Chapter 12          Worldviews Since the Renaissance

                          

   

                    Renaissance watch (credit: Melanchthon's watch, via Wikimedia Commons)

Renaissance society rose out of the ideas that synthesized respect for the individual and even exaltation in his or 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 pious, moral, creative, thoughtful, practical, and original. The ideas of Greece, Rome, and Christianity blended in a way that was coherent and real-world effective. The new system of ideas worked, and as the new printing presses made books affordable, those ideas began to spread like a wildfire.

                                                               

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. Practical acts done well glorify God. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the era called the Enlightenment.

                 

   

                                           

 Battle of Rocroi, Thirty Years War (credit: Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau, via Wikimedia Commons)

To most of the people alive at the time, it wasn’t at all obvious that the Church’s traditional views were in any way deficient, or that the views of the Enlightenment scientists, like Galileo, were better. But experiences in which people who lived by the new ways of Science and Reason outperformed those who lived by the old ways of blind obedience to authorities gradually won over more citizens in each new generation.

                                      

                            

                 

            English physician William Harvey (credit: Daniel Mytens, via Wikimedia Commons)

Some of the new beliefs were infuriating to medieval thinkers—but the new beliefs worked. They enabled an “enlightened” subculture within society to solve problems (e.g. navigate 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, in the end, could not match. Science kept attracting more new followers because the miracles of Science can be replicated; Science works.