The Scientific Revolution and Scientific Discrimination

A New Way of Thinking: The Birth of Modern Science

From religion, today’s reading shifted its focus on science. The Scientific Revolution to be exact. The Scientific Revolution occurred between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was a time when people decided to explore outside of religious scriptures and culturally inherited wisdom. The scientific concepts that emerged were a huge eye opener since the facts that were discovered were very different to what they currently believed in. In their conquest for the truth, the scholars had to knock down the foundation of their knowledge and understanding and basically had to start from scratch. This reminds of Descartes’ “Meditation on First Philosophy” where he encouraged skepticism and to never trust something like your senses if it deceived you even just once. The church did not see the Scientific Revolution as something that was driven by their motivation to figure out the truth but more of a rebellion. Religion in fact was the reason why scientific development was not significant in some areas of the world like the Islamic especially since the Europeans actually derived their scientific concepts from the Arab medical texts, astronomical research and translations of Greek classics. Science and religion naturally contradicts each other and we still this until now.

The part of the reading that caught my attention was how science was used to legitimize racial and gender inequality, also called scientific racism. The textbook mentioned Voltaire on his view on Enlightenment from the Scientific Revolution but it didn’t mention his support on scientific racism. He believed that the Africans evolved from monkey while the Caucasians were created from the image of God. One of the biggest events in history that is connected to scientific racism was the Holocaust. We can see in this occurrence how knowledge can be manipulated and become dangerous. If scientific racism is to progress, I see it as something like the movie “Gattica”. One of the lines in the movie says that it was “a world where they have discrimination down to science” as the technology enable them to read an individual’s genomes and phenotype.