Gary Harmon SID – 62069 February 9, 2015
GED130 Introduction to Civilization
Unit 4 Question 3: Explain the impact of humanism on Christian beliefs in the fifteenth century.

Humanism is at its core a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes critical thinking and evidence rather than just a blind faith in established doctrine. At the height of the Italian renaissance when are things were changing in Europe people began opening their minds to different concepts of reality and questioning what had been put before them with the church. During this period, the notion of separation of State and Church is yet unrealized and hence Christian doctrine and dogma infiltrated into political and social affairs. During the fifteenth century, however, luminaries such as Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola helped bring humanistic ideas into Christianity. For example, his book Oration on the Dignity of Man states that transcendence into the divine is the highest form of the humanist experience. That is, by following all the tenets laid down by Humanist philosophy, human beings can move closer to God.
Because of the sharing of ideas and development of new technologies being discovered old stances on reality was no being regularly challenged. In the 1500’s virtually everyone believed that the earth was the center of the universe and the rotated around it. Nicolaus Copernicus was the first came up with a model of the solar system that showed the sun was at the center and the earth