The European Enlightenment

The lessons of The Renaissance (the re-discovery of the immense value of human reasoning as the impetus for humankind’s progress, especially as learned by the great Classic Greek and Roman philosophers, mainly Aristotle) and The Reformation (i.e., the officially accepted Church in political and ecclesiastical power is not necessarily the only beacon of truth in the known world of the day) set the stage for a mind-boggling one hundred years or so of pervasive change that would make the world a very different place for centuries to come. This historic period of time during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is now called The Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment had its formative experiences in England and France with the "natural philosophies" of men such as Isaac Newton/John Locke and Rene Descartes/Voltaire respectively. The time was right and the new movement spread across Europe like a social and intellectual brushfire, extending its branches to Scotland, Germany, Italy, Spain and even to the New World. Human reason, experimental observation and systematic reporting of the universe’s natural laws and progress were the keywords of the philosophes movement, as it came to be called. Although God may have created His universe in the beginning, He had left it to humankind to learn about a rather well-ordered natural world in which human beings could learn enough to solve problems and make the world a much better place in which to live (Deism). Human reason, by learning about the surrounding universe, could cure humankind of past ills, bring about technological progress and help the world achieve utopian governments and a perfect society.

This, of course, set the stage for an awkward tension between religion and science: while there was overt disagreement with the powerful rule of the (Roman Catholic) Church over against the new intellectualism and desire for truth by experimentation, the philosophes still tacitly recognized the authority of the Church and gave a cumbersome deference to it. In Europe, the Roman Catholic Church, still assessing its losses from The Reformation, had officially censured Galileo Galilei in 1633 and The Inquisition was still looking for those who challenged Roman Catholic orthodox doctrine and teaching. The movement of the philosophes and the technological advances of the new age of human reasoning made for strained, but somehow contained, debate and disagreement between religion and science.

The classic debate in the heated discussions about creation during this time period seemed to center around the perceived role of God in the universe. Men of religion believed, according to their doctrine, that God had created the world and was still involved in running the universe and all within it in an ongoing way (called "Theism"). Men of science heartily asserted the "Deistic" point of view, that God had created the universe, but then bowed out with the intention to let mankind learn about the laws of nature around him and, then, improve the world.

The gap between the Church and natural philosophy widened and remained this way well into the twentieth century. As the new, more specialized sciences and sub-sciences developed and became more disciplined in natural observation, hypothesis, well-ordered experimental method and appropriate conclusion (the "Scientific Method"), men of science gradually moved away from asserting that God had a hand at all in the universe: perhaps even the Creation itself could be explained scientifically if more and more natural law could be discovered. Perhaps, even more, the "philosopher-scientist" contentions of Plato, Aristotle and others during the Greek classical age were true: that there was no Creation at all, that the universe was eternal, with no beginning and no end.

 

References:

Brinton, Crane, John B. Christopher and Robert Lee Wolff. (1967). The Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Science. In A History of Civilization (Volume Two). (pp. 45-46), Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Brooke, John Hedley. (1991). Science and Religion in the Enlightenment (chapter v). In Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. (pp.152-191), Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Ferris, Timothy. (1997). Preface. In The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. (p.19), New York: Touchstone Books.

Halsall, Paul. (1997). The Scientific Revolution in the 17th Century. On The Modern History Sourcebook Website (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/)

Hooker, Richard. (1997-98). The European Enlightenment: The Scientific Revolution. On The World Cultures Website (http://www.wsu.edu/8000/~dee/ENLIGHT/ENLIGHT.htm ).

Schroeder, Gerald (1999). The Age of the Universe. On the Torah and Science Web Site (http://members.xoom.com/torahscience/bigbang1.htm)

Scientific method. (1993-1996). In Encarta 97 encyclopedia (online version). Microsoft Corporation.

Weisstein, Eric W. (1996-98). Isaac Newton. On Scientific Biography Website (http://www.astro.virginia.edu/%7Eeww6n/bios0.html)