would repeat his action of creation; the universe would be without limit and filled with inhabited planets. The Catholic church at the time could not be brought to accept the idea of countless beings on countless planets, because it was antithetical to the idea of a Christian salvation. This belief became popular with religious scholars after Galileo became commonly accepted.

Johannes Kepler, one of the first to focus mostly on the physical and mathematical applications of heliocentric astronomy, was the first to stand up to the church. This was probably due to the fact that he was in Germany and held the post of Imperial Mathematician to the Hapsburg Emperor. The Hapsburgs were perhaps the only political power in the Catholic world superior to that of the Vatican itself, and controlled the Austria-Hungarian Empire, Belgium, southern Germany, and the part of the Low Countries that was to become Belgium. An analysis of his life leads us to believe that Kepler stayed close to the establishment in order to gain more intellectual freedoms. This was evidenced by his close relationship with Tycho Brahe, who had convinced the Catholic church to modify their heliocentric theory to allow for planets revolving around the sun.

In the following century, Amsterdam was to replace Paris and Northern Italy as the center of scientific thought on the continent. This was because the city was immune to the threats of the Vatican. The United Republic of the Netherlands had, in the late 16th century, pre-empted the United States by seceding from the Hapsburg empire. The Spanish, which controlled the Low Countries, were only able to retain the southern half, where they effectively purged all of the Protestants. Other cities that valued scientific inquiry, such as Paris, realized that if they stifled such inquiry that they would face a 'brain drain,' and so instead they embraced new scientific ideas. The Jesuits, often associated with horrible purges of Protestants in areas such as modern-day Slovakia, became some of the strongest advocates of scientific research.

During the Scientific Revolution, the mechanics of logic became more intuitive and Aristotelian methodologies of analysis were modified or abandoned.

Aristotle saw causation in reverse from the way we see it today; for instance, the 'final cause' was the aim or goal of something. Thus, it was common to see the purpose of grain as being human nourishment. Nature was seen as a system of 'goals' rather than being derived from its own parameters. The mechanists were the first to question this system. Rene Descartes and others rejected all goals, emotion and intelligence in nature. The world consisted of matter moving in accordance with physical laws. These were typified by Newton's mechanics that governed the 'spheres.'

There was also a move away from qualitative reasoning and towards an appreciation for well-structured mathematical equasions that governed life, especially in the realms of physics and astronomy. Aristotle had believed that physics was about changing objects with a reality of their own, but that mathematics was about unchanging objects without a reality of their own. The Newtonian world was the marriage of the existing world with that which was mathematically abstract, and relied on coefficients that defined things such as math and gravity. The mathematical proclivities of Galileo and others lead to a mathematical appreciation of nature that was not to be significantly questioned until the 20th century.

The scientists of the 17th century were the first to experiment extensively, and developed systems of hypothesis testing in order to prove their conclusions. Before that time, it wasn't commonly believed that nature could be boxed and observed. However, Bacon, Hume and others living in Britain and collectively known as the empiricists were to develop hypothesis testing. This is largely due to empiricist distrust of non-observable phenomena and the belief that things most be observed in order so that one could become sure of them. A research tradition of systematic experimentation was slowly accepted throughout the scientific community and lead to the development of chemistry and other sciences. This was simultaneously enhanced by the use of telescopes to observe celestial bodies and the use of the microscope to recognize and identify cellular life.