¶ … 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...
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.
How did Galileo respond to the edict? What did he do to protect himself? The original 1616 edict was not taken entirely seriously: "The Sun-Centered universe still remained an unproven idea -- without, [Pope] Urban believed, any proof in its future" (Sobel 138). However, Galileo still undertook steps to protect himself, defending his writings as a way: "to show Protestants to the north…that Catholics understood more about astronomy" (Sobel 140).
On orders of Pope Paul V, Galileo is ordered not to hold or defend the Copernican theory. Later, in 1624, Galileo was allowed to write about the Copernican theory provided that he treated it as a mathematical hypothesis. When Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in1630, comparing the Ptolemaic and Copernican models, the Church stopped its distribution and condemned Galileo to house arrest for the rest
Two of the most important proponents were the French philosophes, Montesquieu and Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose great contributions to the Enlightenment lead to the development of liberal democracy characterized among modern societies at present. Montesquieu's discourse, entitled, "The Spirit of the Laws," provided objective and insightful propositions for reforms as societies change from being traditional to modern. According to him, the process towards social progress should be accompanied with material progress,
Scientific Revolution of 1600-1715 -- When humanity shook its free from the grips of the fallacy that 'Man is the center of the solar system,' it gained the confidence to raise the human scientific intellect to the center of the political, religious, and mathematical world. According to Roy T. Matthews and F. DeWitt Platt, the scientific revolution of 1600-1715 was a paradoxical one. (Matthews & DeWitt, 2004) Before, according to Aristotle
' His ground-breaking "Principia Mathematica" published in 1687 argued that the universe could be explained completely through the use of Mathematics without resorting to theology or the scriptures; that the universe behaved in an entirely rational and predictable way explainable by the laws of physics. Newton thus argued, and proved his arguments by observation and the use of mathematics, that the universe was 'mechanistic' and behaved like a vast machine
Scientific Revolution was the period when man's intellect explored the interests of science, reasoning, and truth. It was the time when man, not satisfied with the assumptions about things he was used, explored scientific methods and theories to determine the truth about things based on scientific way of thinking. The emphasis of this intellectual change was on natural sciences of the earth such as astronomy, physics, zoology, geology, mathematics,
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