John Calvin doesn't seem like much of a good man. He lent his miserable personality to his view of humanity which in turn fueled his take on humanity. It's testament to humanity's ability to be self-loathing that he should have any followers at all willing to adopt his misanthropic Gospel.
I thought this way until reading an article on Liberal Christianity in America. There it stated that Calvin's view of humanity's fallibility. Calvin takes Paul's Epistle that 'we see in the mirror dimly' to mean that our knowledge will always be incomplete and imperfect. Understanding will always be piece meal and somewhat short of the truth. This is what it means for humanity to be Fallen.
Widespread acceptance of Calvin's doctrine of Human Fallibility, it was argued by this author, lead to the scientific revolution. He argues that fallibility is compatible with tolerance and a search for truth. Calvin himself personally did not have much taste for tolerance as he had his one-time friend Michael Servetus burnt alive for heresy.
But, perhaps there is something to this doctrine.
Maybe, the belief in human fallibility lead to a more democratic view of knowledge - that it was not something owned exclusively by the Church. Maybe it gave a more sobering view of knowledge as something obtainable not through pristine and precise mathema-logical methods of the Scholastics, but through the dirty business of scientific experimentation.
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