The Super Summary of World History (22 page)

 
Chapter 4

The Renaissance 1300 to 1500

As the Dark Ages were stumbling along their plague-ridden way, the Renaissance (means rebirth) finally put an end to them. After all the problems of the Dark Ages, light began to pour into the Western world.
A
flowering
of
human
knowledge
and
inventiveness
began
in
Italy
in
1300
or
so,
and
it
never
stopped.
Historians like to end things; so for the purposes of history, the Renaissance ended about 1500.
In
reality,
it
did
not
end
because the ideas and attitudes of the Renaissance never die in the Western world. The mind-set of the Dark Ages (Medieval mind-set—whatever) focused on the afterlife and the worship of God as the center of life. After the Renaissance, the
mind-set
looked to this life and what a person could accomplish here on earth as the center of life. Man began to imagine he could improve the world, and he could start without God’s permission. The here and now became more important than the life beyond this world.

New
Thoughts
and
New
Assumptions

The mind-set of the Renaissance never changed in the West once it was established. In the Middle East, with Islam, the medieval mind-set remained; along with hard results for the modern world.
This
clash
of
worlds
is
a
clash
of
thought
processes
. In Islam, their medieval mental outlook places the worship of their god (Allah) over everything of this world. This mind-set encourages young men to detonate their explosive-laden selves in crowded market places.
Islam
never
experienced
a
Renaissance,
and the resulting ancient view of life is at odds with the post-Renaissance Western world. The West might have directed the Renaissance to Islam, but Islam’s swift and permanent Renaissance rejection blocked the acceptance of Europe’s new mindset forever.

In the Far East, China, Japan, and Korea also failed to enjoy a Renaissance, but the continuity of their civilizations and flexibility of their philosophies allowed them to grow and change anyway. Nonetheless, without the arrival of the West, the Far East may never have entertained the thought processes of the modern world. The Renaissance came to the Far East via the West where it enjoyed at least partial acceptance.

Do theologians arguing about God matter? Yes, student of history, they do. As the here and now moved to center stage, the importance of man increased, and the things man could produce increased in importance.
Science
and
the
scientific
method
(much misunderstood) began to pry open the secrets of the universe. Advances in machines, art, writing, printing, building, and many more areas became common. The idea that life could get better, people could reduce pain, control crops, and do better than the ancients took hold. Once the idea of progress was established, the West never looked back. It is not that Western Europe rejected God; it was that Western Europe saw God in a new way. God was not against progress or science or thinking for oneself. The Bible was not intended to control every situation in life. Believe in God, but work for the here and now, was the new mind-set in Europe. Using these beliefs, the secular and spiritual worlds separated in Europe with tremendous implications for the world. Because Islam missed the shock of Renaissance, it failed to scrutinize its religious teachings, failing to acknowledge man might have more importance than believed.

Europe discovered the giants of antiquity.
[59]
The discovery of Aristotle, Cicero, Plato and other great writers and thinkers of Rome and Greece, fueled an explosion of new ideas in Europe. Painters discovered oil paint, canvas, and perspective with stunning results that left the ancients behind them. Masterpieces of sculpture and painting turned out by Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, and others are beyond compare. Most of these artistic giants were contemporaries which makes all this even more amazing. Not since the glory days of ancient Athens had the world witnessed such an outpouring of talent, inventiveness, and creativity.

The advance to the modern world had just begun, but the
speed
of
progress
accelerated beyond all measure. From 1300 to 1500, the world of the peasant saw little change; but from these foundations, the world would witness amazing developments. A person alive in 1910, for example, could watch the world go from horses to motor cars to landing on the moon in about sixty years. Look around your world and remember it all started in Italy about seven hundred years ago.

The
key
was
a
new
outlook
for
the
human
mind.
Once released, the avalanche of progress was unstoppable. The dazzling accomplishments of the Western world are unequaled anywhere so far, but these advances upset the remainder of the planet. A backlash is underway in the twenty-first century challenging the quantum leap forward brought about by the Renaissance and the scientific method (empirical method). The challenge comes from the Middle and Far East, and people not gaining (or perhaps
adopting
is a better word) the Renaissance mind and its empirical outlook. Those who challenge the Western mind-set have lost out on history. Without the challenge of fundamentally new ideas spawned by the Renaissance, old ideas and assumptions naturally stay in place. Areas of missing the Renaissance, or something like it, remain mired in thought processes traceable to ancient ways of reasoning.
[60]
This rebuff of new ideas is traceable to deflecting challenges to religious or traditional dominance in society. It is the ultimate rejection of the Renaissance.

How did Europe, of all places, manage to embrace such volatile new concepts? Why did Europe in 1300 begin to accept radical new perceptions of life, while other parts of the world rejected them? Islam preserved the books of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek and Roman classics, eventually transferring them to Europe where they were studied in the developing universities. Islam rejected the ideas contained in the classics from Greece and Rome. One rejection explanation is the
Koran
(the Muslim sacred book) is believed to be the perfect book (literally, no flaws), and anything remotely contradicting the holy book is abruptly discarded.
[61]

In Europe, theologians read the translations of the classic works (Thomas Aquinas, for example), but they accepted these classics as indispensable. Thomas Aquinas thought the books added to his understanding of the Bible. Western Christian theologians believed God created a discoverable world of order; thus, rather than reject ancient thinking, Aquinas sought to incorporate it into Christian theology. Instead of rejecting the thoughts of Greece and Rome, they embraced them with enthusiasm.
Christianity
was
able
to
accept
this
challenge
, although not without struggle, and grafted the new thinking onto the Christian worldview. For example, Thomas Aquinas reached the conclusion that science, religion, and philosophy all reached the same conclusion of proving God’s existence. Aquinas’ conclusions are often termed
Scholasticism
—the reconciliation of logic, reason, and faith.

This acceptance was possible because Christianity told the theologians the world was an orderly place, and governed by a rational God. Thus, they could expect to find rational explanations for the world around them. Science gave them those explanations, and it did not conflict with the Bible or their view of God. This difference in thinking is the key to the all-important Renaissance in Europe. Those thoughts began a revolution of human ingenuity. Of all the differences made in painting and the arts,
the
real
change
came
with
science
and
the
printing
press
. Science started looking at the world in an
empirical
way
and fashioning man’s products after these observations.

Science and Pseudoscience

The word “science,” as used today, carries a tone implying “proven” or no dispute is possible. This thinking is erroneous. To make progress, scientific discoveries must be able to withstand a challenge, and when they fail, people start searching for better answers.
All
scientific
theories
are
always
open
to
challenge.
New data is always coming in, so theories are always under suspicion. Even the raw data itself is open to challenge through additional experiments.

In
science,
theories
are
ALWAYS
temporary.
Modernly, cosmology theorizes how the universe started, and the predictions from these theories have proven correct thus far. “Proven correct,” meaning the data collected from experiments and measurements agree with the theories. For illustration, the Big Bang would leave its “fingerprints” behind, that is, some evidence showing a stupendous explosion. We have found that data. This marks cosmology as a true science, even though one cannot go back and recreate the universe. This is so because the underlying math is repeatable, and experiments on cosmological theories show they conform with reality as we measure it. To understand the impact of science since the Renaissance, one must try to understand the method of “science.” The “scientific method” requires research, careful observation, recording, and publishing. Why the recording and publishing? Recording and publication gives others the chance to test the results for themselves. Theories in science come from data. The data comes from careful observation and measurement of results during an experiment. The experiment is an attempt to isolate a few (hopefully one) pieces of data that can be measured.
Controlled
experimentation is critical.

Many fields claim to be scientific, but they do not predict; and their “experiments” are not repeatable. History is not a science because a repeatable experiment is impossible in this field. The
hard
sciences
(chemistry, physics et al) do allow repeatable experiments; however, in
pseudoscience
, nothing is repeatable. In science, contradictory data is acceptable, even if unexplained. In pseudoscience, contradictory data sinks out of sight so the theories remain intact.

Presented as science, evolution’s defenders claim the theory is proven; however, a theory is never proven, and the theories’ data cannot be subjected to repeatable experiments. Darwin admitted in his book (1859,
The
Origin
of
Species
) the fossil proof of his theory was missing, but he said it would be found. Many critics say those fossils were never found, but supporters of the theory assert otherwise. Some argue the Theory of Evolution is merely a pathway to
naturalism’s
acceptance. Naturalism is the philosophy of explaining everything through nature; thus, eliminating a need for God. Those supporting Darwin object that it is science, not philosophy; nonetheless, few argue the impact of the theory on philosophy or the impact of naturalism on post-modernism.

The problem is fossil discovery is not a repeatable experiment. We must simply take the expert’s word for the meaning of the fossil. There are finds or discoveries in anthropology, but nothing comparable to a repeatable experiment with controlled samples. The data is subject to an enormous number of explanations, but experts in the field only allow explanations fitting the theory. Challenging or validating a theory is impossible if the data remains open to widely varying interpretations. This was all worked out during the Renaissance. Men who began the scientific movement clearly understood the
repeatability
of
the
experiments
was the key to progress. With this insight, the world began to move forward with
empirical
knowledge,
and set the foundation for the inestimable progress to come.

The Art of Oil Painting