210 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Probably none of the reformers thought they were encouraging people to
think outside the box on matters of faith. And yet, calling the quest for sal-
vation the province of the individual legitimized the authority of each in-
dividual to think what he or she wanted about God, no matter what the
reformers intended. And legitimizing the authority of individuals to think
what they wanted about God implicitly legitimized their authority to
think what they wanted about anything.
It was this aspect of the Reformation that cross-fertilized with the Eu-
ropean rediscovery of ancient Greek thought, the renewal of interest in
pagan Latin writers, and the trickling influence of Arab thinkers. Individ-
uals who felt they could seek salvation on their own terms were naturally
going to speculate freely on the nature of God and the world and with all
these interesting ideas floating around, some people inevitably were going
to start playing with new ways to put together the pieces of the puzzle they
saw around them.
If the Church had still been ubiquitous and all-powerful, every idea
would have required that an addendum be accounted for: how does it re-
late to the faith? If one were thinking, "I wonder why everything falls
down instead of up," the voice of the church inside one's conscience would
immediately ask, "and how will the explanation help me to be a better
Christian?" There's only so far and so fast a mind can roam if it's dragging
around this baggage all the time.
Liberated from this baggage, Copernicus could posit that the Earth
went around the sun. This simple and daring hypothesis explained every-
thing about the motion of the stars and planets except for why God would
make the universe revolve around something other than His most precious
creation. If you didn't have to deal with that second part, you could much
more easily work out an answer to the first part. A lot of nature's puzzles
were like that: they became much easier to explain if you didn't have to
square your explanation with the dictates of the faith.
For most thinkers, this didn't mean contradicting the faith; it just
meant that faith was one thing and explaining nature was another: they
were two separate fields of inquiry and never did the twain have to meet.
Separating inquiries about nature from the framework of faith enabled Eu-
ropeans to come up with a dazzling array of scientific concepts and dis-
coveries in the two centuries following the Reformation.