What types of beliefs about the world were necessary for developing the scientific method?

Question

Was there any religious content in those beliefs that lead to its development or was it a completely secular, mechanistic, advancement?

Answer 1

Many people don't realize that religion played a huge role in the developement of science. The crusades allowed an interesting mixture of Muslim and Christian ideas. In particularly if it weren't for the crusades and their religious motivation, the europeans wouldn't have learned anything about algebra, euclidean geometry, aristotlean physics, basic medicine, and optics. Science was motivated by the belief that the world and the mind of man were created by an all knowing being. Thus one of the primary tenents of science: the world is ordered and is able to be understood by mankind. Many early physicists were motivated by religion. For example, Pascal, who did a lot of work with pressure, was motivated by the arguements of some atheists in his day who said that there was no God because there was no vaccuum. Even in this day and age there are many scientists who only study science because they want to "know the mind of God". (myself included) Ultimately, science is an interesting blend of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious thinking.

Answer 2

As many 'scientists' of early science were philosophers as well, there were few of them that held strict religious beliefs. They were of open mind and thought was most often not the common beliefs of the day. In order to prove their postulates experimentation had to be conducted until such time their hypothesis was proven or disproven. Therefore the dawn of scientific method. Primarily of secular nature? History would tend to agree. Mechanistic, in some cases. For advancement, an unequivocal YES.

Answer 3

Principles of reasoning are abstract. Empirical observations (which should be objective) are drawn from the world. Science evolved from philosophy which had evolved from religion. Early university education (which led to the scientific method) prepared students for law, medicine or the clergy. The scientific method was developed by men fully aware of religion, but who found that not every explanation had to derive from God.

Answer 4

Basically secular, laic beliefs, not religeous. But many of the people who developed these beliefs believed in God. They just considered that God had made nature and that now nature had laws of its own, which needed to be discovered. Such an example is Galieleo Galilei

Answer 5

:

Characterizations (Quantifications, observations, and measurements)
Hypotheses (theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations and measurements)
Predictions (reasoning including logical deduction from hypothesis and theory)
Experiments (tests of all of the above)

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Answer 6

religion is as diametrically opposed to scientific method as it gets