Part of the genius of modern empirical science was precisely its use of recurring natural events to provide observable checks on hypotheses. No more would scientists content themselves with speculative reason unchecked by sensory experience. According to Bacon, the Greeks were simply wrong in their approach to nature because they failed to regard it as created. Creation may have been a mere doctrine in earlier centuries, but to many in the late Middle Ages it supplied the impetus to rethink the ancients' view of the natural world. Realizing the implications of a created nature opened the door to emphasizing the importance of sensory experience.
Empirical science follows directly from belief in a created and therefore contingent nature.
Not until the end of the 17th century would Newton reach a new understanding of physical reality. In the meantime, a certain sense of delight and fascination came in exposing cracks in the Aristotelian edifice. The voyages of discovery in the 15th century not only opened up the New World with new trade routes, they gave empirical proof that ancient knowledge was both incomplete and in many instances wrong. The explorers contradicted the ancients by experience. They, for example, did not fall off the edge of the earth when sailing uncharted waters.