this is long sorry.
Explanation:
The Scientific Revolution was initially a movement that buttressed Christianity. Only in the late 19th century did science become a secularizing force.
It’s often claimed that empirical validation replaced religious authority. That’s a facile assumption but false.
In fact, Boyle and Newton were fervent Christians who believed that modern science provided endless and compelling evidence of God’s Design and existence. Indeed, this was the chief value of science. This attitude prevailed throughout the eighteenth century. Christianity gained a new modern justification in science.
The chief secularizers were not scientists, but Enlightenment philosophers. Their beliefs would become enshrined in the constitutions that would secularize society. The most important of them - Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire - were Christians. Their disgust with religious wars and religious tyranny, and their respect for the dignity of independent thought, drove them to challenge Christian authoritarianism. The Scientific Revolution played little role here.
A few secularists such as d’Holbach and La Mettrie were more clearly driven by scientific views, namely, atomism, but their views had marginal influence on secularism. Moreover, their atheistic materialism has a lineage separate from the Scientific Revolution. It encompasses Spinoza, the School of Padua (philosophers such as Zabarella and Pomponazzi), and the 14th century rediscovery of Lucretius, and it was born from philosophical considerations, not by scientific method. By contrast, whenever materialism intersected the Scientific Revolution, natural philosophers, such as Descartes, Gassendi, and Malebranche endeavored as dutiful Christians to re-infuse that materialism with God.
It wasn’t until the 19th century that science switched sides and became the ally of secularization. Two factors prevailed: Scientific materialism became a dominant viewpoint openly hostile to religion (signaled by Feuerbach in Germany and George Combe in England); and the theory of evolution finally retired science from confirming Design. The intricate workings of Nature no longer attested God’s hand, but were understood as having evolved over geologic time.
But this was a recent development. The modern stand-off between science and religion, and stories like Galileo’s struggle with the Church, lead us to imagine that science was always a secularizing force opposed to Christianity, but the opposite was true.
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