“once Christians began to read the Bible for themselves,” as they did with the availability of printed books from the fifteenth century on, “they too picked out those ideas as salient in how they defined their relationship to God.” This biblical understanding of human nature “extended to how they did science.”62 Such a nuanced view of human nature implied, on the one hand, that human beings could attain insight into the workings of the natural world, but that, on the other, they were vulnerable to self-deception, flights of fancy, and prematurely jumping to conclusions.
