by The Scientific Revolution of the 16th century, lasting until the 18th century, had not only a profound impact on the knowledge of the natural world around humans, but also on the ancient disciplines and customs that guided society during the time period. A subsequent consequence of the Scientific Revolution was the ability of the ideas and methods used in fields of science to seep into other parts of life. The beliefs of people in these early centuries were heavily guided by tradition and religion. However, the “undisputed” answers of religion and ancient writings were now beginning to be questioned by everyday members of society. The scientific discoveries during the scientific revolution formed new ways of thinking and understanding, thus creating a polarization between science and the role of the church in people’s lives.
Ancient ways of thinking were the most impacted ideas during the emergence of the Scientific Revolution. New discoveries that clearly contradicted older understandings of the world left no choice but to shift the commonwealth’s understanding of general “knowledge”. One of the largest examples of this shift due to new understandings of the world was the replacement of the geocentric system. Prior to the 16th century, Ptolemy’s geocentric system illustrated that the Earth was the center point of the universe, with all other terrestrial planets and masses in space rotating around our planet. However, with the development of telescopes and a newly developed focus on astronomy, natural philosophers such as Nicolaus Copernicus developed a model of our solar system that placed the sun in the middle of the solar system, with planets revolving around it. This 1543 illustration was challenged by the general public due to the prolonged period of time that the geocentric system was accepted. Future observation and experimentation would solidify Copernicus’s model, but this groundbreaking idea shows how the Scientific Revolution completely changed the way that people thought about the world around them.
While new ideas of how we understand the natural world erupted from the Scientific Revolution, natural philosophers also developed new ways to experiment and research new questions about the world around us. Galileo’s work in astronomy produced a new focus on experimentation and the recreation of controlled environments. In professor and writer Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Revolution, we can see the foreshadowing of modern experiments through Galileo’s work, as Shapin states: “Modern natural philosophers also claimed that earthly effects artificially produced by human beings could legitimately serve as tokens of how things were in nature” (Shapin 19). By recreating the natural world in a controlled environment, philosophers could better understand the world around them. Prior to the Scientific Revolution, creating such experiments had not been a universal way of collecting data and applying it to the world, but this era had ushered in this practice, thus shifting the way people thought about scientific research.
The most profound social impact of the Scientific Revolution was its polarization between the world of science and the role of the church in the lives of people. Both the commonwealth and the wealthy elite had always placed the church in the center of their lives, as the writings of the Bible gave guidance and teachings in every aspect of life. New ideas stemming from the Scientific Revolution threatened the role of church in everyone’s understanding of the world, as it was now being less considered that all was known about the world in which everyone lived in. This idea of expanding our bounds of religious knowledge to the unknowns of modern science can be seen in Francis Bacon’s cover of The Great Instauration (1620). Shapin writes that Bacon’s cover expresses the human race sailing past the confines of religious knowledge, as a ship is seen sailing through the Pillars of Hercules, often thought to symbolize the knowledge of the divine world. Illustrations such as Bacon’s show the fracture that had come about between people’s dependence on religion, and the shifting focus on understanding the world through science and experimentation as opposed to ancient information.
When looking at the Scientific Revolution in a historical context, it exemplifies one of the greatest societal shifts that the world had ever seen. No longer were the teachings of Roman and Greeks being accepted without questioning. Natural Philosophers engineered inventions and methods in which these ancient ideas could be tested and refuted. The role of the Catholic church in 16th-18th century Europe saw a receding amount of importance in the lives of the general public, as the answer to the question of “how” could be more thoroughly proven through science than in the writings of religious texts. Because of the Scientific Revolution and the natural philosophers that helped progress it, the world became a populace that was less dependent on religion, and more curious to learn more about how the world may not be as it was continuously written to appear as.
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http://web.colby.edu/st112a-fall20/files/2020/08/copernicus.png