Según una opinión muy común, la ciencia moderna habría sido inventada por Galileo Galilei y René Descartes. De esta deriva que el racionalismo y el mecanicismo cartesianos sean partes esenciales de la ciencia como tal, mientras que en realidad su origen solo es filosófica, pues Descartes nunca fue un científico. Por tanto, en el Renacimiento no nació una nueva cultura (la modernidad) y una nueva idea de razón (el racionalismo, sino dos: una basada en el método experimental de Galileo y en una idea abierta de razón, y otra, opuesta, basada en la filosofía de Descartes y en una idea de razón cerrada que no cree posible encontrar la verdad en la experiencia.

The question about the ultimate meaning of the world is as ancient as mankind. The novelty isthat, while during the previous centuries we were able to search for an answer only through art,mitology, philosophy and religion, nowadays we can search for it also by means of experimentalscience, especially cosmology and the so-called “Theory Of Everything” (TOE). The paradox isthat during this search science sometimes seems to contradict religion, especially christianism,from which nonetheless it was born. In the present paper we’ll see why this is not the case, andwhy no theory will ever be able to completely exhaust reality.

Nowadays, it seems very often that social sciences, and even more the humanities, are trapped between two opposite but equally unsatisfactory alternatives: either to conform completely to the method of natural science (which push them towards a deleterious reductionism that disregards the most characteristic properties of their objects) or to give up the ambition of being forms of true knowledge (which push them towards an equally deleterious irrationalism that turns them ineffective and therefore useless). However, a correct understanding of the experimental method, of its nature and its limits, enables us to demonstrate the full legitimacy of other forms of true knowledge besides natural science, from which these other forms differ, not in regards to their nature, but in regards to the degree of certainty they can reach, since they use different metho...

This article presents the contributions of Galileo to modern science, especially that of definitively establishing the method of natural science, where not only observation is part of this knowledge but also experimentation, not using the essence of the things, but simply to study some properties, the use of mathematics, etc. It also indicates that cultural factors that favored the scientific process of this time contributed as the Greek and Christian faith in the rational order of the world, the rediscovery of Platonism and the Greek text mathematicians and finally the Christian faith in the creation of the world