Descartes’s most famous maxim, Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” centered the foundation for knowledge in self rather than in divine revelation, beginning a shift in what constitutes the final authority for understanding the world from faith in God’s divine revelation to human reason. Whereas Augustine had said, Credo, ut intelligas, “Believe, so that you may understand,” Descartes made understanding primary.

Many factors gradually led to the end of the close church/state union of Christendom in the West. Several of these, ironically, actually came as a result of the dominance of Christianity. The fifteenth-century Renaissance, which emphasized classical learning rooted in original sources, flourished among Christian theologians, but also began to dismantle unilateral control of the Church. The quick impact of the Reformation, also, could have only happened because Christianity was such a central part of society; most people already believed in the reality of God and the Bible as his divine revelation, and once the Scripture were translated into the language of the people, these underlying assumptions provided the fertile ground for Protestant theologians to argue their reforms. Likewise, even advancements in science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, beginning with the Copernican Revolution in 1543 and culminating with Isaac Newton’s discoveries, arose out of Christian curiosity to truly know God and what he had made.

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