Tricksie

A Grand, But False Edifice

The really momentous, but notorious contributions of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were the French Revolutions' Reign of Terror, the scourge of Nazism, and the totalitarian embrace of Communism.  These were all directly traceable to the doctrine of the autonomy of human reason, which was the lodestone both the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. 

The other benefits attributed to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason were actually incidental to both.  Benefits such as scientific and technological advances during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred due to the foundations laid centuries before.  Rodney Stark has it right when he writes:

The single most remarkable and ironic thing about the "Enlightenment" is that those who proclaimed it made little or no contribution to the accomplishments they hailed as a revolution in human knowledge, while those responsible for these advances stressed continuity with the past. . . . In truth, the rise of science was inseparable from Christian theology, for the latter gave direction and confidence to the former . . . [Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 252.]

The ideology of Enlightenment  truly is a trick played at the time upon the dead.  However, that particular trick has remained remarkably durable.  It is repeated ceaselessly in our day as a mantra, a set of propositions which are now regarded as self-evident.  The West, we are told, remained in the thrall of brute ignorance ruthlessly enforced by religious superstitions, until man began to think for himself.  When he finally threw off the shackles of religious superstition knowledge, truth, discovery and science exploded--with all their beneficent fruits. This claim amounts to an elaborate example of the fallacy of false cause.

. . . [T]he historian's task is not to explain why so much progress has been made since the fifteenth century--that focus is much too late.  The fundamental question about the rise of the West is: What enabled Europeans to begin and maintain the extraordinary and enduring period of rapid progress than enabled them, by the end of the "Dark Ages," to have far surpassed the rest of the world?  Why was it that, although many civilizations have pursued alchemy, it led to chemistry only in Europe?  Or, while many societies have made excellent observations of the heavens and have created sophisticated systems of astrology, why was this transformed into scientific astronomy only in Europe? . . . .

[T]he truly fundamental basis for the rise of the West was an extraordinary faith in reason and progress that was firmly rooted in Christian theology, in the belief that God is the rational creator of a rational universe. (Ibid., p. 252f.)

Quite so.   It's a pity someone has forgotten to tell modern perpetuators of the Enlightenment myth, such as Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.