The Scientific Revolution

Until the so called Scientific Revolution, for over 1,000 there was one and only one source in Western Europe for learning about the nature of world and universe: the Judeo-Christian Bible.  The Bible explained the origin of life, the earth, the planets and the workings of the universe, and this explanation went, essentially, entirely unchallenged.

This changed as Copernicus (1473 – 1543), Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo (1564 – 1642) disproved the traditional Aristotelian and Ptolemaic theory of geocentric (earth-centered) universe and gradually proved the heliocentric (sun centered) universe.   Elsewhere, for the first time in 2000 years, people break the Roman and Judeo-Christian ban on "defiling" human corpses in order to understand human anatomy and how the human body actually functions.  Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) shocked Europe by publicly proving, among other radical ideas, that men and women have the same number of ribs.

By the time of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles Of Natural Philosophy") (1687), the revolution was complete: mankind had proved itself capable of explaining nature's greatest mysteries without recourse to religious belief.

This leads to an emerging schism between scientific proof and biblical scripture that is with us today (Evolution vs. Creationism) etc.

For the purposes of this class, we're interested in how this movement:

1) Undermines the authority of The Church at essentially the same time as the Reformation also splinters European religious belief.

2) Either, depending on your perspective, gives humanity great new freedom and potential to end human suffering (as Voltaire, Jefferson, Marx and Nietzsche argue) or condemns humanity to uncertainty and doubt (Hamlet, T.S. Eliot etc.)