Forging the Methodology that Enlightened Modern Civilization presents a review of two millennia
of human strivings to attain a more realistic understanding of the universe and humans' place
in it. The earliest attempts were mythical accounts invoking miracles and intentional
explanations involving spirits angels and gods. It was the ancient Greeks who first achieved
a more rational understanding of the world as shown in their prescient theories of evolution
atomism heliocentrism and physical cosmologies.Later developments include the supernatural
worldview of the medieval period followed by the Arabic renewal of the Greek achievements by
translating their manuscripts and emulating their research. This endeavor led to the
scholastics of the Renaissance reviving and revising Aristotle's worldview and to the
introduction of some of the crucial concepts of later classical science. The latter
inaugurated by Copernicus' defense of heliocentrism followed by the remarkable discoveries of
Kepler Gilbert Harvey and Galileo culminated in Newton's universal laws forces cosmology
and optical theory which formed modern classical science. Newton's deterministic cosmology of
absolute space and time persisted until the introduction of quantum mechanics and Einstein's
relativity theories in the twentieth century. This book clearly establishes that there is an
inevitable conflict between science and religion and why science is prevailing.
