In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the educated classes of Europe moved from a world-view that was basically religious to one that was primarily secular. The development of scientific knowledge was the key cause of this intellectual change. Until about 1500, scientific thought reflected the Aristotelian-medieval world-view, which taught that a motionless earth was at the center of a universe made up of planets and stars in ten crystal spheres. These and many other beliefs showed that science was primarily a branch of religion (Thomas, 1996). Beginning with Copernicus, who taught that the earth revolved around the sun, Europeans slowly began to reject Aristotelian-medieval scientific thought. They developed a new conception of a universe based on natural laws, not on a personal God. Isaac Newton formulated the great scientific synthesis: the law of universal gravitation. This was the culminating point of the scientific revolution.
Of all the changes that swept over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most widely influential was an epistemological transformation that we call the "scientific revolution." In the popular mind, we associate this revolution with natural science and technological change, but the scientific revolution was, in reality, a series of changes in the structure of European thought itself: systematic doubt, empirical and sensory verification, the abstraction of human knowledge into separate sciences, and the view that the world functions like a machine. These changes greatly changed the human experience of every other aspect of life, from individual life to the life of the group.
The new science was more important for intellectual development than for economic activity or everyday life, for above all it promoted critical thinking (Thomas, 1996). Nothing was to be accepted on faith; everything was to be submitted to the rational, scientific way of thinking. This critical examination....
