“Modern Science it can be said, began with Descartes. Like Francis Bacon he strove to create a new methodology, but his was based more on deduction than experience.” (Commins, Linscott, p. 159).

(Comment: Bacon [late 16th century] promoted ‘induction’ from experimentation, calling the method ‘new’. Descartes [middle third of the 17th c.] offered ‘deduction’ from general observations, suggesting it was ‘new’. Both claims are untrue. Deduction and induction long predate both men.)

 

Modern science, cosmology, physics and our worldview are based entirely on philosophical assumptions which might be wrong.  We looked at Copernicus, whose system and theory was incorrect, premised on circular orbits and ‘crystalline spheres’.  Copernicanism as first proposed, was largely incoherent, and organised around the ancient Pythagorean-Platonic concepts of Sun Worship and Aristarchian heliocentricity.  Copernicus provided no observational proof whatsoever for his theory. 

 

Neither did Kepler, who used Tycho Brahe’s detailed observations and may have killed Brahe to access his journals.  Kepler’s complicated geometry seemed to offer some ‘proof’ of planetary elliptical orbits and movement around the Sun.  Much of what Kepler offered was however inaccurate or wrong.  His maths could just as easily have proven the Tychonic geo-helio-centric system or geo-centricity. 

 

As a Lutheran devotee and a member of the ‘new religion’ which opposed the Catholic Church, and as an acolyte of Plato and Pythagoras, Kepler made the philosophical decision to support heliocentricity.  It was philosophy and maths, not ‘science’ which informed that decision.  ‘Out with the old, in with the new’, was the zeitgeist of Kepler’s era.  More here