Reason versus faith
Copernicus showed that the earth revolved around the sun
Once, religion was a matter a blind faith, beyond question. Not so for Thomas Paine, the radical English political writer, who wrote: 'My own mind is my own Church,' in the opening pages of The Age of Reason (1794). 'All national institutions of Churches ... appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit.'
Challenging authority
Paine was not the first to question religious authority. In 1517 Martin Luther (1483-1546) said that, rather than trusting priests to give God's word, for the truth we should appeal to one of God's actual works, the Bible. Similar arguments have been made since, regarding many of the world's religions, though some, like Buddhism and Jainism, for example, are not based on the existence of a supreme being.
The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) shook established religion further when he published The Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Overturning the view that had been accepted since the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (100-178AD) that the earth is at the centre of the universe, Copernicus used scientific evidence to show that the planets – including the Earth – revolve round the sun. This implied that everything can be scientifically tested; that rather than living by faith, people could examine the facts of the world and their place in it. This was very challenging to the authority of the Catholic Church, which banned the book until 1835.
