The contribution of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century to the rise and development of the Enlightenment cannot be exaggerated. To put the matter simply, without the scientific revolution, there would've been no Enlightenment. The scientific revolution opened up new intellectual vistas for humankind, showing man a completely different way of looking at the world from the dominant religious worldview.

What in the past had been mysterious now had a clear and verifiable explanation thanks to the rapid development of natural science. For instance, the experiments of the great Italian astronomer Galileo had confirmed Copernicus's earlier discovery that the sun was at the center of the solar system. As this flatly contradicted the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, however, Galileo found himself in deep trouble and was eventually forced to make a public recantation of his views.

Nevertheless, the genie was out of the bottle, as it were, and Enlightenment thinkers were inspired by the example of Galileo, seeing him as a martyr to the truth suffering at the hands of a Church establishment devoted to keeping people in ignorance. For such thinkers, natural science, with its focus on experiment and observational methodology was a much more effective means of getting at the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live than the teachings of any religion.

Though few Enlightenment thinkers were outright atheists, they generally believed that knowledge should be thoroughly secularized and taken out of the hands of churches, which in Europe were still largely responsible for what could and could not be taught. If science could make such great strides without the assistance of formal religion, it was argued, why couldn't other disciplines such as history, philosophy, and politics? From the Enlightenment onward, knowledge became gradually more secularized, dethroning the various churches from their previously privileged role as promoters and disseminators of knowledge.