Answer to Question #247804 in History for Jimmy

Question

One defining feature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that society saw increasing challenges to traditional authorities.  What kinds of authorities would the Europeans of the get challenged during the period of Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment and how did reason and rationality serve to question traditional beliefs?  What individuals were at the forefront of the movement to challenge beliefs and practices and what were their contributions?  How were these ideas spread across European society?

Answer 1

Before the Scientific Revolution, most educated people who studied the world took guidance from the explanations given by authorities like ancient Greek writers and Catholic Church officials. After the Scientific Revolution, educated people placed more importance on what they observed and less on what they were told. The Scientific Revolution in Europe produced a large flow of discoveries that changed European thought. These discoveries were in astronomy, optics, the science of motion, mathematics, and the field of physics. To prove these discoveries, scientists used the scientific method which helped establish facts.

The Enlightenment was a late 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement emphasizing reason, individualism, skepticism, and science. The scientific revolution led to the enlightenment by applying reason to society while using the scientific method challenged beliefs from the church and also the government.

Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and other humanists were at the forefront of the movement to challenge beliefs and practices and what were their contributions.

The ideas of the Scientific Revolution continued to appeal to elites and some natural philosophers, in part because they shared with the new science the notion of a predictable and knowable universe.