Chapter 11.                      Part G 

                                        

                                                         Renaissance pocket watch 

            Thus, a more tolerant Renaissance society rose out of the new ideas that melded respect for the individual and even exaltation in the creative potential of the human condition with an equal respect for the inherent worth and rights of other citizens. Science requires both if it is to flourish.

In Renaissance thinking, a man could be all of moral, venturesome, independent, and patriotic. The ideas of Greece, Rome, and Christianity could be blended in a way that was  practicable and consistent. The new system of ideas worked, and it was exciting because it was empowering.

                                                

                                                     replica of Gutenberg's printing press

   The growing Renaissance focus on the rights of the individual produced some excesses (e.g. the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War), but these were gradually tamed. When the dust settled, one thing was perfectly clear: there would be no going back to the medieval ways of thinking. The way forward was to live by reason, or more accurately, to live by the most reasonable interpretations of Reason's darling child, Science and its material worldview. Material acts done right did glorify God. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the era called the “Enlightenment”.

 

                       Duc d'Enghien at the Battle of Rocroi, Thirty Years War 

            To most of the people alive at the time, it wasn’t at all obvious that the Church's traditional views were deficient in any way, or that the views of the Enlightenment scientists, like Galileo, were better ones. But decades of experience in which people who lived by the ways of individualism, science, and inductive reasoning outperformed those who lived by the old ways (based on blind obedience to authorities whose authority came from texts that were not to be analyzed or criticized) gradually won over more and more of the citizens in each new generation.              

                                                

                                                                           William Harvey

            Some of the new beliefs were anathema to medieval thinkers – but the new beliefs worked. They enabled this "enlightened" sub-culture within society to solve problems (e.g. navigate the oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and, especially, make deadlier and deadlier weapons). This new sub-culture within Europe's nations was therefore able to increase its community of followers and its range of influence at a rate that the old church and aristocracy, in the end, could not match. As was noted above, Science keeps getting new followers because the miracles of Science can be replicated over and over again; Science works.

                                                

                                   

                                                           Antoine Lavoisier with his wife Marie

            This scientific way of thinking was further employed by geniuses like Newton, Harvey, Faraday, Lavoisier, etc. Its gurus piled up successes in the hard market of physical results. Of those who resisted the new way, some were converted by reason, some went down in military defeats, some worked out compromises, and some just got old and died, still resisting the new ways and preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences. The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

            Other societies which also operated under world views that portrayed humans as having little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, around the planet, was the one which we call “scientific”, the Enlightenment view.