Preparing for the Miraculous

eing human and the copernican principle 123now put to the test of reason and found for the most part tobe invention, superstition, fabulation, and sometimes outrighterrors or lies. Intellectuals invested themselves withthe right of scepticism and dared to exert it publicly andin their writings, even at the risk of their possessions, theircareer, or their lives. The Enlightenment was a period ofheroism, fully aware that the negation of an old intellectualand religious paradigm and the construction of a new onewould result in revolt as the precondition of a new world.Few people of the present day realize how much they oweto the activist thinkers of centuries not that long past.It was against this 17th century background that thescientific revolution took place. The principles then formulatedby Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and a host ofless well-known “natural philosophers,” are still the pillarssupporting positivist or materialistic science today. All canbe found, worded in various ways, in the works of Galileo 7 ,the Catholic scientist to whom they were the keys to decipherthe book of Nature.1. Science must be about matter.This tenet is nowadays so self-evident that one hardlyfinds it mentioned any more in writings on science. Yet atthe time it was a hard-won rule which created a split betweenthings material and non-material. Then the prevalentview was still that of the Chain of Being, the hierarchical ladderof (in ascending order) matter, the life force, mental consciousness,and the spirit. The new, materialistic statementdirectly implicated the definition and interpretation of Reality,and therefore of God. It was one of the main causes in theattitude of the Church towards the “new science” of whichGalileo was seen as the harbinger and figurehead. The sole7 It is a strange fact that, while all scientists are normally referredto by their last name, Galileo Galilei is always mentioned by his firstname.