Page 440 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

or only hopeless. Pascal even had an answer for skep- tics in his famous wager: God is a reasonable bet; it is worthwhile to assume that God exists. If he does, then we win all; if he does not, we lose nothing. Despite his own background as a scientist and mathematician, Pas- cal refused to rely on the scientist’s world of order and rationality to attract people to God: “If we submit everything to reason, there will be no mystery and no supernatural element in our religion.” In the new cos- mology of the seventeenth century, “finite man,” Pascal believed, was lost in the new infinite world, a realiza- tion that frightened him: “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces strikes me with terror” (see the box on p. 401).
For Pascal, then, the world of nature could never reveal God: “Because they have failed to contemplate these infinites, men have rashly plunged into the exam- ination of nature, as though they bore some proportion to her. . . . Their assumption is as infinite as their object.” A Christian could only rely on a God who through Jesus cared for human beings. In the final analysis, after providing reasonable arguments for Christianity, Pascal came to rest on faith. Reason, he believed, could take people only so far: “The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” As a Christian, faith was the final step: “The heart feels God, not the reason. This is what constitutes faith: God experienced by the heart, not by the reason.”14
Chapter Summary
The Scientific Revolution represents a major turning point in modern Western civilization. In the Scientific Revolution, the Western world overthrew the medieval, Ptolemaic-Aristotelian worldview and geocentric universe and arrived at a new concep- tion of the universe: the sun at the center, the planets as mate- rial bodies revolving around the sun in elliptical orbits, and an infinite rather than finite world. This new conception of the heavens was the work of a number of brilliant individuals: Nico- laus Copernicus, who theorized a heliocentric or sun-centered universe; Johannes Kepler, who discovered that planetary orbits were elliptical; Galileo Galilei, who, by using a telescope and observing the moon and sunspots, discovered that the universe
seemed to be composed of mate- rial substance; and Isaac Newton, who tied together all of these ideas with his universal law of gravitation. The contributions of each individual built on the contri- butions of the others, thus estab- lishing one of the basic principles of the new science—cooperation in the pursuit of new knowledge.
With the changes in the conception of “heaven” came changes in the conception of “earth.” The work of Bacon and Descartes left Europeans with the separation of mind and matter and the belief that by using only reason they could in fact understand and dominate the world of nature. The development of a scien- tific methodology furthered the work of the scientists, and the creation of scientific societies and learned journals spread its
results. The Scientific Revolution was more than merely intellectual theo- ries. It also appealed to nonscientific elites because of its practical implica- tions for economic progress and for maintaining the social order, includ- ing the waging of war.
Although traditional churches stub-
bornly resisted the new ideas and a
few intellectuals pointed to some inherent flaws, nothing was able to halt the replacement of the traditional ways of thinking by new ways of thinking that created a more fundamental break with the past than that represented by the breakup of Christian- ity in the Reformation.
The Scientific Revolution forced Europeans to change their conception of themselves. At first, some were appalled and even frightened by its implications. Formerly, humans on earth had viewed themselves as being at the center of the universe. Now the earth was only a tiny planet revolving around a sun that was itself only a speck in a boundless universe. Most people remained optimistic despite the apparent blow to human dignity. After all, had Newton not demonstrated that the universe was a great machine governed by natural laws? Newton had found one—the universal law of gravitation. Could others not find other laws? Were there not natural laws governing every aspect of human endeavor that could be found by the new scientific method? Thus, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Scientific Revolu- tion leads us logically to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.
402 Chapter 16 Toward a New Heaven and a New Earth: The Scientific Revolution
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