In the few spare moments that I have had over the past month, I have been reading a book on the history of probability. It is not strictly a history book but takes a philosophical look at the development of the theory of probability. I was struck by the similarity between one of the major precursors of the Scientific Revolution and that of the Reformation.

During the Middle Ages, the opinions of the ancients (you know - Plato, Aristotle and friends) held a tremendous amount of weight. Truth was established through an appeal to their established opinion. This was considered the only form of evidence. For some reason, this changed in the 16th and 17th centuries in a very subtle way at first. People started asking why couldn't the earth be considered a witness to appeal to in addition to the authorities of old? Experiments provided the method of interrogating this witness. Soon these experiments became the dominant manner of determining scientific truth rather than the traditional appeal to Ptolemy or Galen. This fundamental change in man's understanding of evidence enabled the scientific advances that followed.

In a similar way, the primary authority during this time period in religious matters was the traditions of the Church. It took direct appeals to the Bible itself by Luther and others to spark the Reformation. The principle of sola Scriptura replaced the typical citation of church fathers and tradition. The Bible played the role of expert witness for the theologians just like the earth did for the scientists.