Asher K. Sisneros
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Western Civilization Since 1493
October 14, 2024
It is a misconception that the Scientific Revolution was the first attempt to understand the universe in terms of rationality. Many Scholastics engaged in this behavior, and the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution did build on some ideas from the past. In other words, it is not the case that scientists before this era were dumb rubes and those following Francis Bacon were “enlightened” and smart. Such an oversimplification would be absurd. It is certainly true that contributors to the Scientific Revolution relied more on empirical evidence—distinct from so-called “rationality”— than their more theologically inclined predecessors. But the pejorative “Dark Ages” as a label for the entire medieval era is unfounded, and most modern scholars acknowledge this. So the term “revolution” is not accurate in the sense that members of the Scientific Revolution were the first people to think about these scientific ideas, as one person’s work usually built on the work of a predecessor (e.g., Lasovier and Priestley), but the historian Thomas Woods does defend the term “revolution” just because of the gargantuan level of output during this period. While it was not necessarily a revolution as a complete break away from the past, the level of output during this period reached an unprecedented height.
Before delving into the heliocentric-geocentric debate that occurred during the Scientific Revolution, it is important to explain the backdrop to the Scientific Revolution. Throughout the Middle Ages, cosmology rested on the teachings of Aristotle and Ptolemy. For centuries, their teachings were accepted as the ultimate authority on science and philosophy. However, the 16th and 17th centuries gave rise to a scientific skepticism. This was not anything particularly new. Institutional skepticism started in 1346 during the Black Death and continued to grow in a linear fashion. By the Protestant Reformatioin, the once-revered papacy was questioned and a complete reversal occurred: where popes once crowned monarchs like Charlemagne, in England, King Henry VIII defied and replaced the pope. Then there were also the radical constitutionalists like Juan de Mariana who questioned the authority of the State and claimed citizens could morally assassinate monarchs. It was only a matter of time until this skepticism of authority spread into the scientific realm. And by the 16th century, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was condemning the once-revered Aristotle and calling for a permanent separation between theology and science.
The Ptolemaic-Aristotelian (geocentric) consensus was that the Earth is a motionless and at the center of the universe, while all the other planets are perfect spheres and orbit the Earth. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was one of the first people to voice an objection to this consensus, and the heliocentric debate that did not end until Newton is called the Copernican Revolution after him. He did not believe the heliocenetric model, which states that all planets including the Earth orbit the Sun, was a perfect model, but he believed it was better than the geocentric model and solved unanswered problems. However, the Protestants pushed back against Copernicus because the heliocentric model seemed to contradict the Genesis account of creation. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) looked at Copernicus’ model and, unlike Copernicus, believed the heliocentric model was in fact completely correct but solved the discrepancies by explaining that planetary orbits are elliptical, not circular, and that planetary speed increases near the Sun. Galileo (1564-1642) then invented an incredibly powerful telescope and, upon examination, realized the Moon was not a perfect sphere as the geocentrists had posited. Moreover, he also discovered that Jupiter has four moons orbiting it, which meant not all planets orbited the Earth, since clearly four moons were orbiting Jupiter. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) finally brought an end to the Copernican Revolution by defining the laws of motion and realizing these laws apply to space as well as on Earth. One of the objections to the heliocentric model was the question of why all the planets do not just “fly away” into space; why do they stay in orbit? Newton explained that the laws of gravitation apply between planets, and since the Sun has the largest mass, it exerts a gravitational pull on all the other planets keeping them in orbit. And this answer brought an end to the debate and ended the Copernican Revolution, giving rise to the universal belief in the heliocentric model.
Asher Sisneros 