Restoring Authority To Nature -  The Enlightenment 1600's

 (December, 2025)  

The Reformation only challenged the Catholic Church's thought control in areas whose rulers did not suppress Protestantism. The Bible remained the main source for community knowledge. Replacing the Bible with nature for physics required a paradigm change and that change is known as The Enlightenment.

(March 30, 2025) Yet the real proof that the clock-like mechanics of earth extended into the heavens was only seen by those who could understand the complex astronomical mathematics in Kepler's 650 page book published in 1609 entitled: 

• New Astronomy, Based upon Causes, or Celestial Physics, Treated by Means of Commentaries on the Motions of the Star Mars, from the Observations of Tycho Brahe, Gent.

Kepler made the claim that planets moved in elliptical orbits subject to physical forces and did not move magically in perfect circles. Additionally he put the sun at one focus of the ellipse. To make this claim he had to replace the classical era Aristotelian physics which placed the earth at the center of the universe where it attracted all physical bodies. 

He was also the first to define gravity as a force similar to the force of magnetism by saying this:

• Gravity is a mutual corporeal disposition among kindred bodies to unite or join together; thus the earth attracts a stone much more than the stone seeks the earth. (The magnetic faculty is another example of this sort).... For it follows that if the earth's power of attraction will be much more likely to extend to the moon and far beyond, and accordingly, that nothing that consists to any extent whatever of terrestrial material, carried up on high, ever escapes the grasp of this mighty power of attraction .... 

He want on to say in chapter 33 that the sun somehow moves the planets laterally. He claimed the Sun emitted a physical something, analogous to light, which pushed the planets along. 

References

(July 6, 2022) Two discoveries started the expansion of physical nature into heavens which ultimately ended up forcing a paradigm change about motion. 

Galileo built himself this telescope in 1609 after he heard about Kepler's laws and the invention of the telescope in the Netherlands. His first telescope demonstration was for the Venetian military which gained him a life time appointment as a professor and raised his salary to 1000 florins a year. In the fall he turned an even better telescope towards the heavens. He confirmed that planets orbited the sun by seeing that planets had phases. He also saw that the moon's surface was imperfect and thus it belonged to the material realm.He published a book called the"Starry Messenger" describing and illustrating these discoveries in Venice on March 12, 1610. The book caused a sensation. Kepler was delighted because it confirmed his contention that physics extended to the heavens.  After this, Galileo's hometown of Padua offered him a professorship with terms better than those from Venice so Galileo moved back home. 

Galileo Galilee (1564 - 1642) was a professor of Mathematics at the University of Padua in the Republic of Venice where he specialized in instrument making. This included an irrigation device and an advanced drawing compass/slide-rule.

The importance of his father, Vincenzio, on Galileo's  anti-authoritarian views should not be over looked. Vincenzio was a musician and mathematician and part of the group which invented the opera as a musical revival of Greek tragedy. He invented a more refined musical scale for the lute based on the actual harmonies of sound instead of the traditional mathematical Pythagorean ratios. He wrote a book describing and defending this new approach called Dialog of Ancient and Modern Music.  In it he states:

• "they who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of authority, without adducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly. (page 17 Sobel 2000)

In 1608 or early 1609 Galileo heard about the invention of the telescope in Flanders which had came about because eye glasses had been invented making lenses more common. Because he was an instrument maker and designer he was one of the few who could build it sight unseen and keep on improving its magnification and clarity. His first telescope used standard eye glass lenses but Galileo soon went beyond that with lenses of greater power and clarity.

Reference

Sobel, Dana (2000) Galileo's Daughter, Penguin Books, New York

(March 31, 2025) 

For Galileo the simplest explanation of his new findings was that the earth had to move around the sun. Yet, as he would be told, this directly contradicted Psalm 104 verse 5: 

• Thou (God) fixed the earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever.

Galileo's answer to this is found in a 1613 letter to a friend who was reporting this growing opposition to him:

• The Holy Scripture cannot err and the decrees contained therein are absolutely true and inviolable. I should only have added that, though the Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are able to err in so many ways. (Sobel page 63)

He went on to say that many statements about nature were put into the Bible in order to keep it simple for the masses because the main purpose of the Bible was teaching salvation.  

Overt public attacks on Galileo began on December 21, 1614 with a sermon by a Dominican priest in Florence named Tommaso Caccini. He stated that all of Galileo's followers and indeed, all mathematicians in general were "practitioners of diabolical arts and ... the enemies of true religion." After this and the Catholic inquisition condemned heliocentrism again in 1615, Galileo went silent.

When a friend of his (Cardiinal Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini) became Pope Urban VIII from 1623 to 1644 Galileo was emboldened once again. In 1632 he published his sun centric astronomical views in a book entitled Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He framed it as a debate and not as his own views so he managed to get it approved by the church. But what he did not know was that his anti-sun centered proponent named Simplico just happened to hold the same views as Pope Urban VIII who was insulted and wanted revenge. He at age 68 and ill was tried by the Inquisition, found guilty of heresy, and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest until he died in 1642.

Yet some still naively hoped that a more proper reasoning methodology would somehow reconcile nature with the Bible and/or Catholic theology. This was never to occur but Protestant Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Catholic Descartes (1596-1650) made the most  famous attempts. 

(July 6, 2022) The problem with nature knowledge is that it is uncertain. Humans will never know if we know everything about nature or even parts of nature. In contrast, revealed knowledge as found in the Bible seems so certain. 

John Locke was the first person to attack this problem. He was simply trying to understand the how humans could come to know things. The result was the first description of what moderns would call "Decision Theory." He took the new ideas of mathematical probability developed within the context gambling and commercial insurance and applied them to knowledge. Christiaan Huygens published his book on the subject in 1657 entitled On reasoning in games of chance.

For Locke, all knowledge was uncertain. Only if its probability was high enough could it be considered true. Certainty increases with:

1. The conformity of anything with our own knowledge, observation, and experience.
2. The testimony of others, vouching their observation and experience. In the testimony of others is to be considered : 1. The number. 2. The integrity. 3. The skill of the witnesses. 4. The design of the author, where it is a testimony out of a book cited. 5. The consistency of the parts, and circumstances of the relation. 6. Contrary testimonies. (book IV, Chapter XV: Of Probability)

Uncertainty in Knowledge Demands Tolerance, Not Dogmatic Intolerance

This weighing of evidence takes time therefore:

But in a contradictory nod the Biblical authority to prevent his book from being suppressed (a fear expressed in the books introduction) he says this:

Locke's book was also an attack on Dualism, the idea that knowledge was binary and had to be either true or false. Knowledge from nature grew over time so it starts with a lot of uncertainty and moves toward greater certainty. His ideas have proven to be true by as exemplified by the  development of modern technology over time.

References

Locke, John (1689) Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Online at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding

Locke, John (1690) Essay Concerning Human Understanding (a second edition original) Online at: https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding/hGeKsjjtu6EC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Essay+Concerning+Human+Understanding&printsec=frontcover

(March 30, 2025) The change of paradigm from a single realm in which all change was governed by divine powers to a binary realm with each realm having their own sources of change (Divine = occult change, Physical = mechanical change) was completed by Isaac Newton (1643–1727) of England in his 1687 book Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. He wrote:

• "Since the ancients (as we are told by Pappus), made great account of the science of mechanics in the investigation of natural things; and the moderns, laying aside substantial forms and occult qualities, have endeavoured to subject the phænomena of nature to the laws of mathematics, I have in this treatise cultivated mathematics so far as it regards philosophy. The ancients considered mechanics in a twofold respect; as rational, which proceeds accurately by demonstration: and practical. To practical mechanics all the manual arts belong, from which mechanics took its name."

Reference