Category Archives: Religion

There are times of transformation and change in the course of human history, when new discoveries force human beings into reassessment of their model of the world, into changing their views often in a drastic and painful manner. Eventually, what seemed to be unbelievable and shocking at first, years later becomes part of commonly accepted knowledge, and a new model gradually takes hold, promising to solve all the riddles of our existence. That process took place more than once, and at the times when people have to adjust to changes in their worldview it becomes clear how much tension and difficulty is involved in adapting to new information. Sometimes human mind finds it easier simply to deny the existence of facts that do not fit into the established picture, sometimes it chooses to discard “old” knowledge altogether: it is more convenient to divide our views of the world into true and false, outdated and modern, than to attempt a more complex synthesis. The Baroque period is often seen now as the time of switching from the obsolete medieval outlook to the more “correct” secular vision of modernity. However, the Baroque thinkers themselves would, probably, disagree with this interpretation, and it can be argued that, even from the modern viewpoint, division between religious and secular, spiritual and material, intuitive and rational is not as clear-cut as it is often presented.Discoveries of Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Newton and others are seen nowadays as revolutionary developments that shattered the old medieval worldview based on Ptolemy’s astronomy, – and, in some ways, they did. New causal relationships, now understood as natural laws, were discovered. One could no longer think of Earth being in the center of the whole creation, or of motionless, unchanging, static universe, where everyone’s