During the twentieth century, a few perceptive writers, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Francis A. Schaeffer, observed that it was the “Enlightenment” of the 1700s that had a decisive influence upon the secularization of the world view of Western civilization.  How, why and when did this happen?  What was it about that period that made it so decisive, and why?

First of all, what was the “Enlightenment,” also known as the “Age of Reason”?  In Europe prior to the eighteenth century, all areas of thought were saturated with God.  Whenever anyone thought about or wrote about anything, it was almost always with reference to God, regardless of the topic, whether it happened to be the weather, the seasons, the structure of the earth, the constitution of the heavens, the nature of political society, social morality, ethics, or anything else.  Almost by definition, if someone wrote about these things, he or she was writing about God.   For most people, the world was God’s creation, and could only be explained within a Christian frame of reference.

With the “Age of Reason,” all of this changed.  The “Enlightenment” was the first major shift in Western thought that had taken place in more than thirteen centuries.  With respect to world view, the Reformation was merely a fight between cousins, Protestants and Catholics.  However, with the advent of the “Enlightenment,” there came an entirely different family of thought altogether.

The “Enlightenment” has provided the thought framework for the vast majority of Western intellectuals from the time of the late seventeenth century until the opening of the twenty-first.  Among the intelligentsia, Christianity has scarcely affected the world of thought at all since that time; rather, it is the principles of the “Enlightenment” that have been dominant.  Some of its adherents have boasted that it could be considered a religion or a philosophy, or perhaps even a prophetic movement explaining all of life, rather than a mere method of describing some segment of it.

On the other hand, the people of the “Enlightenment” were not totally severed from their Christian roots.  Most of them believed in a God of some kind, and in some kind of creation.  Most held tenaciously to the idea of immortality.  And all of them believed in the basic logical consistency of reality.  Nevertheless, the “Enlightenment” altered the intellectual topography of the Western world in such a way as to render it unrecognizable to its predecessors.

People sometimes trace the beginnings of the “Enlightenment” to the work of the great seventeenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes, who settled upon man as the central reference point for his entire philosophy.  Man then came to be understood as self-determining, and the individual soon came to be considered autonomous.  For Descartes, the rational proof, or reason, was the way to discover reality.

In England at the close of the seventeenth century, the work of Isaac Newton in contributing scientific methodology and of John Lock in his philosophical writings are thought to have been important for the development of the “Enlightenment,” followed by the English Deists.  Then, the movement became centered in eighteenth-century France through the work of Pierre Bayle, Montesquieu, Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau, and of course, the philosophes, especially Voltaire, the great popularizer of the ideas of the “Enlightenment.”  All of this provided the basis for much of later German thought, especially in the nineteenth century, when Germany came to be considered the cultured nation of the world.

The “Enlightenment” entailed the denial of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin.  In particular, it involved the assumption that human reason is not fallen and that the intellectual was able to think in correspondence with reality.  Accordingly, the grace or help of God was no longer considered essential for attaining proper human thought, or for the process of determining reality.  The great problem of the world, therefore, was not sin, but ignorance.  The great remedy for social ills became education, rather than redemption through Jesus Christ.  The transformation of society was therefore to be effected by banishing ignorance.

For the “Enlightenment,” divine revelation was inconsequential for the attainment of true knowledge.  There was no need for any special knowledge given by God, since human beings, through the use of reason, could discover whatever God might have revealed.  While God was important as creator of nature and of nature’s laws, any revelation from Him was of no consequence.  Human reason was autonomous, and was to be applied to all fields of endeavor in order to secure infallible knowledge.  Then, in place of superstitions like Christianity, one would have true knowledge.

The scientific method became very important as a means of determining reality.  One of its assumptions was that there was a uniformity of natural causes, with no exceptions.  The world was expected to operate like a machine, without interference either from God or from demons.  John Locke made use of these scientific assumptions and applied them to areas of thought beyond science.  Man came to be understood simply as a part of nature, and not as unique in the ways that Christians had previously affirmed.  Thus, all that would apply to nature should apply equally to humanity.  All knowledge could be derived from the use of the senses.  There were no innate ideas.  One’s sensations, reflected upon by reason, would yield knowledge, according to Locke.

For the “Enlightenment,” the starting place was knowledge of oneself.  This idea was in marked contrast to that of the first chapter of Romans or the opening chapters of Calvin’s Institutes, where God was the starting point.  It was becoming a very different world.  In moral matters, the sensation of pain was to be avoided, and pleasure accepted.  For the first time, moral codes came to be considered empirical and fallible.  Moreover, the things of this world came to be considered paramount.  There was a concern with humans and humanness.  Happiness was the goal of life, and it was to be fostered through the context of liberty.  A concern for the practical and the utilitarian spawned movements for social change, improvement, and reform during the “Enlightenment.”

The “Enlightenment” was also characterized by optimism, a positive attitude toward innovation, and a belief in the possibility of long range and permanent improvement in man’s lot.  There was thus an orientation towards the future.  The past was considered disastrous, but the people looked to the future with great buoyancy.  There was also a stress on freedom–individual freedom of choice.  Associated with this was the idea that each person, expressing his or her own self-interest, would by that means contribute to the basic harmony of society.

The “Enlightenment” criticized the truth content of the Bible.  There was a stress upon what were perceived as moral difficulties and historical problems in the Bible.  Biblical inspiration was ascribed to the remarkable natural powers of the writers, rather than any special divine activity of the Holy Spirit.  According to the “Enlightenment,” all religions had a common core of morality.  “Natural religion,” was based upon moral principles common to all religions.  Miracles and divine intervention were not important; they were mere accretions obscuring the central moral core of Christianity and other religions.

The “Enlightenment” tended to secularize all of life.  This was equally true in science, jurisprudence, education, politics, history, economics, the social science, and all other fields of endeavor.

Nevertheless, it can be argued that much good came out of the “Enlightenment.”  Advances in science and technology were very helpful to humanity.  Closely related to its idea of natural laws was a belief in natural rights, thought to be inalienable privileges that ought not to be withheld from anyone.  These included equality before the law, freedom of religious worship, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, the right to hold property, and the pursuit of happiness.  It was felt that rulers should allow religious toleration, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to hold private property.  They were to foster the arts, sciences, and education.  They were also not to be arbitrary in their rule, obey the laws and enforce them fairly for all subjects.

Because of the good things that came out of the “Enlightenment,” people assumed that all of its principles must be good, and that mankind had made progress by embracing all of them.

The United States obtained its independence at just the right time to benefit from the rampant popular sentiment for so many of the liberties which the Enlightenment championed.  The “enlightened despots” of that era, while progressive in their thinking, were hamstrung by the vested interests of the nobles and upper classes, and, for the most part, were therefore unable to put very much into practice by way of liberty and justice.  However, the situation in America was ideal for the establishment of a nation based upon some of the better principles of the Enlightenment.  Did God design it so that the people in America, most of whom were committed Christians, would benefit?  If so, he was using unbelievers (the philosophes) for the benefit of His saints, since they spread some of the ideas that would help to bring about an end to tyrannical government for people living in the thirteen colonies in America.