Do we today tend to place too much confidence in science?

THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE 19

 

Chapter Objectives

• Compare and contrast the Renaissance in the South and the North.

• Identify the key ideas and figures in the Protestant Reformation.

• Demonstrate how the Reformation shaped modern western values.

 

Up to this point, almost everything we’ve said about the Renaissance has been focused on the Southern or the Italian Renaissance. I now want to focus our attention on the North. As we look at what's happening in Germany, England, and Holland, we see that there is a reawakening, a revival in arts and culture that we describe with the same word, Renaissance. We are going to see that in some ways, this is similar to what was happening in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; but in some important ways it's very different as well.

The first things to consider are how the Southern and the Northern Renaissance are different, and then secondly, we will go on very logically to ask how they are similar. What binds them together? What justifies our speaking of both of them with a single word, Renaissance? We are going to find that one of the ways in which the Renaissance in the North is different from the Renaissance in the South was the particularly religious nature of the arts and the culture in the North. There is a much more of a religious flavor to the Northern Renaissance than in Italy. In Italy it’s much more secular, much more pagan and classical in theme and subject matter. Understanding the religious nature of the Renaissance in the North is also helpful for understanding the Reformation, which is focused on what happens in Germany, England and to some lesser extent, the countries of the North.

We will next turn to the subject of the Reformation and analyze it as natural outgrowth of the Renaissance. We should not think about the Reformation as an event that only has significance if you are studying church history. Rather it has cultural significance and it can be understood as an outgrowth or an expression of the same values that can also be identified as Renaissance values. Finally, we are going to ask the question, Why does all this matter? Why does it matter that we know what was happening during the Reformation and the Northern Renaissance 400 years ago?

We are going to see that it profoundly affects our understanding of how our own culture is today. What do we mean when we describe someone as having a good work ethic? Where do those ideas come from? What about the notions that we take for granted as qualities and values of middle class America? We are going to see, again, that it is in this period, in the culture and the values of the Northern Renaissance and the Reformation, where we can isolate and identify the values that were so important in shaping our own country and our own time. And so, yes, it does matter.

Once again, the same theme that we have been exploring from the very beginning is once again on display. That the more closely we look at the past, the more clearly we see the present. The past does matter, and it does help us. It gives us the tools and the resources, in some cases simply the vocabulary to talk about our own times, our own values, our own conflicts and challenges with greater clarity and with a greater understanding.

The North and South: A Contrast

First of all, what is the Northern Renaissance? How is it different from, how is it similar to, what was happening in Italy? The first thing that we should note is that, when we talk about the Northern Renaissance, we are thinking of a slightly later period. Remember those years for the Renaissance; they were pretty expansive, 1400-1600, roughly 200 years. That timeframe is very misleading, because it really depends on what part of Europe you are talking about. The Renaissance was best understood as a kind of wave that swept from South to North over these 200 years. It’s occurring first in the South, in Italy. 1400 is not early enough for Italy, already in the 1300s in Italy we are seeing things that we look back and say, this is a shift in thinking. This is kind of Renaissance. We just conveniently put the date 1400 to it. As you head north to England, 200 years later, at the end of this period, around the year 1600, this is when Shakespeare was writing his plays. There is much that’s renaissance about Shakespeare, but there’s also a lot that’s still very medieval about Shakespeare and still very medieval about the Elizabethan world in the England of his day and age. Renaissance is a very elastic term. As we head to the North, the Renaissance is a much later phenomenon; it occurs at the tail end of this period that we designated the Renaissance.

Let’s focus now more specifically on what is different from and what is similar between these two Renaissances, North and South. What can we say? First of all, the Italian Renaissance (as a generalization) is more secular in tone and nature. It is more obviously humanistic. The subject matter was more deeply classical, even pagan and classical in its themes. Botticelli's “Birth of Venus” sums up these values, these classical humanistic pagan values that are so typical of the Italian Renaissance painting. Scholars have often noticed that there is much more of a religious quality and tone to the Northern Renaissance. The art is more devotional, more obviously religious in feeling. They weren’t just painting religious themes; they were painting them with more emotion, with more feeling. In the South they were into drama: Michelangelo’s “Moses,” Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” capture that sense of a dramatic moment. In the Northern Renaissance we see a more internalized sense of emotion that is a religious experience and an expression of faith. This forms an obvious connection to the Reformation in the North.

In the Italian South, they were just falling in love with classical humanism. And so the ground was more fertile really for the Reformation in the North because of this tradition, this more deeply rooted tradition of emotional and religious art. This is clearly on display in one of the masterpieces of the Northern Renaissance, a painting by the German, Matthias Grünewald—not a name that is widely known. In fact, Grünewald was not well known until the twentieth century. He was really, through art scholarship and the work of historians, rescued from relative anonymity. There are only thirteen or fourteen of his paintings that have survived, and he was largely unknown until just a hundred years ago. The famous “Crucifixion of Christ” from the “Isenheim Altar-piece,” painted in 1510-1515, wasn’t even attributed to Grünewald until the twentieth century; it was believed to be a work by Albrecht Dürer. (See Color Illustration R .)

Matthias Grünewald’s central panel in the “Isenheim Altarpiece” is the “Crucifixion of Christ.” What’s interesting is not just that it’s a religious theme, since Botticelli painted religious things too; “The Adoration of the Magi” is a biblical account that he is painting, but Botticelli painted it in a very secular manner and its very focused on Renaissance humanistic values. In Grüne-wald’s painting there are no Renaissance humanistic values. What’s on display are Gothic medieval devotional values. It’s a more medieval painting than a Renaissance one, and yet it’s painted in the early sixteenth century. Look at the depiction of Christ: the body of Christ is deeply wounded. You see the blood, you see the wounds, and you see the stripes—very uncharacteristic for what you see in other traditions in Christian art. It’s certainly not something widely depicted in Italian Renaissance art, to see the body of Christ so violently and brutally and realistically portrayed. In this deeply devotional and highly emotional style of religious art of the Northern Renaissance, Christ was depicted as the “Man of Sorrows” prophesied in Isaiah 53. This is what Grünewald wants to give us. This is very characteristic of the Northern Renaissance, and we are going to see the spirit of this even in the Reformation. Notice the figures to the left who are also deeply emotional, grieving the death of Christ. And on the right you see John the Baptist portrayed, holding a book in his hands, the Old Testament prophecies. He is pointing to Christ as the last of the prophets, the forerunner to Christ. The symbolism is very medieval; but the spirit and the feeling of it is in keeping with the devotional nature of the Northern Renaissance and the spirit even of the Reformation.

If that’s one of the primary ways in which we see the difference between the Northern and the Southern Renaissance, does that mean that all of the arts in the North were all about deeply emotional religious scenes like this? Well, the answer is no. I want to caution us against overgeneralizing here. There is a very famous Northern Renaissance painting that has nothing to do with these religious themes: “Hunters in the Snow,” painted in 1565 by Pieter Brueghel. (See Color Illustration S .) It is simply a painting of a village scene in winter. It’s a beautiful painting in its evocative nature, the way it calls forth the quiet, everyday routines of life in a village. The hunters are coming back, apparently, unsuccessfully from the hunt; the fires are burning and the meal is being prepared. Everything expresses the sense of the warmth of human society and the contrast of that warmth with the cold of winter. It’s a very rich painting in many ways.

Look at the direction the hunters and the dogs are going as they enter stage left as it were, and they are moving along the base of these trees in a diagonal direction. It’s a very subtle, very beautiful use of that line of composition to give you that sense of movement across the canvas. And in that sense then you contrast and compare the foreground with the extreme background of the painting. It’s a painting of an everyday scene. We wouldn’t look at this and say, “Well, this is obviously a Northern Renaissance religious painting.” No, not at all. But it points us to the fact that there's a lot more going on in the Renaissance of the north besides just this religious quality of the Reformation. There is also the rise of a whole class of people, the middle classes, who were becoming increasingly affluent. The merchant class is now commissioning works of art. It’s not just the church that’s paying artists to produce works like Grüne-wald’s Altarpiece. It’s now individuals who are saying, “I want you to paint a beautiful winter scene.” “I want you to paint this portrait.” That’s also occurring as part of the Northern Renaissance. The merchant class will reach its height in the seventeenth century in Holland, where we begin to see the great paintings of Rembrandt, for example, all commissioned by individuals.

The North and South: A Comparison

Let’s turn from the differences between the Italian and the Northern Renaissance to the similarities. What binds them together? What justifies our saying these are both expressions of this movement that we call the Renaissance? There are two things I want to identify here, by way of noting how they were similar. We know, for example, that in both the north and the south there was a profound emphasis upon individuality. We recognize that we have clearly shifted from the medieval to the modern when we identify this quality. We see this in the way that Botticelli and Raphael are bringing themselves into their paintings, the way in which individuals now are objects to be painted. The individual is now something you can focus on as a subject, because the individual is seen as having worth and dignity, apart from any kind of hierarchical system with which that individual might be associated. This is something we see in the North as well. Once again, I would argue that this is one of the most important concepts that helps us to understand the modern age. We cannot account for the rise of social institutions like the middle class; we cannot account for the rise of political institutions, democratic institutions, economic institutions, and capitalism, apart from this shift towards the emphasis on the individual that we see in the Renaissance, in the early modern age.

We see the concept of individualism documented in the art of the North, just as surely as it’s documented in the art of the South. Recall the great self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer, which, among other things, bears witness to this new perspective of individuality. But note the twist here. Being a Northern Renaissance painter, being a devout Christian, we see that even Dürer takes this humanistic theme and value of individuality and gives it a devotional interpretation. He depicts himself as Christ, and this becomes an act of worship, and that's so typical of the religious tenor and quality of the Renaissance in the North. Recall, as well, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini wedding portrait. This is a Northern painting, and it shows that these qualities of individuality and humanism are clearly percolating in the culture of the North and being given expression in the arts of this period.

Let's look at a third example, not an example from painting or sculpture here, but the works of Shakespeare, who was arguably, the greatest figure in all of the arts of the Northern Renaissance. If you think of his great plays, if you think of his poetry, this Renaissance value of individuality is on display everywhere in Shakespeare's great body of work. His tragedies are explorations of individual personalities. Consider the psychology of Macbeth or Hamlet, King Lear or Othello when you read or watch those plays. Shakespeare’s drama very much displays this preoccupation of seeing one as an individual with a unique perspective on the world, not just as part of a system, but as an individual.

Secondly, in addition to the rise of this individual value, we see that both the Northern and the Southern Renaissance were steeped in classical learning. This revival of classical knowledge defines the North as well as the South. We see scholars going back to the old texts, going back to the old histories, back to the old languages, Greek and Latin. They are studying and learning those and reviving the scholarship of those things. What you and I normally think of as modern scholarship—going to the library and doing research by going back to the original sources—all of these scholarly practices developed in this period through the classical scholarship of the Renaissance. It’s one of the legacies that we can trace back to this time. Biblical scholarship was anchored in this period as well—that practice of going back to the manuscripts and comparing them in the original languages.

Let me just give you a few names that we associate with a Northern classical revival of knowledge and learning. Erasmus—he’s best known for his book in “Praise of Folly,” which is a satiric book that he wrote about Renaissance values. He was a great humanist scholar in the classical tradition. In England, Sir Thomas More, also a great classical scholar, was the author of Utopia, another Renaissance satire. More coined the word “utopia,” which means, “no place.” More was making the point that this perfect society, one made perfect by man’s reason, is really “no place.”

In addition to Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, we can cite the great reformers. Martin Luther and John Calvin were also humanists and classical scholars; they went back not only to the original languages, but also to the original manuscripts. Finally, once again, we must mention Shakespeare. He is kind of a universal man of this age and is typical of the Northern Renaissance in so many ways. We see in his plays this revival of classical themes and subjects. Some of his plays are on classical subjects, such as “Julius Caesar” and “Titus Andronicus.” We also see in Shakespeare an awareness and knowledge of classical sources that he drew upon when writing his plays and his poetry.

What do we conclude then, by comparing the Northern and the Southern Renaissance? We can conclude that the Renaissance was a broad cultural development. It was not just an isolated occurrence in Italy or in Florence. Florence, in particular, and Italy in general may have been the epicenter of the Renaissance, out of which this movement radiated to the rest of Europe. But it's not to be understood as a purely Southern or Italian event. The Renaissance affected all of Europe and all of Western civilization.

The Reformation

As we look at the North, we now turn to one of the ways in which the Reformation developed out of the Renaissance. We have already noted the uniquely religious nature of the Renaissance in the North. This gives us an opportunity to explore that in greater detail, by looking at the Reformation. First, I’ll define it, before looking at a couple of the key figures of the Reformation. And then I’ll finally ask the question: How has the Reformation affected and shaped the values of Western culture and Western civilization?

The perspective that I am bringing to this is that the story of the Northern Renaissance cannot be separated from the story of the Reformation. But what was the Reformation? Look at the word itself. It has to do with reforming. The Reformation was the attempt to reform the Catholic Church. Note that it’s an attempt to reform the Church from the inside. Martin Luther wasn’t throwing stones at the Church from the outside. He was operating initially within the Catholic Church. Martin Luther was a priest in the Church. So we are going to have to ask the question, Why did Church need to be reformed? What the reformers were trying to do was to bring the Church back to the Bible, back to the foundation and the authority of scripture. Why did this have to be done? Why was it in need of Reformation? There were many ways in which the medieval Church had veered seriously off course over the centuries with the practices, teachings, and doctrines that had emerged during the Middle Ages. We can identify four main ways that the medieval Catholic Church had become corrupt and was in need of the kind of reform that Martin Luther and John Calvin were preaching from their pulpits.

• Political corruption

• Financial corruption

• Moral corruption

• Theological corruption

The Church had become a corrupt political institution. You know that something is wrong when the Church becomes a political player. Christ did not commission his disciples in Acts 1:8 to go out and be politicians in the world, but to be witnesses of his resurrection and proclaimers of the Gospel.

This is not to say that Christians do not have a role in the political sphere; it’s not to say the Christians cannot be involved in political activity. The Church, however, is not a political institution. Its primary function is not political, and cannot correctly and biblically be seen in that light. Yet it became a political power based institution in the Middle Ages.

It was also the biggest bank in the Middle Ages. It had become financially corrupt. It had become all about money and wealth, and they raked in the wealth during the Middle Ages. This was one of the things that most outraged a young Martin Luther, as he looked at the abuses of the late medieval Catholic Church.

If you are politically corrupt and financially corrupt, then you are going to be morally corrupt as well. We see that outrageous careers of many of the late medieval and early modern popes. They wheeled and dealed and bought and sold offices. Some popes who had mistresses and fathered illegitimate children, whom they then tried to put on the career path towards the papacy themselves. The really horrible thing was that the Church had no moral authority, because it had become a corrupt institution. Finally, the church was theologically corrupt. Many false teachings had entered the church through the Middle Ages—the veneration of saints, the cult of the Virgin Mary, the doctrine of purgatory, and many more. These doctrines had corrupted the message of grace and faith. So the church was in desperate need of reformation. That’s when Martin Luther steps onto the stage.

Martin Luther lived from 1483-1546 and was a priest and monk in the Catholic Church. As an infant he had been baptized in the Catholic Church and raised in its teachings. I emphasize this because to me that’s the most remarkable thing about this whole story of the Reformation. How could somebody like Martin Luther see through all that blindness to the truth? Do not just look at Luther as a historical figure and the Reformation as a historical period. You should see the hand of God in history, as we look at the Reformation and see the work of the Holy Spirit doing what Christ promised the Holy Spirit would do: lead us into truth. I don’t know how else you can account for how Martin Luther arrived at the truth and that understanding and then had the boldness to challenge the Pope and the authority of the Catholic Church. He was not the first reformer, and he would not be the last reformer. There are others who went before—men like Wycliffe, men who in many cases died a martyr’s death as they sought to reform the teachings and practices of the Church.

But Martin Luther certainly towers over the history of the Reformation as the single greatest figure. The singular event that really was the watershed of the Reformation occurred in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed what are known as the 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg. These 95 statements addressed one of the practices of the church that Luther found most repugnant—the buying and the selling of indulgences. In a very methodical way, Luther argued through 95 statements and refuted the church’s teaching and practice on this point.

Indulgences are pardons doled out by the Church for a fee. You could pay for so many years off your stay in purgatory. You can see how conveniently the Church had a monopoly in this. It’s not like you could go to the discount indulgence store to buy lower priced indulgences to get ten years off. To translate this into modern terms, it would be like purchasing a little credit card which you could swipe at the door of purgatory to get, say, ten years off your stay in purgatory. That's how it was in the Middle Ages, as these indulgences were sold by the church and sanctioned by papal edict. The church profited and gained enormously and became, as I said, the biggest banking system in medieval Europe. Martin Luther found this repugnant and he railed against this and preached against it. He also published his objections, using the new technology that Gutenberg had invented—the printing press.

As we look at his teachings more specifically, we’re going to see what the nature of the Reformation was all about. Let's look at Martin Luther's own conversion, the transformation in his understanding of his faith before we look at the heart of the teaching itself. He was a priest and a scholar. He was also a Professor of Theology; and as he was teaching through the book of Romans, he experienced a great life-changing event. Romans is a great doctrinal book—all about the work of salvation, the law and grace. Luther could not shake loose from a statement he found in scripture: “The just shall live by faith.” He could not understand that verse in light of Church's teachings. It seemed obvious to him, as he reflected, that the Church had gone way off track in its understanding. He wanted to bring the Church back to Ephesians 2:8-9 and Titus 3:5: “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us.” The work of justification in our lives is the work of God’s grace, not the product of our work.

Luther's teaching and the heart of the Reformation are really summed up in two Latin phrases. The first phrase is sola scriptura, which means “only scripture,” or “by scripture alone.” The idea here is that only scripture is authoritative for life and practice, for faith and doctrine. Not the teachings of the Church, not the edicts of the pope, but only scripture. If you can’t justify it from scripture, then what business do you have teaching it as the doctrine of the Church? The other Latin phrase, so important to understanding the teaching of the Reformation, is sola fide, which means “by faith alone.” This means that we come to salvation only through faith in Christ— not through our works, not through the Church’s mediation, but only through faith. How did he arrive at that, while blinded within the teachings of the church? Again, we have to see in this the work of the Holy Spirit.

There were other reformers as well. There was the great Frenchman John Calvin, who preached in Geneva, Switzerland. We remember him as a great theologian, more than probably any of the other reformers. In a popular sense, when we think of Calvin and Calvinistic teaching we think of the doctrine of election; but that’s just part of the vast tradition of the reformed theology we associate with his life and teaching.

In England the Reformation was very real as well, but for different reasons. The English Church broke with the Church of Rome, not over some high theological dispute over justification. Rather, the Church of England broke with Rome because King Henry VIII couldn’t get the pope to sanction his divorce. Henry was having a hard time producing a male heir, and so he decided, since the Pope wouldn’t authorize it, he would separate the Church of England from the Church of Rome. What began in that very petty personal political context, we have to see as part of the larger Reformation in England. The great legacy and tradition of the English Reformation, certainly, is the magisterial translation of the Bible, the King James Version of 1611.

Max Weber’s Theory

The question remains, Why does the Reformation matter? How has the Reformation influenced the direction of Western culture? That’s why we go back to the past. That’s why we study something that occurred 500 years ago, as the Reformation did, not just because we are interested in knowing the details of a long past historical event. What would be the value of that if it doesn’t have any application to our lives today? So the question for us is: How does it impact our culture? What has been the lasting legacy of something like the Reformation on the direction of Western culture?

Let’s start with a simple observation. As one travels across Europe, one can see profound differences between the culture of northern Europe and the culture of southern Europe. As you move towards the Mediterranean, time seems to slow down, people take a little bit longer lunch breaks. The trains and the buses don’t run maybe as much on time as they do in Germany and in Scandinavia. All kinds of little cultural things are noticeable as you move from North to South. What accounts for these kinds of differences? A hundred years ago, Max Weber, a German historian and sociologist, formulated a thesis to try and account for these great cultural differences between North and South. We are going to see how they help us to understand the unique nature of American culture as well. The gist of his argument was contained in the title of his book, published in 1905. The title gives the whole thesis away, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. We still refer to the Protestant work ethic today. We recognize what we mean by that, the sense of thriftiness and working hard and putting in an honest day’s work, of getting ahead through hard work and individual effort and so on. All of these things are so essential to the capitalistic system of economics that emerged in the early modern period in the West. Max Weber associates these qualities with the Reformation.

His argument went something like this. The doctrinal teaching of the Reformation emphasized that one is not saved through church—by being baptized in the church and taking communion in the church. Those are the things that medieval Christians in the Catholic system believed saved them. Instead, Luther and Calvin taught that one is saved through the work of God in your life; it’s a work of grace. One is saved if one is part of the elect—if one is elected to salvation. But how do you know you are one of the elect? That’s the question that drives Max Weber’s understanding of the Protestant ethic. Hard work, the acquisition and growth of capital, were seen as signs of God’s blessings on His elect. They “confirmed” what the church could never confirm—that you were, indeed, elected by God to salvation.

Weber contended that the theology of the Reformation conditioned people to seek the blessing of God in their life through hard work, labor, discipline, and thriftiness. These are the qualities that make up what Weber called the Protestant Ethic. Thereby, through the acquisition of wealth, and all the capitalistic virtues that go with that, one could demonstrate that there was the blessing of God in your life. Then you must be one of the elect if that is the case. That’s his main argument. He is trying to connect the rise of capitalistic systems in the North, the rise of these ethical principles, with reformed doctrine and reformed theology.

Weber was claiming that the North is different from the South because the North is Protestant and the South is Catholic. All these German merchants and workers in the little German cities are working hard and being very thrifty and saving, because they see themselves as part of the elect; their values were influenced and shaped by this powerful doctrinal idea of the Reformation. This is the central argument, the thesis that Max Weber set forth. It has been a very controversial thesis. It has weathered well over the century since he first put it forth, and I think it’s a very powerful interpretation.

Let’s now think ahead to the application of this thesis to our own American culture. Who is it that settled North America? We think back to the pilgrims and the Protestant work ethic they brought with them from Northern Europe. It is these values of hard work, frugality, and thriftiness that we associate with that culture. These qualities that we are calling the Protestant ethic have probably never been better expressed as they were by Benjamin Franklin.

The emphasis in these familiar, pithy statements is on hard work, saving money, and keeping your hands busy doing worthwhile things so that God will bless you.

• Idleness is the devil’s workshop.

• Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

• A penny saved is a penny earned.

• Haste makes waste.

• The early bird catches the worm.

• A stitch in time saves nine.

Whether you accept Weber’s theory of not, and it has been very controversial, it’s nonetheless a very clever way, I think, to account for the profound cultural differences between northern and southern Europe, and ultimately as we look at American culture as well. So does the Reformation matter? It does matter—in ways that continue to shape western culture today.

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20

A CENTURY OF GENIUS

Chapter Objectives

• Define the Scientific Revolution as a shift in world view.

• Identify some of the key thinkers in the “century of genius.”

• Demonstrate how Bacon’s “Idols” express the spirit of modern science.

In the last chapter we noted that the Reformation has exercised a lasting impact on western culture—one that is still felt today. That’s the perspective we need to bring to our study of the past. We should be asking, “Why does it matter? How does it help us to understand the way people live and think and behave in the world right now? What have we inherited from these earlier cultures?” Remember how we did asked those questions of the Greeks and the Romans. We did as well when we surveyed the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Now, we’ll continue to do that as we carry on the story of the emergence of the modern age. Once again, we are going to ask the question, “Why do the developments in these remote centuries matter to us today?”

We’ll be moving in the seventeenth century in this chapter. The seventeenth century is sometimes called "a century of genius.” This was the century of Milton and Galileo, Cervantes and Descartes. In this chapter, however, we’re going to focus on one aspect of that genius—the Scientific Revolution which, in many ways, came to a head during this century. As we go through this, we are going to be looking back at the roots of modern science, as well as looking ahead to our own time to see what the implications are for how people look at the world today. The Scientific Revolution was a natural outgrowth of the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, as a typical Renaissance man, was deeply curious about the world around him. So it shouldn’t surprise us that this focus on materialism should give rise to the Scientific Revolution.

The Scientific Revolution: Overview

What are the dates that we associate with the Scientific Revolution? Roughly, the period is from 1550-1700. What is the significance of those dates? 1550 is right around the time when Copernicus, the great Polish astronomer, published his great book, which challenged the longstanding view of astronomy—the old notion that the earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus said, “No, we’re just a planet going around the sun.” So, we swapped out the geocentric view for the heliocentric view. That’s the significance of the date 1550. The “New Science,” as it’s sometimes called, had begun.

What about on the other end of the period, the date 1700? That’s associated with the life of Isaac Newton, who, until Einstein, was arguably the greatest scientist in the Western tradition. With Newton, we have the emergence of the whole mechanical model of the universe and its physical laws.

Why did the Scientific Revolution occur? What caused this great shift in thinking about the natural world and the physical world to come about? It happened as a natural byproduct of the shift from the medieval to the modern world view, from that vertical hierarchical model in the middle ages to the modern world view. This brought about a new emphasis on scientific knowledge and scientific investigation. This shift was vividly demonstrated when Galileo (1564-1642) championed the views of Copernicus, and ran afoul of the authority of the church.

So that’s just a quick overview: the time period, the causes behind the Scientific Revolution, and some of the great figures associated with this shift and knowledge about the physical world.

But what, more specifically, is the Scientific Revolution and how does it break from the ancient and medieval practice of science? First of all, the question that we need to consider is, “How is ancient science different from modern science?” Let’s consider this question based upon what we said about the Middle Ages. Consider that you’re a medieval man or woman. On what basis would you “know” something to be true about the world around you? Quite simply this: Someone tells you that it’s true. Somebody higher up the chain of command than you tells you. That somebody might be the church, it might be an old authoritative book that you look to, but that’s how you know. At least you think you know. That’s how you would know, for example, that the earth is the center of the universe, because you go to an old book on astronomy written by Ptolemy 1,500 years earlier. Some ancient authority tells you, or the authority of the church tells you that something is true. It’s very important to understand that way of thinking. We can’t make sense of the modern way of looking at these things unless we have that contrast in mind.

What about modern science? What is its basis for truth? Observation and experimentation. You figure it out for yourself. You investigate it for yourself. Something is true not because somebody tells you, but because you can go into a laboratory, you can test it, and you can experiment. You can repeat that experiment, and you can say that, “Yes, this is true; I can see it with my own eyes that it’s true.” That’s the profound difference in thinking between ancient and medieval science and the modern scientific method. This shift in thinking toward experience and observation is captured in Rembrandt’s famous “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp” (1632).

The Scientific Method

Let’s hone in on the scientific method then. The scientific method is based upon what we call inductive reasoning. What is inductive reasoning? Well, let’s illustrate it.

First of all, inductive reasoning is usually contrasted with another kind of reasoning known as deductive reasoning. Let’s use an example to try to illustrate what both of these modes of reasoning are and then apply it to modern scientific thinking. You go to a grocery store and you buy a bag of oranges, ten oranges in the bag, and you take those oranges home. Of course, you bought the bag because you are hoping for really good, sweet tasting oranges. So you open the bag up, you peel the first orange, and you eat it. It’s pulpy, it’s sour, it’s not worth eating, and you throw it away. You try a second orange. It’s the same thing; it’s not worth eating and you throw it away, too. You try a third orange, but have the same problem. What might you conclude after trying the first three oranges in that ten-orange bag? That’s how they all are. They are all not worth eating. They are all pulpy and sour and so on. You have just reasoned inductively. When you reason inductively, you reason from specific pieces of evidence to general conclusions. In a sense, you have performed a basic kind of scientific experiment. Is this bag of oranges worth eating? You put it to the test? How do you arrive at the truth? By testing it for yourself. You try the oranges, and after three sour oranges, you reason inductively, from these specific pieces of evidence, that the rest of the bag is also sour.

Now let’s say you go to the grocery store and you want to buy a bag of oranges and you are debating whether or not to spend money on a bag of oranges. Obviously, you want to make sure that they are worth eating if you are going to spend a lot of money on them. You ask the guy who is putting the oranges out there, and based upon his authority he says, “Yeah, these are worth eating.” Now, in this case you would be taking it on authority, wouldn’t you? That’s a good way to illustrate that difference between medieval and modern scientific approaches. Somebody in authority tells you, as opposed to putting it to the test through your own observation and experimentation.

Let’s more specifically illustrate deductive reasoning. Let’s say some authority is not around for you to ask. How might you arrive at an answer deductively? You might stop and reason as you stand there in front of this bag of oranges. You might say, “Well, let’s see, this time of year usually bags of oranges are sweet. Usually bags of oranges that come from Florida, in particular, are sweet. Considering the kind of weather they have had down there over the last few months, which is very favorable to sweet oranges, I would deduce that this bag of oranges is going to be sweet.” So you buy it on that basis; whether it is or not is an entirely different matter. But what you have done is reasoned deductively. Where inductive reasoning is going from specific pieces of evidence to general conclusions, reasoning deductively is reasoning from general statements to specific conclusions—in this case, general statements about the time of year, the place that these oranges are coming from, the weather conditions, and so on. Those are general foundational statements from which you deduct a specific conclusion; hence, deductive reasoning.

Again, think of a scientist, going into the classroom, putting something to the test. Then, based upon those specific pieces of data he or she arrives at a general conclusion—the hypothesis that’s testable or a scientific law that is demonstrable and provable in some way. So that is really the foundation of the scientific method, this inductive approach to truth. Notice how it takes knowledge out of the realm of authority and brings it down to the level of you and me. What we observe, what we reason, what we test, what we see with our own eyes, what we can handle with our own hands—all of these things make up modern the approach to scientific investigation and also make up, in large part, the modern materialistic world view.

Look at the big picture. Why is it that the modern scientific materialistic worldview is so hostile to the supernatural, to faith, to religion? We start to see why as we look at the nature of this thought process. Modern science believes what it can handle. It be lieves what can be testable. It believes what can be studied in the laboratory, what can be arrived at through inductive reasoning.

This scientific method is sometimes called the empirical method; empiricism refers to how we arrive at knowledge through experience. The experience of what we see, of what we can touch, of what we know about the world. An English philosopher, named Francis Bacon, gave us a great formulation of this method about four hundred years ago. Let’s turn to what Francis Bacon had to say about empiricism. He presented the classic statement about the scientific method in the early modern period. Bacon’s critique and analysis of the new science gives us a blueprint, really, to understanding how the modern mind thinks about the world.

For us as Christians in the modern world, it's very important for us to understand how, when you are talking with somebody who is not a believer and who just believes in science, how that person thinks about the world. What, for that individual is the basis of truth? That’s really what we are trying to understand.

Bacon’s Idols of the Mind

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose dates correspond almost exactly to William Shakespeare’s, laid out the issue four centuries ago when he talked about how we arrive at true statements about the world through the scientific method. One of things he emphasized was how hard it is to do that. He spoke of this as a process of coming to knowledge about the world, where we have to really knock down a bunch of false ideas. You start by having to smash these false gods, false ideas in our minds. Bacon used this concrete metaphor to help us understand what’s at stake.

Bacon identified four false ideas, four false ways of thinking, that modern science has to smash and get rid of before we can arrive at true statements about the world. The first of these is the Idol of the Tribe. Bacon is speaking about false beliefs that are common to all men; that is to the tribe.

In other words, false ways of looking at the world, which come about just because this is how we look at the world through our eyes, and how we are limited by our senses. We are limited by our faculties of reason, and so we see the world through own natural, physical limitations.

Let me give you one very quick simple example. We talk about the sun rising. The sun doesn't rise and yet, even today knowing that the sun doesn't rise, and yet we use that expression. Why do we say that? Why do we speak that way? Why in ancient times was there the belief that the sun rose and why do we still speak of it in those terms? Because that’s how it looks like to us. You look at the eastern horizon and it looks like the sun is rising. We are limited by what we see. We are limited by just how we look at the world and those natural limitations are built into our senses, built into our framework. This is what Bacon is talking about when he speaks of the Idols of the Tribe. The scientist has to set those aside and say, “I know that what I am seeing looks like the sun is rising, but I have got to test it, I have got to calculate, I have got to observe. I can't just rely upon what my eyes are telling me here, because that’s an idol of the tribe. That’s a natural limitation of who I am in the world.”

Second, Francis Bacon identified another kind of problem that the scientific method has to deal with and he called these the Idols of the Cave. He spoke of these as false beliefs, shaped by personal experience, in the mind of the individual. These are idols that are unique to me as an individual—false beliefs that may arise out of the way I was raised or what my personal experience with the world has been. I can't carry into the laboratory my personal biases. I have to set my own personal biases aside. The way I was raised has shaped my way of looking at things; and the scientific method tries to set those aside.

The third idol that Bacon speaks of, the Idols of the Marketplace, are false beliefs that arise from language. He uses the word marketplace, because language is kind of like a marketplace of ideas. We exchange words like we exchange goods. What Bacon is saying is that language is imprecise. We know the world imperfectly through language. Language doesn't give us an accurate description of the world. We know that to be true. We argue over words all the time, and we are arguing over the imprecision of words. How do scientists try to deal with that when they speak of scientific laws? They try to reduce scientific laws not to words, but to mathematics. To formulas, to equations, to mathematical statements— using math as a kind of pure language that's not subject to ambiguity and misunderstanding. Scientists like to reduce things to something you can write on a chalk-board—an equation like e=mc2, that’s not bound by language and misunderstanding. That's really what we see Bacon talking about, that we have got to work beyond those, false beliefs and imperfections. The scientific method tries to take us to that point, so we can understand and then describe the world as it actually is.

Finally, Francis Bacon speaks of what he calls Idols of the Theatre. These are systems of belief. They might be theological systems, they might be philosophical systems, they might be political systems, like Marxism, let's say, or an ideological system like feminism. They might be a religious system like Christianity. Bacon would see all these as the same kind of a thing, systems of belief. The idea is this: When you go into the laboratory, you are supposed to take your system of belief and check it at the door and go in and practice the supposedly neutral and objective scientific method in the pursuit of truth.

We are justified in asking, however, whether it’s ever possible to actually do this. Now, Science, with a capital S, and the scientific method, has itself become a kind of Idol of the Theatre. It has become a system of belief, with its materialistic assumptions about the world. It is almost a kind of religious system in our own day. And that's the irony; that’s something that Francis Bacon didn't foresee happening.

Well, let's talk about that a little bit more and ask, “What are some of the basic ways in which this revolution in scientific knowledge has shaped our culture?”

First of all, we see the elevation of science as the measure of truth. People appeal to science now as the final statement and the final word as to whether or not something is true. This leads us to the next two points. Second, we see skepticism of authority, which is one of the significant things to note in the transition from medieval to modern. If science is now the basis of truth, the measure of truth, then everything, including authority, has got to be judged by science. But who will question the authority of science?

Finally, we see skepticism of the supernatural. Think about it. If science is the ultimate measure of truth, then only things that can be tested, only things that are subject to scientific inquiry, are real and are true. By definition then, there is no such thing as the miraculous. What then happens to miracles? What happens to personal conversion? We can’t test these things in the laboratory? The reality of one's own personal salvation in Christ can't be tested in the laboratory. So somebody who is steeped in scientific thinking would discount that as not real or as not true, not subject to scientific analysis.

What we have been tracing here in this great development of seventeenth-century thought, the Scientific Revolution, is really the foundation for so much of the conflict that we see today between Science with a capital S and Faith with a capital F. You really can't account for the modern age without talking about this profound intellectual shift. It’s the foundation for the direction of the last few centuries. We need to understand that scientific thinking about the world has become, in many ways, the dominant filter through which modern man sees reality and formulates his understanding of truth in the world.

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