Why did modern thinkers return to Greek philosophy and bypass the Church?
A viewer asks why, since the saints and councils condemned the Greek pagan schools as limited worldly knowledge, modern Westerners make Greek thought central to faith and knowledge.
Answer
In the Enlightenment, roughly the late 1600s through the 1800s, Newton came along and seemed to show, by his laws of motion, that Galileo was right and the Church was wrong, and Kant used philosophy to attack Aquinas's five proofs of God. For the first time two men covered the basics of knowledge, science and metaphysics, and nobody could compete with them. So thinkers said, let us go back to the Greeks and build from Greek thought, bypassing the Church. They felt entitled to because the Church had declared the sun's motion around the earth to be a matter of faith, and if it could be wrong about what it called a matter of faith, then it was worthless, since Christianity is an all-or-nothing game. That is why the Galileo affair matters so much: not because I care which body goes around which, but because it is the one instance they point to in order to shut the Church up. Newton finagled it in his day, but with Mach and Einstein we can now show, by their own science, that the Church was not wrong, though they will not listen, including many Catholic apologists. That is why classicism, with its Greek columns, and the teaching of philosophy still starting with Plato and Aristotle, skips right over the Church.