Passion of the Western Mind (2012)
“Any central focus of the new universe was maintained only by religious belief, not by scientific evidence. The Earth and mankind might be the metaphysical pivot of God’s creation, but that status could not be supported by a purely scientific understanding, which saw both the Earth and the Sun as merely two bodies among countless others moving through a boundless neutral void. “I am terrified,” said the intensely religious mathematician Pascal, “by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” ...Intellectually sensitive Christians attempted to reinterpret and modify their religious understanding to accommodate a universe drastically different from that of the ancient and medieval cosmology within which the Christian religion had evolved, but the metaphysical hiatus continued to widen. In the Enlightenment’s Newtonian cosmos, heaven and hell had lost their physical locations, natural phenomena had lost their symbolic import, and miracles and arbitrary divine interventions into human affairs now appeared increasingly implausible, contradicting the supreme orderliness of a clockwork universe.MoreLess
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