Comparing Galileo, Descartes, And Newton

Galileo, Descartes, and Newton were only some of the enlightened thinkers responsible for the shift in scientific understanding. Previously, science in Europe did little without relying on the church, but these scientific thinkers set the stage for a modern scientific model that separated the spiritual from the physical and strived to learn the natural laws that governed the physical world. Each one of these men, through their different researches, helped Europe see a world that was not necessarily godless, but could operate at the same time under constant natural laws.
Galileo, most known for the use of his telescope, advocated the Copernican model of a heliocentric universe, which he published and supported through his own observations and measurements. This was an absolute opposition to the geocentric model, which was supported by the church because Earth, man’s home, was said to be placed in the center of the universe to show God’s priority. By opposing the beliefs of the church, and by supporting the heliocentric model, the church viewed it as Galileo proposing that God doesn’t love humans as preached. As a result of this, Galileo was accused of heresy and forced to recant his research. Although he was unable to stand by his observations, by using his evidence to support his theory he was
using a new scientific mindset to alter the way people think. “Cogito ergo sum.” which translates to “I think, therefore I am.” Pretty much sums up Descartes’ thought that the spiritual does not have define the physical.
The fact that he can observe the reality around him is a good enough reason to do so. Descartes created the experimental method which provided a firm procedure to conduct scientific experiment and collecting data and observations. Far from renouncing God, Descartes hypothesized separate physical and spiritual worlds by stating that the physical is governed by natural laws and not by occurrences in the scripture. Knowledge should be found in observations of the world rather than coming from spiritual
authority. Similar to Galileo and Descartes, Newton dealt with the universe through observation. His significance, however, comes from his development of physics and analytical geometry. The Newtonian laws of motion are three laws that explain interaction in the natural world. Through his observation and experimentation, everything from things simply falling to the ground to astronomical bodies could be explained without the reference of God. His explanation for gravity opposed the church’s teachings because the church was clueless to how and why the things stayed and fell to the ground so they developed a theory about how God and angels were responsible for it. These three men all believed that they themselves, through observation and experimentation, could learn the workings of the natural world without the reference of scripture. Galileo observed the sky through a modernized model, Descartes’ offered the world a mindset, and Newton justified reasons of why things do what they do. These men and those like them allowed science to separate itself from the church and draw meaningful conclusions about the world.