Once upon a time the Catholic Church dominated every area of life, particularly the life of the mind. Free thought was suppressed, and the West's precious Greek heritage was rejected. Miraculous explanations for natural events were routinely invoked, and belief in a flat earth was universal. However, in the 16th and 17th centuries, a few plucky thinkers like Copernicus, Galileo, and Bacon threw off the chains of church hierarchy and scripturalism to offer bold new interpretations of the cosmos. Thus modern science was born. While medieval theories about nature were often circular and religiously biased, the new discipline relied solely on impartial experimentation and inductive logic.

What I have rehearsed here is, of course, a reductive and erroneous version of one of Western culture's most influential narratives, that of the so-called Scientific Revolution. Though this version may continue to dominate the popular mind, 20th-century historians of science have disputed many of its claims. For example, Thomas Kuhn famously argued that throughout history scientists have been predisposed to interpret data in various ways—to see some things and miss others—according to paradigms that influence them, usually unconsciously. Similarly, Michael Polanyi contended that even the most rigorous scientific knowledge involves a substantial element of belief, and demonstrated that scientists are often motivated as well by seemingly non-scientific notions like elegance and beauty. Jeffrey Russell has made the case that virtually no one, either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, believed in a flat Earth. (Washington Irving, creator of Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow, invented the error and read it back into Columbus' audience with Queen Isabella.) And Stanley Jaki has demonstrated that the Scientific Revolution may in fact be better viewed as an evolution, pointing out that Copernicus and Newton had important—though seldom acknowledged—medieval predecessors, ...

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