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at.” Christianity, he felt, was the only religion that recognized people’s true state of being as both vulnerable and great. To a Christian, a human being was both fallen and at the same time God’s special creation. But it was not necessary to emphasize one at the expense of the other— to view humans as only rational or only hopeless. Pascal even had an answer for skeptics 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, Pascal 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 cosmology of the seventeenth century, “finite man,” Pascal believed, was lost in the new infinite world, a realization that frightened him: “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces strikes me with terror” (see the box above). The world of nature, then, could never reveal God: “Because they have failed to contemplate these infinites, men have rashly plunged into the examination 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.”26

In retrospect, it is obvious that Pascal failed to achieve his goal of uniting Christianity and science. Increasingly, the gap between science and traditional religion grew wider as Europe continued along its path of secularization. Of course, traditional religions were not eliminated, nor is there any evidence that churches had yet lost their followers. That would happen later. Nevertheless, more and more of the intellectual, social, and political elites began to act on the basis of secular rather than religious assumptions.

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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 conception of the universe: the sun at the center, the planets as material 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: Nicolaus 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 material 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 work of the others, thus establishing 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 scientific 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 theories. It also appealed to nonscientific elites because of its practical implications for economic progress and for maintaining the social order, including the waging of war.