Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

Finally, the Age of Reason sprang from the soil of a new faith in law and order. Modern science arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and filled men with visions of a new day of peace and harmony. These pioneers of modern science forced men to think in a new way about the universe: Copernicus (1473–1543), who insisted that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe; Johann Kepler (1571–1630), who concluded that the sun emitted a magnetic force that moved the planets in their courses; and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who made a telescope to examine the planets and proved that the acceleration of falling bodies is constant. All these discoveries, however, had to be united in one all-embracing principle that would explain the motion of bodies in the heavens and present the universe as one great machine operating according to unalterable laws. This was the feat of the most illustrious scientist of the Age of Reason, Isaac Newton (1642–1727). In 1687 Newton published his momentous work, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, in which all laws of motion, in the heavens and on the earth, were harmonized in a master principle for the universe, the law of gravitation.