The Scientific Revolution: The Origins Of Enlightenment

The Scientific Revolution (1543-1688) consisted of thinkers who started to question the old “truths” about astronomy, chemistry, biology, and were now having a more secular outlook on the universe that did not solely revolve around God’s creation. This was also a time where the Catholic Church was doing its best to claim power over the people. However, people were no longer willing to accept all of the church’s ideas. The church still held the majority if power so thinkers who were brave enough to publically contradict the church were executed. As more thinkers started working together and hypothesis turned into undeniable facts, some secular ideas were accepted.

However their perfect,invincible image crumbled when Protestant England, under Queen Elizabeth’s rule, rose to power in the mid 1500s. Tense relations rise as both nations strive for world conquest and to further add to the conflict, both countries had opposing religious views. Spain was completely devoted to Catholicism while England was a newly reformed Protestant regime. Failure to reach an agreement between both countries sparked the launch of the Invincible Armada. Different sources from both countries show opposing views that may be magnified with nationalistic pride.

People began to assert themselves against blind faith and useless religious rituals and began to feel that they could reach God without the intermediary of a priest. Instead of one Pope, two Popes began to be elected one by the French Cardinals and the other by the Italian Cardinals. Solution: With recognition of the reformers criticism and acceptance of their ideology Protestants were able to put their beliefs on display in art. Artists sympathetic to the movement developed a new repertoire of subjects, or adapted traditional ones, to reflect and emphasize Protestant ideals and teaching more broadly, the balance of power gradually shifted from religious to secular authorities in western Europe initiating a decline of Christian imagery in the protestant Church. Balance: Meanwhile, Church mounted the counter-Reformation, through than which it denounced and reaffirmed Catholic doctrine.

Prior to the events of The Enlightenment, The Scientific Revolution occured. This is a time in which the authority of the church is challenged and long and old traditional ideas about god are challenged by science. This led into the French Revolution because if you can challenge god you are able to challenge monarchs. The French took away power from the monarchs and put more power into the people. However this

• During the Enlightenment there was a Scientific Revolution • The enlightenment was also called the Age of Reason • The chaos of the Reformation and wars of religion had shaken a belief system that had been accepted by society in the Middle Ages • People began looking for natural law, the conditions that govern human behavior • Thinkers began to believe that the problems of society could be solved through reasoning • One of the first philosophers to search for the natural laws of government was England’s Thomas Hobbes. • He believed that people by nature were bad and needed strong government • He believed that people could avoid the nature of being bad by entering into a social contract • This was an agreement to give up individual freedom to live in an organized society

The scientists and philosophers of the Scientific Revolution did not set out to change the world, they each studied different subjects in different fields. However their experiments all challenged the traditional, blindly followed views of the world and fostered a new way of thinking that relied on empiricism and skepticism rather than fundamental widely expected truths. This search for knowledge changed our world forever. The scientific revolution challenged and influenced American culture in three ways; it encouraged innovation, questioned religion, created a new lifestyle. The first way that the scientific revolution influenced American culture was through encouraging innovation.

Originally, they were a reward for pious actions. However, with much corruption through the church, they were morphed into a scheme to take money from misguided Christians. One of the northern humanists, Martin Luther, began protesting this in 1517 (p. 333). Martin Luther’s biggest accomplishment concerning his protests of the Roman Catholic Church would probably be the posting of his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg (p. 334). This act of defiance against the church sparked the spread of protestantism.

“The Enlightenment is the period in the history of western thought and culture… characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics; these revolutions swept away the medieval world-view and ushered in our modern western world” (Bristow). The Enlightenment is also referred to as The Age of Reason because its philosophies were mostly based on logic and reason. One important figure who introduced the Enlightenment to America was Benjamin Franklin. “Many of Franklin’s satires work through logic of inversion, taking an established idea and exposing the assumptions that implicitly frame it by demonstrating how it might appear from a reverse perspective” (Giles 48-49). A simpler way of stating how Franklin uses satire is as placing “the

The Enlightenment made the world become more free because of the ideas that were spread during the time period. The Scientific Revolution was a period of time where philosophers such as Galileo and Isaac Newton proved that the church was not always right, and they proved this with science. The people began to question the church, and their power over the people. Philosophers such as Locke, suggested that all people were born equal, and that the citizens can improve, and overthrow the government if they don’t agree with its actions. The enlightenment philosophers were one of the first to suggest a world where the people had control over the place where they were living.

Historians refer to the climate of thought in eighteenth-century as the Enlightenment. It is a movement happened in the United Kingdom, and developed in France. Rationality was characterized as the main characteristic in the Age of Enlightenment, the philosophers during the enlightenment ages always stressed the ideas that traditional authority like theocracy and royal power is not always correct, therefore humans could and should improve themselves through reason. They also viewed that the natural world was governed by mathematical and scientific laws, which could be understood by humankind through doing researches themselves rather than depend on traditional authority wielded by established religion. Rationalism played an important role in directing human thought and actions, improving science and making political changes in Europe and North America as well as