ng up that could consider the study of anything apart from some implicit religious significance.
             Despite the concern about the cruelty of the religious debate between Protestantism and Catholicism, none of these new freethinkers had any desire to disestablish the larger matter of the Christian faith and its general world-view. Ultimately, what they would discover in their freewheeling inquiry into their newly expanding universe would throw the whole moral-intellectual-spiritual paradigm of the West into further confusion. The earliest upheaval came in a new view about the heavens and the earth. The underlying truth about our world "out there" was discoverable really only through careful mathematical meditations on that world, which could be done at home or in one's closet. An idea soon sprang out that the world "out there" was essentially a mechanical device that worked according to fixed rules of motion. Events occurred as the result of impacts among the various material bodies that are in constant motion within this "machine." The machine itself is devoid of soul or!
             vitality of its own. It simply responds to the "laws" of motion
             ...