Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

eality that the faithful were allowed became more and more
narrow.
In time, those who would try to further explore and explain
the workings of the universe, thus broadening those perceptions,
would be branded as heretics, and punished as such, because of
the threats they posed to that certainty of the Word of God.
This was the unfortunate case of those answering the call to
expand the borders of scientific knowledge. The all-too-curious
likes of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Andreas Vesalius,
and other pioneering scientists like them tried – dared – to
look deeply into the “mystery” that Dewey had explained as
inciting that “quest for certainty” and, because of their
investigations into the unknown, or, at the very least, the “not
wholly known,” they were persecuted by the true strength girding
the status quo of their day: the Christian Church, regardless
of denomination. Because “reality” and the natural phenomenon
that vivifies it – astronomical, physical, chemical, anatomical,
physiological, and even mental – were still strictly defined by
Christianity’s “unchanging doctrinal formulae” of “one God, one
Church, one Truth,” any deviation from, never mind any denial
of, that predictive and prescriptive way of perceiving the
universe, the world, and humanity’s place in them both was
forbidden. Again, you were either a believer, a follower, of
that Word of God … or you weren’t.
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