those who clung to authority and tradition and those who believed in man’s individual connection to God. Protestantism, with its streak of populist anti-authoritarianism, was born.
Luther’s grand movement, and the very idea that knowledge could be accessible by individuals without an intervening authority, had been made possible by the 1451 invention of the printing press. For the first time, books could be mass-produced, permitting knowledge and its attendant power to be spread widely. Luther used this new technology to distribute power among the people with his 1534 translation of the Bible from Greek, Hebrew, and Latin into common German. More than one hundred thousand copies of the Luther Bible were sold within forty years of its publication (an unfathomable number for the time), and millions heard its message. People could suddenly study the Bible and come to their own conclusions without the intercession of a pope or priest. The printing press laid the intellectual foundation for the scientific revolution that was to come.
This marked an important moment in human history, when Western thought was split into twin, competing paths: the authoritarian and the anti-authoritarian. The other three major sources of human power—government, economics, and science—developed similar authoritarian, top-down and anti-authoritarian, bottom-up strains of thought over the ensuing centuries as power was demystified.
As in religion, in government there are authoritarian, totalitarian models such as monarchy, dictatorship, and fascism on the one hand and antiauthoritarian models like democracy and anarchy on the other. In economics, communism and capitalism are the opposing theories, as are (less extremely) the ideas of John Maynard Keynes about the need for government stewardship of the economy on the one hand and Milton Friedman’s laissez-faire, free-market focus on the other. And in renaissance science, the split fell between the two competing paths of knowledge that were first proposed by the Catholic René Descartes and the Protestant Francis Bacon.
Descartes versus Bacon
Descartes stressed the importance of deduction, a method of reasoning from the top down using “first principles,” beginning with his famous line “I think, therefore I am.” In his 1637 Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, he began by embracing skepticism and approaching the entire world with doubt, free of preconceived notions. There was nothing, he said, he could count on as real if all things were subject to skepticism. Ah, but wait—he was here, thinking these thoughts. Therefore, he must be real.
Beginning with his mind as the only reliable foundation, Descartes regarded the senses as unreliable and the sources of untruth and illusion. He concluded that reliable truth about reality could be determined only by a mind that was separate and distinct from the physical body, thereby originating the concept of the mind-body split, or Cartesian (from “Descartes”) dualism. To Descartes, a conclusion is valid if and only if it follows logically from the premise, as do the syllogisms Aristotle defined in his classic book on logic, Organon. For example:
All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
Bacon, in contrast, thought Aristotle had gotten it all wrong. He liked the ideas of Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon before him, and he stressed nearly the opposite approach. Bacon was a lawyer who worked under Edward Coke, the attorney general, a position he would eventually assume himself. Toward the end of his legal career, he turned more of his attention to science and published what would become a foundational volume, Novum Organum Scientiarum, or “New Organon”—a “new instrument” of science. It was a devastating attack on Aristotle’s book and the logic of the Greeks with its emphasis on top-down reasoning and disdain for experimentation. In it he argued instead for using the inductive method of reasoning, which underlies much of the scientific method we use today. Inductive reasoning proceeds from the bottom up by observing with the senses and then building in logical steps to reach a general conclusion about reality. An example would be:
All observed swans are white; therefore, all swans are white.
This method clearly has a limitation: its conclusions are provisional and always subject to disproof. All it takes is the discovery of a single nonwhite swan to invalidate the statement. This is why one hears scientists talking about the “theory” of evolution. It is not an observed fact; rather, it is a conclusion that is supported by all the facts observed so far, but one can never be absolutely sure because one can never see the whole universe at once, and because of the provisional nature of inductive reasoning, scientists hold out the possibility, no matter how small, that it could be invalidated. Science thus demands intellectual honesty, and a scientific conclusion will always contain a provisional statement:
All observed swans are white; therefore, all swans are probably white.
In practice, Bacon’s method doesn’t bother scientists, or most reasonable people, because the chances of being wrong, while present, are usually in a practical sense very small. It is, for example, theoretically possible that chemical processes taking place in your body could cause you to spontaneously combust, but we don’t live our lives worrying about it because the probability is extremely small. That is why math and statistics have become such important parts of science: they quantify the relative probability that a conclusion is true or false.
Puritan Science
Since Protestantism was rooted in a protest against Catholic authority, Puritans did not take kindly to the Catholic Church’s indictment of Galileo, or to the idea that opinions that were supported by observation of nature, and thus were evidence of God’s law, could be decreed contrary to holy scripture. In fact, the growing conflict between the Puritans and the Church of England—established in 1534 because the Roman Catholic Church would not annul the marriage of King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon, preventing him from marrying again—arose because the Puritans thought the Church of England was not anti-Catholic enough. Thus their name: Puritans.
In 1604, their frustration led King James to authorize a new translation of the Bible, the King James version, to address their concerns. Nonetheless, many Puritans viewed having a monarch as the spiritual leader of the church (as is the case with the Church of England) as an irreconcilable compromise, a substitution of king for pope that had been made solely for the matrimonial benefit of Henry VIII. The monarchy’s royal prerogative seemed to them yet another hypocritical corruption of authority, akin to the Catholic Church’s “indulgences.”
Puritans became even more upset when James’s successor, King Charles I, hurriedly married the French Catholic princess Henrietta Maria within two months of his coronation, before Parliament could meet to forbid it. Soon after, he began appointing Catholic Lords to his court. He appointed William Laud the new Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Laud replaced the wooden communion tables with stone altars, installed railings around them, and ordered the use of candles, causing Puritans to complain that he was altering the Anglican churches to be more Catholic. Laud responded by closing Puritan churches and firing nonconformist clergy.
Separatist Congregationalist Puritans began emigrating to America again, fearing a return of Catholic absolutism and partisan political reprisals. Other Puritans organized as dissenters to King Charles’s use of arcane laws to levy personal taxes and his aggressive authoritarian power grab. Edward Coke, now in Parliament, sought to limit the bottom-wing king’s powers, for example by serving as chief author of the Petition of Right, passed in 1628, which laid out several basic rights that the United States would later adopt. Among these were that taxes could be levied only by Parliament, not by the king; that martial law could not be imposed in peacetime; that prisoners had to be able to challenge the legitimacy of their detentions through a writ of habeas corpus; and that soldiers could not be billeted in private residences. But in 1629, Charles rebuffed this attempt, dissolved Parliament, and asserted personal rule by extended royal prerogative. This state of affairs lasted until the English Civil Wars, from 1642 to 1646, in 1648, and from 1650 to 1651, which pitted Royalists (authoritarians) against the largely Puritan Parliamentarians (antiauthoritarians) and eventually led to both Laud’s and Charles’s beheadings.
After the Civil Wars ended and the Church of England was restored, many Puritans broke away. At first these “nonconformists” were again persecuted, but by the