History Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 68

History - Essay Example Discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus also made people question existing view of geography by Ptolemy (the world is flat). These discoveries spawned a scientific revolution as it spurred new questions to be asked. There was much resistance to new discoveries because the people were skeptical of these discoveries and would rather stick with their old beliefs. But perhaps more importantly, resistance came from the Catholic Church because ideas from the scientific revolution challenged their hold on the masses by using faith and superstition. In other words, scientific discoveries threatened the social, economic, and political order based on religion, as Christianity was often the central coherent ideology in many European societies. The people would naturally tend to question the authority of the Church because there were now being offered scientific explanations based on reason and logic for many natural phenomena like lightning (just a form of electricity) and not an act of God. The scientific studies by Copernicus in 1543 theorized the Sun to be the center of the solar system and not the Earth as had previously been taught. This striking departure from past beliefs made people realize not to accept dogma as truth anymore; science started to challenge the many ideas of religion. The Enlightenment is also called as the Age of Reason and it was influenced by the Scientific Revolution in the sense every observable natural phenomena has to have an underlying scientific, logical explanation for it. The Industrial Revolution was similar to the Scientific Revolution because it altered the way people think and perceive the natural world. In other words, it was a big paradigm shift for them and society in general. In particular, capitalism destroyed the old feudal order in which the wealth of a person was derived from ownership of vast tracts of land with many people or serfs serving in bondage as peons. The old pattern or business model (paradigm) of