Challenges that created the Reformation
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For hundreds of years the Catholic Church was the backbone of authority figures in Europe. Since most of the population around the fourteenth and fifteenth century was Catholic, the Church created many regulations and beliefs that their followers abided by. This included everything from what occurred during the transubstantiation of the Eucharist to proving God's existence. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Martin Luther, William of Occam, Voltaire, and Galileo were all examples of individuals who either intentionally or inadvertently challenged the Church's authority in some way. Despite several centuries in between many of these Protestant reformers and Enlightenment thinkers, they frequently had similar and different viewpoints which challenged the Church's authority.
During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an innovative wave of intellectual thinking occurred. Men and women of science began to develop patterns of thinking that used logical steps of observation, data, and experimentation to understand concepts formally unknown. The French philosopher Rene Descartes pioneered one of these scientific developments of the eighteenth century. He developed a system of knowledge that used deductive reasoning to understand the world that covered every facet of the world; from the existence of oneself, to the existence of God. Descartes declared, "one would start by examining the smallest object, the easiest to understand and gradually move to a knowledge of those that are the most complex...