The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [58]
How did Europe, of all places, manage to embrace such volatile new concepts? Why did Europe in 1300 begin to accept radical new perceptions of life, while other parts of the world rejected them? Islam preserved the books of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek and Roman classics, eventually transferring them to Europe where they were studied in the developing universities. Islam rejected the ideas contained in the classics from Greece and Rome. One rejection explanation is the Koran (the Muslim sacred book) is believed to be the perfect book (literally, no flaws), and anything remotely contradicting the holy book is abruptly discarded.[61]
In Europe, theologians read the translations of the classic works (Thomas Aquinas, for example), but they accepted these classics as indispensable. Thomas Aquinas thought the books added to his understanding of the Bible. Western Christian theologians believed God created a discoverable world of order; thus, rather than reject ancient thinking, Aquinas sought to incorporate it into Christian theology. Instead of rejecting the thoughts of Greece and Rome, they embraced them with enthusiasm. Christianity was able to accept this challenge, although not without struggle, and grafted the new thinking onto the Christian worldview. For example, Thomas Aquinas reached the conclusion that science, religion, and philosophy all reached the same conclusion of proving God’s existence. Aquinas’ conclusions are often termed Scholasticism—the reconciliation of logic, reason, and faith.
This acceptance was possible because Christianity told the theologians the world was an orderly place, and governed by a rational God. Thus, they could expect to find rational explanations for the world around them. Science gave them those explanations, and it did not conflict with the Bible or their view of God. This difference in thinking is the key to the all-important Renaissance in Europe. Those thoughts began a revolution of human ingenuity. Of all the differences made in painting and the arts, the real change came with science and the printing press. Science started looking at the world in an empirical way and fashioning man’s products after these observations.
Science and Pseudoscience
The word “science,” as used today, carries a tone implying “proven” or no dispute is possible. This thinking is erroneous. To make progress, scientific discoveries must be able to withstand a challenge, and when they fail, people start searching for better answers. All scientific theories are always open to challenge. New data is always coming in, so theories are always under suspicion. Even the raw data itself is open to challenge through additional experiments.
In science, theories are ALWAYS temporary. Modernly, cosmology theorizes how the universe started, and the predictions from these theories have proven correct thus far. “Proven correct,” meaning the data collected from experiments and measurements agree with the theories. For illustration, the Big Bang would leave its “fingerprints” behind, that is, some evidence showing a stupendous explosion. We have found that data. This marks cosmology as a true science, even though one cannot go back and recreate the universe. This is so because the underlying math is repeatable, and experiments on cosmological theories show they conform with reality as we measure it. To understand the impact of science since the Renaissance, one must try to