Dark Ages, Renaissances, Martin Luther , Calvin and Science

475 Fall of Rome

475 – 1000 Dark ages

Middle Ages (500 – 1500)

• Crusades began around 1100 AD• Spanish Inquisition late 1400s• Plague• Famine• Wars• Feudal System• Writings were lost to western culture

Saint Anselm (1033 -1109)Contrary to Christian belief he felt that reason Could help better understand God.

Scholasticism – to join faith with reason

Use logical deduction to account for traditional theological teachings.

Ontological Argument for God’s existenceIf God did not exist, then something greater than He could be thought; thus, God must exist.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 -1274)

Argued Reason and Faith are compatibleReintroduced Aristotle theology

Tabla RasaEmpiricist Argued for the supremacy of reason – free will.

John Duns Scotus (1265 – 1308)

Criticized both Aquinas and Aristotle

Argued for the Supremacy of God’s willIf God’s will is subordinate to reason then it appears that God is limited, which can not be. Thus God must be absolutely free.

God’s moral rules are good because God willed them to be good, not because His wisdom recognized them to be. Thus one cannot understand morality from a rational standpoint.

Dunsmen, Duncemen --- Dunces.

Late Middle Ages – Famine, Plague, War, Peasant Revolutions

When you hit Bottom, there is no where to go but up!!!

Late Middle Ages

William of OckhamOckham’s Razor - the principle that when trying to choose between multiple competing theories the simplest theory is probably the best. (K.I.S.S!)

Nominalist – Universals (truths) exist in name only.

Charged with heresy & excommunicated.

Representation of a university class, (1350s).

The first European medieval institutions generally considered to be universities were established in Italy, France, and England in the late 11th and the 12th.

RENAISSANCE

Lorenzo de' MediciRuler of Florence and patron of arts

Lorenzo the Magnificent

The Elizabethan era (16th century to the early 17th century) - the English Renaissance with the work of writers William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser.

• 1450 – first publication – the bible. by 1492 – 20 million books had been printed.

1492 – Christopher Columbus sets sail.

Humanism

The view that we can make sense of the world using reason, experience and shared human values and that we can live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs.

Martin Luther

German father of the Protestant Reformation• Called for more personalized, less ritualized

religion.• Video

• Reformation polka

• Challenged the absolute authority of the Pope over the Church by maintaining that the doctrine of indulgences, as authorized and taught by the Pope, was wrong.

• Salvation was by faith alone without reference to good works, alms, penance, or the Church's sacraments.

• challenged the authority of the Church by maintaining that all doctrines and dogmata of the Church not found in Scripture should be discarded.

The Edict of Worms was a decree issued on 25 May 1521 by Emperor Charles V, declaring:

“For this reason we forbid anyone from this time forward to dare, either by words or by deeds, to receive, defend, sustain, or favor the said Martin Luther. On the contrary, we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic, as he deserves, to be brought personally before us, or to be securely guarded until those who have captured him inform us, where upon we will order the appropriate manner of proceeding against the said Luther. Those who will help in his capture will be rewarded generously for their good work.”

John Calvin

Ruled Geneva as a religious dictatorship- No drinking, dancing, icons, candles, incense and

obligatory church attendance for everyone.- In Calvin’s view, Man, who is corrupt, is confronted

by the omnipotent (all powerful) and omnipresent (present everywhere) God who before the world began predestined some for eternal salvation (the Elect) while the others would suffer everlasting damnation (the Reprobates).

The chosen few were saved by the operation of divine grace which cannot be challenged and cannot be earned by Man’s merits. You might have lead what you might have considered a perfectly good life that was true to God but if you were a reprobate you remained one because for all your qualities you were inherently corrupt and God would know this even if you did not. However, a reprobate by behaving decently could achieve an inner conviction of salvation. An Elect could never fall from grace.

Henry VIII (England) 1509 to 1547

Married to Catherine of Aragon (1509-1536), who after four earlier pregnancies, gave birth to a stillborn son in 1518, and by 1527, when she was 42, Henry had concluded that she would have no more children.

His only hope for the future of his dynasty seemed to be a new marriage with another queen.

This would require an annulment of his marriage to Catherine.

In1527, he appealed to the pope, asking for the annulment.

The pope refused to give him an easy divorce .The Wives

Henry’s Case

• Catherine had first been the wife of Henry's deceased brother Arthur. Her marriage to Henry had required a papal dispensation, based on her oath that the first marriage had never been consummated.

• Now Henry claimed concern for his soul, tainted by living in sin with Catherine for eighteen years.

• He also claimed that he was being punished, citing a passage in the Book of Leviticus, which predicted childlessness for the man who married his dead brother's wife.

Pope Clement

• The pope was sympathetic • Henry had been named "Defender of the Faith"

by an earlier pope for his opposition to Luther. He also persecuted Protestants dissidents as well as Catholics heretics.

• BUT granting the annulment would have been admission of papal error, perhaps even corruption in issuing the earlier dispensation.

Catherine

Catherine's nephew, Emperor Charles V of Spain, had laid siege to Rome and essentially was holding the Pope as prisoner.

Henry feared Catherine would lead a rebellion against him.

Opps, Anne Boleyn was Pregnant.

Henry declared himself the head of the English (Anglican) Church and took all monastic property for his treasury in 1539!

The new doctrines remained fundamentally Catholic with the exception of Papal supremacy.

The WivesHenry’s various children begin a series of wars!

The Result

The answer to Tom’s Question

One militant group within the Church of England desired to recover biblical teachings and practices. Influenced by the reforms of John Calvin, they became known as "Puritans," perhaps because they insisted upon more purity of doctrine and practice in the church.

Separatists

Another group, “Separatists” were frustrated Puritans and given up hope of reforming the church from within.

Separated from the Church of England By 1600, there were already several of these congregations in England.

Separatists varied in their beliefs and established various denominations including the Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists.

Recap

• St Thomas Aquinas endorses “Natural Theology”, knowing God by studying his creation.

• Protestant reform weakens the hold of the church.

• Rediscovery of Greek and Roman Writings!

• Humanism – The universe is a rational, comprehensible place that people can understand.

• What passes for Science Pre-Renaissance: The Monks Debate.

“In the year of our Lord 1432, there arose a grievous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For 13 days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition, such as was never before heard of in this region, was made manifest. “

Aristotle claimed that horses have 40 teeth. . . St. Aquinas said differently . . .

“At the beginning of the 14th day, a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, . . . he beseeched them to . . . to look in the open mouth of a horse and find answer to their questionings. At this, their dignity being grievously hurt, they waxed exceedingly wroth; and joining in a mighty uproar, they flew upon him and smote him hip and thigh, and cast him out forthwith. for, said they, Surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard-of ways of finding truth contrary to all the teaching of the fathers. After many days more of grievous strife the dove of peace sat on the assembly and they as one man, declaring the problem to be an everlasting mystery because of a grievous dearth of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down.”Note: Horses have have 44 teeth.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Proposed a "new method" for science. Bacon suggested that we use induction – working from facts to theory (instead of from theory, or the Bible, to "facts"). He was wary of hypotheses – which he felt were as likely to be superstition or wishful thinking than anything else – but in fact suggested what we would now call the testing of hypothesis in the form of a process of elimination of alternative explanations!

Big Break Through

The idea that Aristotle and other ancient texts could be wrong!

e.g., Aristotle said that heavier object fall faster than light objects.

Renaissance Science

Return to the idea that human reason and not faith can be used to find Ultimate truth.

• Astronomy

1543 – Nicolaus Copernicus

- Heleocentric (sun centered view of the universe) with data!

- As opposed to a ptolemic (Earth centered) view that had dominated for 1400 years and was church doctrine. Biblical reference. (5 days creating earth, 1 day on universe and 1 day on resting).

- Contrary to common sense.

Giordano Bruno: (1548 – 1600)-Proposed the existence of multiple suns and innumerable earths, each revolving around its own sun and potentially inhabited by sentient beings ~ a limitless universe. -Burned at the stake in 1600.

Pope Urban supported the publication of Copernicus but insisted on a disclaimer that Coperinicanism was a hypothesis. “Simplicius’ Disclaimer”

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)Uses of the Telescope (war and business)Galileo used it to peer into the sky. His finding supported Copernicus.

Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for life

His defense:“The Holy Spirit intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go”.

"My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth."

In 2000, Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology for all the mistakes committed by some Catholics in the last 2,000 years of the Catholic Church's history, including the trial of Galileo among others.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727)

If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.

‘This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being. …”

Sir Edmund Halley used Newton’s Laws of motion to predict the next occurrences of Halley’s comet.

Count down to Armageddon

When a body is once in motion, it moveth, unless something else hinder it, eternally; and whatsoever hindereth it cannot in a instant, but (only) in time and by degrees, quite extinguish it; and as we see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rolling for a long time after; so also it happenth in that motion that is made in the internal parts of a man, then, when he sees, dreams, etc. For after the object is removed, if the eye shut, we still retain an image of the things seen, though more obscure than when it was seen.