goin,
The creation of an orthodoxy around the idea that Christ was the same substance as God, rather than of like substance as Arius had it, had enormous implications.
It turned the church into a machine for the promotion of orthodoxy and the suppression of ideas - adhere to the literal teaching of a man who was a God, rather than loosely follow the example of a God-like man.
So, the first thing you get is the implosion of the civilisation of the Greeks and Romans on the altar of a strict Messianic interpretation of the universe. Why fight for the idea of the unholy and worldly Romanitas, when the world is due to end imminently? And then the dark ages which followed.
A thousand years later, the return of the works of Aristotle and others to Christendom from the Moslem East which had preserved them resulted in an enormous hunger for secular knowledge pushing hard up against this Nicene orthodoxy. But without any release valve. You see people like Copernicus conceding in the introduction to his work on the suncentric universe that what he is offering is simply a mathematical model, not the reality of the heavens. You see braver souls burnt at the stake or castrated.
Finally, we see the invention of the telescope, which was used, at first, as a method of watching armies maneouvre, until someone asked the mathematician and instrument maker, Galileo Galilei, to make one, and he had the idea of pointing it not horizontally towards the horizon and the landscape beneath it, but upwards to the heavens. And when he looked at Jupiter and saw its moons, the supernova event of Western science exploded into the consciousness of philosophers throughout Europe. The Church could only deny what was incontrovertibly so, and absolutely anti-orthodox, by refusing to look. The earth was not the centre of the universe. Look. You cannot miss the moons of Jupiter spinning around their planet as our moon does around the earth.
Lock up Galileo, if you will. But the power of his observation ruptured the religious status quo, and led to the birth of modern secular evidential science.
The council of Nicaea made modern science necessary. Nicaea meant that one day, there would need to be a much bigger, stronger idea to displace it. So in making incontrovertible proof necessary, Nicaea helped create the tension which the telescope and the mind of man finally resolved. And when Galileo wrote his discourse on the two systems of thought, in which he suggested the universe itself draws a more reliable picture of God's handiwork than any words in a book, he ushered in the modern age.
In my - much simplified - view.
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