The discipline which is the ancestor of modern specializations like astronomy, biology, physics and chemistry was then called natural philosophy. It demarcated itself from theology’s concentration on the world beyond by exploring evidence from nature, the visible created world. We define this exploration as ‘science’, and the story of natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has in the past often been called a ‘Scientific Revolution’. In the modern West, that term has commonly been yoked to the thought that ‘science’ is a rational mode of enquiry, waging an ideological
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