Enlightenment's Stepchildren

Hucksters and Tricksters

The Enlightenment was an anti-Christian movement.  It was the parent of modern atheistic, secular humanism, which has become the official established religion of our day.  The transition from Christendom to anti-Christendom took three centuries, but here we are.

The Enlightenment rejected Christianity and the Church.  But it attempted to retain those aspects of Christianity and Christendom it "liked".  To remove the foundation will naturally cause the superstructure to fall to the ground in pieces.  But that emerged only later--in our generation.  It was a gradual, but inevitable outcome.

Christopher Dawson explains how Enlightenment  philosophes rationalised their positions, in a manner akin to modern militant atheists who vehemently reject the Triune eternal God, whilst hypocritically clinging to aspects of Christian morality which their upbringing and past has ingrained into them.  They are dishonest brokers--much like the Enlightenment philosophes turned out to be.

But in spite of its unorthodox and even anti-Christian character, all the positive elements in the new creed were derived from the old religious tradition of Christendom.
  For a civilization cannot strip itself of its past in the same way that a philosopher discards a theory.  The religion that has governed the life of a people for a thousand years enters into its very being, and moulds all its thought and feeling.

When the philosophers of the 18th century attempted to substitute their new rationalist doctrines for the ancient faith of Christendom, they were in reality simply abstracting from it those elements which had entered so deeply into their own thought that they no longer recognized their origin.  Eighteenth century Deism was but the ghost or shadow of Christianity, a mental abstraction from the reality of a historical religion, which possessed no independent life of its own. . . .

Thus the moral law was divested of all ascetic and other-worldly elements and assimilated to practical philanthropy, and the order of Providence was transformed into a mechanistic natural law.  [Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945),  p. 190.]

Things have moved on from the Enlightenment.  Now, there is no deity, deistic or otherwise.  Now there is no mechanistic law of nature--only brute chance and chaos (which miraculously somehow, don't know how, has produced fixed, natural laws, and a cosmos comprehensively mathematically congruent).  Now, we are told, there are apparently infinite parallel universes, of which ours is one, which, like all the other universes, just happens to have come into existence by brute chance.

Infinite parallel universes are required as a warranting concept to "justify" belief in our irreducibly complex world having just randomly come together in the same way that millions of letters tossed into the air might spontaneously and randomly arrange themselves into the Oxford Shorter Dictionary.  Toss them often enough, an infinite number of times, and at least one toss will product the Oxford Shorter Dictionary.  And if it doesn't, the infinite number of tosses means that none can gainsay the atheist case because the infinite has no limitations. 

Thus the irrational-rationalism of modern secular atheism.  Yet, in this world of theirs, murder is still wrong.  Theft is frowned upon.  Violence is eschewed.  Lying is interdicted.  Human rights are asserted.  But social constructs such as marriage, family, and gender are of no significance or are empty conventions without meaning.  Thus do the vapid bourgeois prejudices run their lines in the utterances of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, along with their ilk.

The Enlightenment Deists spoke about honour, human rights, and truth and appealed to Deus Abscondis to warrant their beliefs.  The modern atheists, secular materialists all, appeal to infinite randomness to warrant their beliefs in human dignity and justice.  They are the children of the Enlightenment, the same but worse.  They are more epistemologically self-conscious, and less so at the same time. 

Their self-deception is more extreme.  They are of all men to be the most pitied.