Worldview Wednesday: The Enlightenment

What do Christians think of the Enlightenment? Do we remember it as a wonderful time of increased knowledge and scientific breakthroughs or as the death of Christian civilization? How much does the Enlightenment influence the way we think and live now?

After the Protestant Reformation, the Western world went through a period in the 17th and 18th centuries we now call the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment comes right after the scientific revolution and ends with the disaster of the French Revolution. That means the Great Awakening and the American Revolution happen right in the middle of this momentous movement. 

The Enlightenment was an attempt to find truth through reason and not to depend on authorities or tradition.The authorities included the Bible, for sure, as it was the reigning authority of the time, but also Aristotle and the teachings of the scholastics throughout the Middle Ages. Since the scientific method had been so successful, it made sense to apply it to other fields of knowledge as well. Thinkers began to believe that using reason and observation, we could find all the knowledge we need, and we wouldn’t need to fight over theological beliefs! 

This kind of thinking explains why you might hear someone say, “How can there be a God if I can’t see him?” Or, “You can’t prove that God exists.” For many Enlightenment thinkers, if you can’t observe it or can’t prove it using reason alone, it isn’t true.

Many Enlightenment thinkers were devout Christians and believed that reason and God’s revelation went together well. An example is Isaac Newton, who believed that God’s intelligence and our intelligence to comprehend God’s work is what makes science possible.  Others wanted reason to provide an answer to everything. The problem was that reason can’t explain reason, so that’s where skepticism came in, the idea that we can’t really know anything for sure.

The Romantics showed up and tried to combat the excesses of the Enlightenment. They didn’t think the world or man was a machine that could be calculated and controlled, so they emphasized intuition, beauty, and feelings as legitimate paths to truth. A lot of their work was good and right, but the truth they wanted was too subjective. The heart knows things, but it’s only true for that person, not for everyone. They never gained back an objective view of truth and truth for all of life. Romanticism is still with us in the way we allow each person to have their own truth. Your religious beliefs are just values, not objective truths. And, your heart doesn’t have any problems,, so “follow your heart.”

Some of the worst elements of both movements came together in the French Revolution, a movement that completely threw out God, revelation, tradition, and natural law. The results were a terrifying episode in world history.

We gained a lot from the Enlightenment and from Romanticism. But neither give us a holistic view of the world from a Christian perspective. A Christian first believes in God and the goodness of creation. Then we use our reason to learn about the world and to read the revelation that God has given. Truth exists, and though we are not completely certain about everything, we can know truth, and we can arrange our lives accordingly.

The biggest problem we still hang on to from the Enlightenment is the reason vs. revelation or science vs. faith. People assume that science and faith are two different ways of thinking and two different sources of knowledge, but they are not. Faith is trusting that there is a God and he has spoken and revealed himself in the world. We can know him through science, but science has limits. The person who has faith in science trusts in science for all the answers.

Today we’ve come to a place where truth and meaning is found nowhere but in the individual self, which is why each person’s self expression is so important. It’s the only thing that exists, and it’s the only place to find any meaning at all. 

We can offer the world something much better. We have a trust in the God who made the world, who made it knowable, and who loves and cares for the world. We can believe in science without being skeptical conspiracy theorists and still realizing the limits of science. We need to be ready and willing to present this whole truth to a world desperate for truth, meaning, and love.