The Scientific Revolution.

The seventeenth century was the moment when opposition to Christianity's cultural authority came to be located, not so much among scientists, but among intellectuals who championed science as an alternative to Christianity. Here "science" must be understood broadly as the new knowledge that resulted from scientific investigation, from technological advance, and from the empirical collection of data about new peoples and places. For anti-Christian intellectuals, science, technology, and empiricism (the observation and charting of the causes of natural phenomena) proved the Bible's inadequacy to explain the world and confirmed that Christian intellectuals were disconnected from reality. The jabs of these intellectuals, however, did only minor injury to the Christian cause. It was church authorities that held Christianity up to ridicule by persecuting those scientists whose ideas they perceived as a threat and by insisting that the new...