The Protestant Reformation and the Rise of Early Modern Science document discusses how the Protestant Reformation influenced the rise of modern science in several ways. The Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura and literal interpretation of the Bible prompted a new literal reading of the "Book of Nature." This led to a shift away from symbolic and allegorical interpretations of nature. Figures like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, and Newton embraced an empirical approach to studying nature through experimentation and mathematics rather than symbolic meanings. Their work helped overthrow the old Aristotelian worldview and establish new mechanistic understandings of the natural world.

1. The Protestant
Reformation and the Rise
of Early Modern Science

3. The Protestant Reformation
• An attack on Papal authority and many of the doctrines and
devotional Catholic practices
▫ Martin Luther (1483–1546)
▫ John Calvin (1509–1564)
• In 1517 Luther began by criticizing the selling of indulgences
• Lutherans, Calvinists and Reformed Lutheran churches founded
mostly in Germany, the Baltics and Scandinavia, France,
Switzerland, Hungary, the Netherlands and Scotland.
• The new movement influenced the Church of England decisively
after 1547
• The Reformation was a triumph of literacy and the new printing
press.
▫ Luther's translation of the Bible into German

4. Luther and the Bible
In 1545 Luther recalled how his
meditation on Romans 1:17 had
fundamentally transformed his
understanding of the righteousness of
God.
“He who through faith is righteous shall
live”
“A totally other face of the entire
Scripture showed itself to me.”
God’s righteousness was not the
righteousness by which God judges us
based on our virtuous deeds, but rather
the righteousness by which God puts us
in right relationship with Him.

5. Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone)
• Sola Scriptura became a foundational doctrinal
principle of the Protestant Reformation – the Bible is
the supreme authority in all matters of doctrine and
practice.
• For Catholics, the Church, although not itself a source
of Divine Revelation, has a God-given mission to
interpret and teach both Scripture and Tradition.
• For Catholics, both the written Word, called Sacred
Scripture, and the oral or unwritten Word, known as
Tradition, are the sources of Christian doctrine.
• Protestantism attacked the authority of the Church
and the Patristic tradition.

6. The Bible in the Middle Ages
• The medieval four-fold interpretation:
• Literal sense – what the text states or reports directly
• Allegorical sense – the doctrinal content; the symbolic
meaning of the text
• Moral sense – application of the text to the individual reader
or hearer
• Analogical sense – allusions to secret metaphysical and
eschatological knowledge
• In the Middle Ages a proliferation of non-literal
interpretations of the Bible.

7. The Protestant Reading of the Bible
• Protestant emphasis on the primacy of the
literal meaning
• Reformers rejected the 4-fold way of
reading the Bible that had been deeply
implicated in providing the divine
institution of this symbolic order.

8. What is a Literal Reading of the Bible?
• Not a fundamentalist reading
• Calvin and Luther acknowledged that God accommodated his
message in Scripture to the limited capacity of those who were
to receive it
• When Moses spoke in Genesis of the sun and moon as ‘two
great lights’, he was not asserting some fundamental
philosophical truth, but was adapting discourse to common
usage
▫ A long-standing practice of exegesis
• The ‘intention’ of biblical authors determined the meaning of
the text – its literal meaning, not just allegorical, and other
meanings.

9. The Language of ‘Accommodation’
• There is no reason to think that biblical writers always
intended their words to be taken in an excessively literal
fashion.
• Some biblical language should be interpreted figuratively
(e.g. “God ascended” and “God was angry” and “God is my
rock”).
• It is often evident that the writers had a higher purpose
than to describe actual historical events or physical nature.
• But, one cannot assume Scripture’s irrelevance in all
physical matters from a few examples – every passage
must be dealt with on its own merits.

10. Recall the Two Books Tradition

11. A New Attitude to the Book of Nature
• Protestant Reformation in the 16th C saw the
emphasis shift from symbolic to a literal
interpretation of the Bible
• The transition coincided with a profound
transformation from a symbolic to a literal
interpretation of Nature
• Not a claim that religion alone produced the
scientific revolution; but that the Reformers’
theology was a serious contributing factor
to the rise of modern science.

12. The Medieval Book of Nature
• Originating with Origen in the 3rd century
in Alexandria
• God has infused the material world with
symbolic meaning, which if understood by
man, reveals higher spiritual truths
• This lay at the foundation of the
‘symbolist mentality’ of the middle ages,
and was the basis of the medieval image
of the ‘book of nature’
• ‘Visible things’ should be regarded as
‘testimony of invisible things’.
Ambrose of Milan (340–397)

13. The Medieval Bestiaries
• The Physiologus compiled in Alexandria
between 2nd and 4th C
• The bestiary tradition – animals and birds
and their religious and symbolic meanings.
• “In a mystic sense the pelican signifies
Christ; Egypt; the World. The pelican lives
in solitude, as Christ alone condescended
to be born of a virgin without intercourse
with a man… In a moral sense, we can
understand by the pelican not the
righteous man, but anyone who distances
himself from carnal desire.”
 Aberdeen Bestiary

14. The Renaissance Doctrine of Signs
• A continuation and expansion of the medieval
tradition. The Renaissance scholar had to be an
expert in ‘reading the signs’.
• A fascination for the ancient pre-Christian symbols
▫ Pagan mythology
▫ Hieroglyphics
▫ Aesop’s fables
▫ Emblematic
• “The expert practitioner of signs may recognize by
means of the signature the virtue inhabiting each
material being... For consequently such expert
signators discover a great many medicaments,
remedies and other powers in natural things.”
Paracelsus, Astronomia Magna (1537)

15. A World of Symbols and Signs
• The emblematic world view is … the single most important factor in
determining late Renaissance attitudes toward the natural world. The
essence of this view is the belief that every kind of thing in the
cosmos has myriad different meanings and that knowledge consists of
the attempt to comprehend as many as possible. To know the
peacock [for example]…, one must know not only what the peacock
looks like but what its name means, in every language; what kind of
proverbial associations it has; what it symbolizes to both pagans and
Christians; what other animals it has sympathies of affinities with;
and any other possible connection it might have with stars, planets,
minerals, numbers, coins, or whatever… The notion that the peacock
could be studied in isolation form the rest of the universe, and inquiry
should be limited to anatomy, physiology, and physical description,
was a notion completely foreign to Renaissance thought.
W. Ashworth, ‘Natural History and the Emblematic World View’ (1990)

16. Conrad Gesner, Historia animalium
(1555)

17. Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologia (1600)

18. Transformations in Natural History
• Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologia (1600)
• 33 topics on the hedgehog
▫ Heiroglyphica
▫ Symbola
▫ Sympathia
▫ Moralia
▫ Mystica
Johannes Johnston, Natural History (1650)
• No reference to symbolic meanings
• Physiological descriptions
• 2 page entry on the peacock

19. John Ray (1627–1705)
• The Wisdom of God manifested
through the Works of Creation
(1691)
• Ray’s natural history constituted a
major contribution to the new form
of natural theology
• A shift away from allegorical,
emblematic meanings in nature
• Literal descriptions of animals and
birds in his Ornithology (1678)
• No reference to nature as a symbol

20. The Desymbolization of Nature
• In the 17th century a series of new
attitudes emerged to reading the
‘Book of Nature’, which departed
from the allegorical reading
• But this was not the abandonment of
the idea of the Book of Nature, but
rather a new way of reading the
book of nature.
• If nature is a text, what is the proper
language for reading and deciphering
nature and natural things?

21. Different Hermeneutic Traditions
Medieval Catholic Protestant
Book of Scripture Patristic tradition and
Ecumenical councils
4-fold interpretation
Sola Scriptura
Literal interpretation
Book of Nature God acts through
intermediaries
God invests Nature with its
own powers and virtues.
Symbolic interpretation
The radical sovereignty of God
God’s power is immediate and
manifested in nature.
Non-symbolic interpretation
Theological
Anthropology
Confidence in the power of
human reason (Aquinas)
Rationalism (Descartes)
Skepticism about human reason
due to the Fall (Augustine)
Empiricism (Bacon, Boyle,
Newton)

22. Re-reading of the Book of Nature
• The shift of emphasis from the allegorical to the literal
interpretation of the Bible prompted a new reading of the Book of
Nature.
• There were other factors
▫ Discoveries of the new world
▫ Changing views of language
• Truth itself is reconfigured, not as an interconnected symbolic
order of nature, but rather as the divinely established, if
contingent, order of things.
• Nature reflects God's majesty, power, and providence, but it does
not contain a hidden network of symbolic and allegorical
meanings.
‘The world is not the image of God’ (Francis Bacon)

23. What Really Happened in the 16th and
17th Centuries?
• ‘Science’ (broadly understood) is a very old activity
• Flourished in many religious societies – medieval
Islam (9–11th C)
• In the 16th and 17th centuries (1500–1700) a new
attitude took hold in Western Europe – a period often
referred to the ‘Scientific Revolution’
• A transformation in the view of nature
• A new attitude to knowledge learning in the late
Renaissance
• The challenge of authority

24. The Overthrow of the Medieval Worldview
• The Christian Medieval Worldview (1100–1500)
▫ Based largely on the Greek philosopher Aristotle (3rd C BCE)
▫ An earth-centred universe (Ptolemaic astronomy)
▫ A universe driven by ‘internal purposes’ (telos)
▫ Combined with Christianity in the 12th C  ‘medieval
scholasticism’
• In the 16th–17th Century we find:
▫ the unraveling of the scholastic view of the universe
▫ the rise of new sciences of ‘physico-mathematics’
▫ the new mechanical philosophy
▫ the new emphasis on experimental natural knowledge

25. The Two Books Tradition
• A religious and philosophical concept originating in late
antiquity (3rd–4thC)
• The ‘Book of Nature’ was a source of God's revelation to
mankind: when read alongside sacred scripture, the ‘book
of nature’ and the study of God's creations would lead to a
knowledge of God himself.
• “Sacred writings are bound in two volumes, that of creation
and that of Holy Scripture”. St Thomas Aquinas (13th C)
• “The Universe is a book reflecting, representing and
describing its maker, … at three different levels of
expression: as trace, as image and as likeness.” St
Bonaventure (13th C)

26. The Rise of Protestantism
• A range of theological attitudes emerged in the 17th C with
regard to the question of to what extent God’s will could be
discerned in creation.
• Many scholars have argued that the rise of Protestantism in
Europe in the 16th C was instrumental in the rise of modern
science
▫ Robert K. Merton
▫ Peter Harrison
• The revival of Augustinian theology over Thomistic theology
▫ The doctrine of original sin
▫ We cannot trust human reason – it is essentially defective
▫ Left to its own devices, the human mind is prone to error
• This encouraged a greater reliance on empirical inquiry

27. The Voluntarist Tradition
• Protestants tended to emphasize God’s Power
and the contingency of God’s Will
• God’s will is unfathomable to human reason
• Only experience can reveal evidence God’s
power, wisdom and intelligence in His
creation
• This view appears to have been shared by
many key figures of the Scientific Revolution
▫ Robert Boyle
▫ Isaac Newton

28. The Scientific ‘Revolution’, 1543–1750
… experiments (the true foundations
of terrestrial philosophy)
– William Gilbert, 1600

29. The Copernican ‘Revolution’ (1542–1687)
• Nicholas Copernicus, On the Revolution
of the Heavenly Orbs (1542)
• Johan Kepler, The New Astronomy
(1609)
• Galileo Galilei, Dialogue on the Two
Chief World Systems (1632)
• René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy
(1644)
• Isaac Newton, Mathematical principles
of Natural Philosophy (1687)

30. The Rise of Experiment
• William Gilbert, De Magnete (1600)
• William Harvey, De Motu Cordis
(1628)
• Daniel Sennert, Hypomnemata
physicae (1636)
• Galileo Galilei, Discourse on the Two
New Sciences (1638)
• Robert Boyle, New Experiments
Physico-Mechanical (1660)
• Isaac Newton, Optics (1704)

31. Robert Boyle (1627–1691)
• The study of God’s handiwork was a religious
duty. By studying God’s handiwork, God’s
goodness and overarching existence would be
illuminated.
• But reading the book of nature requires active and
painstaking investigation of the internal structure
of things.
• Only through experimental inquiry can we find the
workings of nature.
• “The book of nature is a fine and large piece of
tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see
all at once, but must be content to wait for the
discovery of its beauty and symmetry little by
little, as it gradually comes to be more unfolded”.
Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso (1690)

32. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
The Language of Mathematics
• “Philosophy is written in this great book,
which is always open before our eyes – I
mean the universe – but it cannot be
understood unless one first learns the
language and distinguishes the characters
in which it is written. It is a mathematical
language and the characters are triangles,
circles and other geometrical figures,
without which it cannot be understood by
the human mind; without which one would
vainly wander through a dark labyrinth”.
Galileo, The Assayer (1623)

33. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)
• German astronomer, mathematician – one of
the heroes of the Scientific Revolution
• Imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf
II, later Matthias and Ferdinand I
• Known for meticulous attention to
observational precision and his three laws of
planetary motion
• Defender of Copernicanism – a controversial
view
• Abandoned uniform circular motion in favour
of elliptical orbits
• Sought physical causes of planetary motion

34. Kepler’s Thought
• Mathematical, empirical, metaphysical and theological
aspects were deeply interwoven in Kepler’s thought
• Here we focus on two of his most significant works:
▫ The Cosmographical Mystery (1596)
▫ The New Astronomy (1609)
• Kepler also studied theology extensively at Tübingen
• He was adept at textual analysis and biblical exegesis,
as evidenced in his lengthy defense of Copernicanism
in the New Astronomy

35. Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)
• The “sacred mystery” of the
cosmos
• A unique work of theology or
cosmology?
• “What the world is like, God’s
cause and plan for creating it”
• An investigation of the number
of planets, their proportion
distance form the sun
• Not classical subject for
astronomy

36. The Task of Astronomy
• Kepler broke with the long-standing
tradition of treating astronomy as a
purely predictive science
• Kepler’s quest for a ‘realistic’
astronomy
• “I am of the opinion that since
astronomers are priests of Almighty
God with respect to the Book of
nature, we should concern ourselves
not with the praise of our cleverness
but with the glory of God”
Kepler to Hewart von Hohenburg, 1598

37. Kepler’s Reform of Astronomy
• In 1600 Kepler undertook an intense study of
observational data with the aim of recalculating the
orbit of Mars
• An unerring commitment to empirical precision over
the next 10 years
• For a few weeks every 32 years, both the Ptolemaic
and Copernican predictions for the position of Mars
are off by close to 5 degrees
• Kepler broke with the tradition of uniform circular
motion in introducing a new system of elliptical
astronomy in 1609

38. Kepler’s New Astronomy (1609)

39. The Symbolic Image of the Trinity
• Kepler defended the idea of a finite spherical universe on
theological grounds:
“The image of the triune God is in the spherical surface:
the Father’s in the centre, the Son in the outer surface and
the Holy Ghost in the equality of relation between point and
circumference.” Kepler, Harmonies of the World (1619)
• God the Father provides a moving force for the universe.
The physical sun embodies the paternal motive for the
entire system
• Kepler introduces into physics the concept of a ‘physical
force’ – an immaterial species – flowing of out from the sun

40. Kepler’s Scientific and Religious Quest
• Kepler is credited with three of the earliest scientific
laws of the modern period
• He believed he was discovering God’s providential
plan that embodied that pattern of the cosmos, and
the divine laws by which God regulated the cosmos
• This was a motivating force of inquiry for many
thinkers in the 17th century
• The idea of a providential plan and divine laws was an
essential step in preparing the way for the secular
concept of the law of nature

41. An Age of Discovery
• The physics of Galileo, Descartes and Newton
• The discovery of new lands, peoples, animals,
plants
• Astronomical phenomena
▫ Supernovae: Tycho Brahe 1577
▫ Moons of Jupiter & Sunspots: Galileo 1610–
1613)
• New scientific instruments
▫ The telescope (Galileo, The Starry Messenger
1610)
▫ The microscope (Robert Hooke, Micrographia
1665)
▫ The air pump (Robert Boyle 1660)

42. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture

43. Rethinking the Scientific Revolution
• “Contrary to what we are often told
theology and science were inextricably
intertwined during the crucial years when
the scientific worldview was being
formed. At a much deeper level than the
superficial disputes over scriptural
interpretation that accompanied the
reception of Copernican astronomy,
theology exerted a subtle but significant
influence on seventeenth century
science.”
Edward Davis, ‘Newton’s Rejection of the
‘Newtonian Worldview’ (1995)

44. Robert Boyle (1627–1691)
• “All the laws of nature were at first
arbitrary to Him and depended on his free
will … For the most optimistic investigator
must acknowledge that if God be the
author of the universe, and the free
establisher of laws of motion.
• There is no final regularity in that world,
and that existential regularity [that we do
find in nature in the form of laws of
nature] may readily be destroyed at any
moment by God upon whom it depends.”
Robert Boyle, Reconciliation of Reason and
Religion (1675)

45. The Book of Nature [reprise]
• Nature and Scripture both authored by God, written in
different languages.
• Nature is a sacred book with a sublime message to
humankind.
• “The very book of Nature in which God the Creator has
proclaimed and depicted his essence and his will toward man
in part and in a certain wordless kind of writing”.
Epitome of Copernican astronomy (1621)
• The pursuit of science is a kind of sacred vocation for Kepler.
He referred to “the divine inner voice that calls humans to
learn astronomy”
• Nature is “to be celebrated, venerated and admired in true
worship”

46. A New Religiosity
• For Boyle, “being addicted to
experimental philosophy a man is
rather assisted than indisposed to be
a good Christian”.
• The study of God’s handiwork was a
religious duty. By studying God’s
handiwork, God's goodness and
overarching existence would be
illuminated.
• The Christian Virtuoso (1690) was a
manifesto of Boyle’s life as the ideal
Christian scientist.

47. Conclusions
• Contrary to the Conflict Thesis, religion
was a driver of empirical investigation
• The Book of Nature had theological
implications
• The Protestant reformation led to