QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

had simply not been understood correctly earlier. Despite his prudence and his willingness to
cooperate, Galileo was placed under house arrest in his final years and had to publicly deny the
heliocentric teachings in front of the Inquisition in 1633. In the conviction of Galileo, those
university professors who strongly opposed his views – which contradicted those of Aristotle –
played their part. 198
Galileo consolidated the status of empirical natural science by his research, by his writings,
which were available to a wide audience, and to some extent through his martyrdom. The
denunciation of Galileo resulted in a profound conflict between science and the church. It would
of course have been possible to find a modus for settling the conflict in a conciliatory manner,
but instead of this, an old man was forced to deny everything he had professed with all the
vigour of his brilliant mind and his ardent soul. 199 By holding to its view that the authority of its
dogmas overruled all the accomplishments of rational common sense, the church lost an
increasing degree of credibility with each step forward made by natural science. Galileo himself
did not, however, see any contradiction between the Bible and natural phenomena, he believed
that both were based on the divine word. With naïve confidence, he almost to the very end
wanted to be able to convince the church authorities that the true significance of the word of God
might be more easily understood by studying and interpreting the book of nature rather than the
Bible. 200
2.3.2. Bacon and Descartes as shapers of the modern world-view
Francis Bacon and René Descartes were philosophers who made a strong and constructive
contribution to the shaping of the modern scientific-technical era. Without their influence, it is
unlikely that natural science would have become such a powerful influence on the shaping of
culture. Bacon was a powerful rhetorician and visionary who modified the cultural climate so
that it became receptive to new ideas, while Descartes created a new and clear conception of
reality within which the newly-observed natural phenomena could be located and explained.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a contemporary of Galileo. He was the most distinguished
198 Trusted 1991, 48. Tarnas 1998, 260. White 1998, 77-78.
199 Dijksterhuis 1986, 384.
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