Hugo Salinas Price -- 321Gold.com
Oct. 11, 2006 -- Up until the beginning of the 1600s, the philosophy of western civilization was the philosophy of Greece and Rome, preserved and developed further by the scholastic school of the Catholic Church. "Science" was then called "natural philosophy." Philosophy (and natural philosophy) included metaphysics, a field of study based on deduction which explained the material world as an effect of causes operating beyond the material world.
Along came two thinkers, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) an Englishman, and René Descartes (1596-1650) a Frenchman. Between the two of them, they laid the foundation of a scientific revolution. Thanks largely to them, metaphysics went out of fashion and remains so. Induction -- the discovery of physical laws based on experimentation -- was proposed by Francis Bacon as the only way to scientific truth; René Descartes helped powerfully with his development of mathematics. (Graphs, which we so dearly love and rely on, were his invention).
Classical philosophy went into decline and materialism ("all science is measurement and only measurement is science") took over the world.
The scientific revolution, by itself, would not have changed the world as much as it has, had it not been for a factor that enabled the scientific revolution: the invention of the steam engine working with the energy provided by coal. The scientific revolution plus coal brought on the industrial revolution, which historians date from about 1780.
One hundred years later, about 1880, it became clear that oil-based energy was the energy source of the future. Since that time, oil has provided abundant and cheap energy for the world. Oil is, and must be, produced in ever-increasing quantities to keep the world moving at an ever-increasing pace.
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