During the scientific revolution, there was a shift in thinking about nature from a religious perspective to an intellectual perspective. The Roman Catholic Church enforced that the Earth was the center of the universe and the other planets and the sun revolved around it in a perfect circle. Galileo challenged the church’s idea of perfectness and the idea of the Earth being the center of the universe. The church also enforced that God and the church should be the center of everyone’s lives, and Rembrandt challenges this idea through his painting, Raising of the Cross.
In Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo represents the pope as Simplicio, the fool, to reference to the church’s beliefs. Simplicio represents the church and talks about the views with great confidence and appears firm on his beliefs, just like the Roman Catholic Church. The confidence in his speech proves that the church was not open to new ideas, and Galileo uses the pope to convey the message that the church already had a preset idea of what was right and wrong. This sense of opposing straightforwardness is also addressed in Rembrandt’s painting. Instead of using linearity and straight lines, that allow the viewer to find a definite contrast between the background and the subject, Rembrandt uses painterly lines that appear to blend in with the background causing the painting to appear obscure and ambiguous. This blending of subjects with background emphasizes that even though the church pretends to have all the answers, no one can truly have all of the answers and there will always be a sense of uncertainty.
In the Dialogue, Simplicio says, “Now when we see this beautiful order among the planets, they being arranged around the ear...
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...ch makes them imperfect. Through Rembrandt and Galileo, it can be concluded that there is shift to this new idea of change being beneficial.
While there were people like Galileo and Rembrandt who wanted to move past traditional ideas, many religious and intellectual scholars found the idea of new science as threatening because of the undesirable challenges it results in the installed traditions. Since these people remained quite, the church continued to control their beliefs, and remained powerful for a longer time.
Works Cited
Galilei, Galileo. “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” Trans. Drake Stillman. Ed. James Bowley, et. al. Heritage Reader. Jackson,
Mississippi: Millsaps College and Copyright Clearance Center, 2014. 10-11.
Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606-1660. “Raising Of The Cross.”
ARTstor Digital Library. Web. 15 Feb. 2014
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Throughout history, conflicts between faith and reason took the forms of religion and free thinking. In the times of the Old Regime, people like Copernicus and Galileo were often punished for having views that contradicted the beliefs of the church. The strict control of the church was severely weakened around the beginning of the nineteenth century when the Old Regime ended. As the church's control decreased, science and intellectual thinking seemed to advance. While the people in the world became more educated, the church worked harder to maintain its influential position in society and keep the Christian faith strong. In the mid-nineteenth century, the church's task to keep people's faith strong became much harder, due to theories published by free thinkers like Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, David Friedrich Strauss, and others. These men published controversial theories that hammered away at the foundation on which the Christian church was built. As the nineteenth century progressed, more doubts began to arise about the basic faiths of the Christian church.
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During the fourteenth century, the Renaissance was notable for its development from medieval life and values dominated by the Church toward the abstract ethics of civilization. Instead of the perception stressed by religion that emphasized preparation for the after life, the enlightened citizens of the middle class, became interested in individuals success and emphasized life in this world, rather than the afterlife in which the Catholic church emphasized. This encouraged individuals to surmount in a wide variety of grounds portraying their knowledge because of their strong beliefs in all aspects ranging from art, politics, and personal life. Renaissance thinkers were inspired by the ancient Greeks and Romans instead of medieval life because it was portrayed as undeveloped. The textbook a History in The Making discusses these changes and writes, “A new understanding of the motions of heavens and of mechanic on the earth developed among experimenters in natural philosophy, that is, what came to be called science” (484). This portrayed how the scientific revolution changed and impacted attitudes within Europe in regards to Science and knowledge. The Secularization tainted the traditional scientific method of truth and search for non religious foundations, emphasizing the new doors that had been opened for this
Much to the dismay of the Church, two astronomers Galileo and Kepler had the audacity to challenge the authorities by suggesting that the sun-not the earth-was at the center of the universe. The church had a stronghold on the way the spiritual and physical world worked, so these discoveries only added to the Church’s resistance to their aims. Their discoveries came only after Kepler and Galileo began to question ancient theories about how the world functioned. These ancient truths were widely held but were inconsistent with the new observations that they had made. Kepler had discovered the laws of planetary motion which suggested that the planet would move in elliptical orbits, while Galileo followed with his discovery of the principle of inertia. Galileo concluded his finding b...
René Descartes presented his readers to the thought of differentiating scholarly learning from church doctrine. He asserted science filled with myth and uncertainty could never advertise taking in or the headway of public opinion. Descartes reacted to the developing clash between these two powers with an endeavor to bring clarity. He was eager to test the acknowledged plans of his day and present change. Religion had not been independent from science previou...
Over the course of the years, society has been reformed by new ideas of science. We learn more and more about global warming, outer space, and technology. However, this pattern of gaining knowledge did not pick up significantly until the Scientific Revolution. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the Scientific Revolution started, which concerned the fields of astronomy, mechanics, and medicine. These new scientists used math and observations strongly contradicting religious thought at the time, which was dependent on the Aristotelian-Ptolemy theory. However, astronomers like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton accepted the heliocentric theory. Astronomical findings of the Scientific Revolution disproved the fact that humans were the center of everything, ultimately causing people to question theology’s role in science and sparking the idea that people were capable of reasoning for themselves.