Why did it take so long for the human race to arrive at any decent scientific understanding of anything in the natural world?
I thought you'd never ask!
Disregarding earlier glimmerings, decent scientific understanding of anything didn't happen until a couple/few centuries ago.
According to BBC's James Burke, "Connections" and all, we should be able to thank Protestants for that. But that worm has most definitely turned against us on that.
What really drove the Protestant Revolution? Martin Luther posted some protests on a church door. Totally local event! But at the same time Gutenberg had this little printing press thingee. And somebody took that local protest and printed unlimited copies of it all over the region and it became an entire revolution.
OK, as James Burke presented it, you go into a Catholic church and you have all kinds of graphic art, since that graphic art is meant to recall all the stories for you, whereas in a Protestant church you have very abstract art, since you are expected to already know the stories from your own reading -- Story One, the first Sunday Schools were intended to teach the members how to read so that they could indeed read the Bible for themselves; Story Two, family friends, one parent Catholic with the other Protestant, the Catholic parent took their son to service, in the middle of which the kid suddenly yelled out, "Hey, who's that guy up on that cross?" Needless to say, that was the last time he ever attended a Catholic service (as far as I know).
Now here's the "weird" part. The basic part of that entire Renaissance thing was that people were now free to sample and test reality on their own and no longer have to rely on authorities to tell them what they had to believe.
Now the final irony is that while the Protestants may have earlier triggered the shift towards normalcy, now they are trapped in the sewage.
Now the "true Christians" have to insist on "evidences" that are contrary to the evidence,
™ Version 4.2
