Divine Knowledge

Abstract

The phenomenon of modern science is due neither to human curiosity and wonder nor to any other feature of universal inquisitive human nature. It was born out of shattered faith, out of a growing doubt about the foundations of a particular historic religion, that is Christianity. The fundamental structure of the phenomenon was formed under the sway of the particular historical forces that shaped the spirit of Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. About that time basic Christian doctrines and ideas were, first, softened by the almost pagan attitude of Renaissance people, and then re-examined and redefined by Reformers. Renaissance Copernicanism had undermined the already eroded authority of scholastic philosophy by removing man from the centre of the universe and leaving him floating in the endless space. At the same time it boosted the confidence in man’s cognitive power. The Reformers kept on by challenging religious conscience, and by replacing the authority and mediation of the church with an exclusive trust in a personal experience of God and an equally personal understanding of Scripture. As the consequence the faith, which had lost the unique institutional support and which had accepted a plurality of interpretations of the sacred text, loosened its grip on human minds and created an opportunity for dormant philosophical and religious scepticism to awake and to flourish.