6 - Scientistic Humanism

Summary

These things shall be: a loftier race

Than e’er the world hath known shall rise

With flame of freedom in their souls

And light of science in their eyes.

J. Addington Symonds

Just as Columbus and his fellow explorers had expanded awareness of the size and configuration of our planet, so in the following sixteenth century astronomers began to expand our view of the vastness of our universe – with such pioneers as Copernicus and Galileo to make demands on God’s creative powers even infinitely greater than previously envisaged in a relatively circumscribed cosmos. The New Science would continue its attack on the old Aristotelian certainties with Bacon, Descartes, Harvey, Boyle and other seventeenth-century inquirers.