Renaissance Innovators who Challenge Orthodoxies (Nonconformists Wins)

Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when we think about Renaissance innovators is their contrarian spirit. It was a time when people began to ask sceptical questions that had never been asked before, and to challenge deeply entrenched beliefs that had long been taken for granted. For examples:

Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler asked:

“What if the Earth is not the centre of the Universe? What if it revolves around the Sun along with the other planets?”

Martin Luther asked:

“What if the papacy and the dogma of the Roman Catholic church are actually wrong? And what if we could read the Bible and listen to sermons in our own language, instead of in Latin?”

Petrarch asked:

“What if a person can achieve great things in this world without being ungodly? What if God wants us to use the intellectual and creative powers he gave us to their fullest potential?”

Andreas Vesalius asked:

“What if the dominant theories of human anatomy that have been unassailable for a thousand years are fully misguided? What if the human body functions completely differently than we have been taught? And what if we started dissecting some dead bodies to find out the truth?”

Paracelsus asked:

“What if everything we know about medicine is nonsense? What if certain chemicals and minerals, used in the right dosage, would be a far better way to cure illnesses than traditional practices? What if nature could teach us more about medicine than ancient books from Greece and Rome?”

Machiavelli asked:

“What if politics has nothing to do with theology or morality? What if it’s simply about using all means – fair and foul – to retain power?”

Descartes asked:

“What if all of our traditional systems of thinking, most of which are founded upon Aristotle’s ideas, are false? What if we set out to build a new philosophical system from the group up, by first doubting everything we think we know?”

Isaac Newton asked:

“What if conventional concepts of physics, gravity, and motion are inconsistent with reality? What if we need new laws and mathematical models for understanding mechanics?”

Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti asked:

“Why can’t a painting be less like wall decoration and more like a window into the nature world? What if we used mathematical and optional principles to imitate objects so accurately that they look entirely real?”

Christopher Columbus asked:

“What if we could get to the East Indies much faster by sailing west instead of east and circumnavigating the globe?”

Amerigo Vespucci asked:

“What if the Earth has a much larger circumference that we learned from Ptolemy’s cartography? What if these lands Columbus has newly discovered are not the Indies at all, but in fact another whole continent – a New World?”

Almost by definition, the Renaissance revolutionaries were nonconformists who were willing to contest previously held truths – beliefs and assumptions that had been accepted as absolute truth for perhaps a thousand years or more – and to reinvent their worldview completely from scratch. Many of them were branded as heretics or lunatics. Yet their propensity to break the chains of precedent and to challenge conventional thinking became the basis for a whole string of breakthrough discoveries and new philosophies that literally changed our world.

[Questions are taken from The 4 Lenses of Innovation (2015) by Rowan Gibson. Title mine]

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)