A good prediction is one which defines its area of uncertainty; a bad prediction ignores it. - Jacob Bronowski

In effect what Luther said in 1517 was that we may appeal to a demonstrable work of God, the Bible, to override any established authority. The Scientific Revolution begins when Nicolaus Copernicus implied the bolder proposition that there is another work of God to which we may appeal even beyond this: the great work of nature. No absolute statement is allowed to be out of reach of the test, that its consequence must conform to the facts of nature. The habit of testing and correcting the concept by its consequences in experience has been the spring within the movement of our civilization ever since. In science and in art and in self-knowledge we explore and move constantly by turning to the world of sense to ask, Is this so? This is the habit of truth, always minute yet always urgent, which for four hundred years has entered every action of ours; and has made our society and the value it sets on man.

About 1660 therefore, Europe was in the course of a great revolution in thought. This was the Scientific Revolution, and it reached into all forms of culture. We sometimes speak as if science has step by step squeezed other interests out of our culture, and is slowly strangling the traditional ways of thinking. Nothing of the kind. The Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century was a universal revolution. Indeed it could not have begun unless there had already been a deep change in the attitude to everything natural and super-natural among thoughtful men.

Science changes our values in two ways. It injects new ideas into the familiar culture. And it subjects it to the pressure of technical change, in the way I have just been describing, until the whole basis of our culture has imperceptibly been remade.