The Rise of Science and a Scientific Worldview

The countries that moved ahead economically in the first half of the seventeenth century—England, the Dutch Republic, and to some extent France—turned out to be the most receptive to the rise of science and a scientific worldview. In the long-term process known as secularization, religion gradually became a matter of private conscience rather than public policy. Secularization did not entail a loss of religious faith, but it did prompt a search for nonreligious explanations for political authority and natural phenomena. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, science, political theory, and even art began to break their long-standing bonds with religion. Scientists and scholars sought laws in nature to explain politics as well as movements in the heavens and on earth. The visual arts more frequently depicted secular subjects. A scientific revolution was in the making. Yet traditional attitudes did not disappear. Belief in magic and witchcraft pervaded every level of society. People of all classes believed that the laws of nature reflected a divine plan for the universe. They accepted supernatural explanations for natural phenomena, a view only gradually and partially undermined by new ideas.