For over a thousand years in the West, in every field of human knowledge, if you wanted to learn about a subject, you consulted the authorities—your priest or the teachers who taught the wisdom of the sages of old. But for most folk, deeply analyzing events in their own lives or analyzing things the authorities told them wasn’t so much worrying as inconceivable. Over 90 percent of the people were illiterate. They took on faith what the authorities told them because everyone they knew had always done so. A mind capable of memorization and imitation was valued; a questioning, innovative one was not.

The Renaissance changed all that. Bacon came late in the Renaissance era, but he is usually given credit for articulating the new system of thinking that had been sweeping over Europe for more than a hundred years by the time he came on the scene.

What Bacon said, essentially, was that he didn’t think the authorities were infallible. In fact, he proposed that people could learn about this world themselves, by watching real events closely and developing their own ideas about how things worked. Then—and here came the crucial step—they could devise ways to test their models and theories of reality and create increasingly better models that allowed them to conduct increasingly more reliable, material-world tests, until they could predict precisely, in advance, something like “If I do or see A and B, I know that C will result, within a reasonable time frame.”

This proposed change to the method of learning at first seemed a bit silly and very likely to be a complete waste of time. Why spend months or years carefully observing, thinking, and testing, only to discover that Aristotle or the Bible had been right all along? The majority of medieval scholars assumed that this was all that would happen. Their confidence in the Church authorities and the classics was near to absolute. Scholars might discuss how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (they really did argue over that one), but the major questions had already been given answers that were beyond debate.

Of course, Science, in the modern sense of the word, was not suddenly made possible by one writer’s pronouncing how it could and should work. A few rare thinkers had already been using methods pretty much like those Bacon described—and arguably, they’d been using them for centuries. They simply hadn’t been conscious of the steps in the method. However, Bacon’s book on how the real world could and should be studied did give the medieval scholars, who lived mainly in their books, a new model to think about and discuss, one that was much more specific and material-world oriented than any of its predecessors had been.

                          St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, an architectural marvel of its time

                                           (credit: By MarcusObal (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0    

              (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

But whether Bacon started a revolution or merely articulated what was already taking place in the minds of the curious and creative men of his time is not important for my case. What matters is that the method to which Bacon gave voice began, increasingly, to produce useful results. Navigation, architecture, law, agriculture, medicine, industry, warfare, and even the routines of daily life began to show greater and more frequent improvements because of the discoveries and inventions of science.

At this point, as Science began to affect people’s material lives, it inevitably began to affect their deeper ways of thinking. For many people who were trying to hang on to a traditional style of faith, some of the large-scale changes to the generally held ways of thinking that most people had subscribed to for so long were not happy changes. The same still holds true today.