Three Scientific Revolutions: How They Transformed Our Conceptions of Reality Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the earth does not help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what Scripture states. . . .” 11 Or as St. Augustine, an early church father and Bishop of Hippo, reiterated: “‘Nothing is to be accepted except on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all powers of the mind.’” 12 But the supremacy of Christianity over paganism began with the zealous Christian Roman ruler Theodosius the Great in 391 CE who issued edicts prohibiting pagan rituals and public ceremonies with the intent of eradicating paganism.
    Theophilus of Antioch began applying the edicts of Theodosius directing ruthless gangs of Christians to assault the pagans, along with destroying their sanctuaries, monuments, and statues. Cyril, the nephew and successor of Theophilus, turned the wrath of these Christians against the Jews, ordering their expulsion from Alexandria, but, fortunately, he was opposed by Orestes, governor of Alexandria.
    An especially horrific example of the oppressive cruelty was the vile murder of the renown and revered scholar Hypatia. The daughter of a mathematician, she became famous as a mathematician in her own right, along with attaining an outstanding reputation in music, astronomy, and philosophy. Unlike women at the time who where secluded in their homes, she was one of Alexandria’s most admired personages: very beautiful as well as learned and refined, she rode around the city in a chariot. But admirable as this reputation was, it led to her vicious execution.
    Opposed to her pagan notoriety, in March of 415, upon returning home, a gang of Cyril’s followers attached her and took her to a church, where “she was stripped of her clothing, her skin was flayed off with broken bits of pottery. The mob then dragged her corpse outside the city walls and burned it. Their hero Cyril was eventually made a saint.” 13 So much for the Christian “brotherhood of man.” The period when Christianity was dominant has justly been called the dark ages. In fact, the Inquisition in Spain during the fifteenth century was one of the most unjust, terrifying, and fiendish in history.
    Having described the transition from the earlier mythological, theogonic worldview to the first awaking of the possibility of a more rational understanding of the universe and human existence, we turn now to the second revolution when science began replacing both religion and philosophy.

Chapter II
    THE SECOND TRANSITION OWING TO THE CREATION OF MODERN CLASSICAL SCIENCE
    The second revolution that transformed our conception of reality followed the Renaissance with the resurgence of classical Greek science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and extended to the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Realizing the failures of such pseudosciences as alchemy and astrology, it also represented the demise of the authority of the Catholic Church because of the increasing confidence in the new scientific advances disclosing and refuting the incredible nature of Christian beliefs. It also replaced Aristotle’s mistaken conception that metaphysics was a separate philosophical discipline that could transcend scientific inquiry by attaining a truer conception of reality that sustained such later philosophical systems as absolute idealism until it was eventually superseded by science.
    Though it was mainly Aristotle’s insistence that observable evidence was the primary basis of natural explanations that originally replaced mythical or religious creation myths, it gradually became clear that sensory evidence alone was insufficient to explain our ordinary experience of natural phenomena and their underlying causes. Three developments especially led to the awareness of the deceptive nature and explanatory limitations of sensory perceptions, along with the necessity of revising and supplementing them with more exact laws and a different conceptual system.
    These