Chapter 12          Worldviews Since the Renaissance

   

                                                     Renaissance pocket watch (circa 1550) 

A more tolerant Renaissance society rose out of the ideas that synthesized respect for the individual and even exaltation in his/her creative potential with an equal respect for the social order that values and protects the inherent worth and rights of every individual. Science requires both if it is to flourish.

In Renaissance thinking, a person could be moral, creative, independent, and patriotic. The ideas of Greece, Rome, and Christianity blended in a way that was practicable and coherent. The new system of ideas worked, and it was attractive and exciting.

The growing Renaissance focus on the rights of the individual produced some excesses (e.g., the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War) as those who longed for change fought those who did not, but these excesses were gradually tamed. When the dust settled, one thing was clear: there would be no going back to the medieval ways of thinking. The way forward was to live by reason, or more accurately, the most reasonable insights of reason’s darling child, Science, and Science’s materialistic worldview. Material acts done well glorify God. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the era called the Enlightenment.

   

                                             Duc d'Enghien at the Battle of Rocroi, 1643 (Ferrer-Dalmau) 

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 of the citizens in each new generation.

                                                                                                                                                                                                         

                                                   English physican and scientist, William Harvey 

Some of the new beliefs were anathema to medieval thinkers—but the new beliefs worked. They enabled this “enlightened” subculture within society to solve problems (e.g., navigate the oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and, especially, make increasingly deadly weapons). This new subculture 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 could not match. As was noted above, science continued attracting new followers because the miracles of science can be replicated; science works.