And then I saw your post….

–“Holy crap, i was practicing a speech about the evolution of christianity and talking about Aquinas’s attempts to reconcile the Aristotle’s empirical views with christianity. That aquinas didn’t want christianity to follow the path of the muslims in banning any form of empirical logic, but at the same time kept knowledge of God through the bible as paramount. And in my speech I jump to Francis Bacon as being the one to refine the empirical method as a seed of the scientific method that we have today. Bacon, while relying on Aristotle’s empiricism simultaneously despised the flaws in how Aristotle carried them out, felt it was too discursive. Bacon simplified the method to focus on observations and systematically describing the object while being careful to avoid generalizing in the inductive reasoning process of what the observed facts can demonstrate. And then I saw your post…..”— A Friend

I think anyone who knows the of the development of scientific thought knows this. It’s cannon.

I think we’d say it’s Roger Bacon > { Newton + Francis Bacon + Galileo + Descartes} > …

And while we find arguments to the influence of Francis Bacon, and Descartes, they are minor compared to Newton and Galileo.

They were all relative contemporaries. Bacon and Galileo corresponded. But it was Galileo that gave us science finally, and he and Descartes led the battle against the church on behalf of Copernicus.