The Influence of Atheism in the Enlightenment

The Influence of Atheism on the Age of the depth While freethinkerism and doubt arrive at had a presence in human public opinion for nearly as extensive as ghost desire combine has existed, they have had a place within phantasmal model rather than in opposition to it for the vast studyity of their existence. motion was mainly employed by religious thinkers for the purpose of beef up and explaining their religious belief, as fag be seen in the numerous proofs for the existence of beau ideal formulated by the great theologians of the center(a) Ages, such as Thomas doubting Thomas and Anselm of Canterbury.With the in the raw science and philosophy of the Enlightenment, how invariably, unbelief began to be seen as a viable preference option that stood in opposition to faith. In addition to the usual deism of the Enlightenment, espoused by such important figures as Voltaire and Maximilien Robespierre, atheism too found its first explicit adherents among such figures of the French Enlightenment as Baron dHolbach and Jacques Andre Naigeon.This new view of suspicion would have a study submit on subsequent generations of thinkers in the West as prop anents of morality now had to contend with mental rejection as a rival arranging of thought and numerous of the virtu altogethery influential philosophies, such as those of Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, support and often fake this concept of disbelief. Among the numerous new concepts introduced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, one of those which have had the longest lifespan and the greatest impact has been the introduction of disbelief as a viable alternative position to religious faith, Atheism.One of the most central philosophical pursuits of the Middle Ages was the attempt to reconcile faith and movementableness. knightly thinkers had inherited both(prenominal) the religious tradition of the quaint Middle East, which they aphorism as representative of faith, and the phil osophical tradition of ancient Greece, which they saw as representative of antecedent. In their attempts to synthesize the two, the firsthand question they encountered was whether the existence of God, the primary object of faith, could be proved through the use of reason alone. or so of the greatest thinkers who have ever lived have pored at length everyplace this question. One of the most remarkable features of chivalrous philosophy is the centrality of this question when comp ared with the observable nonexistence of any separate class of non conceptualizers. Not only are at that place no surviving writings by or nigh any person espousing outright unbelief during the Middle Ages, merely gibe to Sarah Stroumsa, in the discussions of Gods existence the demonstrable opponents of the philosophers examining the question are not set as individuals.As a group they are sometimes referred to as heretics, unbelievers, materialists, or skeptics. Some of the greatest minds of th e Middle Ages, then, dedicated large portions of their work to represent against an entirely theoretical unbelief. When Anselm of Canterbury formulated his onto licit argument and Thomas Aquinas formulated his famous five ways to prove the existence of God, they themselves false doubt in their writings in order to strengthen faith through reason and to demonstrate that faith and reason are harmonious and complimentary. by and by, in the fifteenth century, however, William of Occam set about undoing the synthesis which had been accomplished by Anselm, Aquinas, and others standardised them. Occam believed that logic and theory of knowledge had become hooklike on metaphysics and theology as a result of their work and that they had make reason subservient to faith. He set to work to separate them again. As a result of his work to separate faith and reason, jibe to Richard Tarnas, there arose the psychological necessity of a double-truth universe. Reason and faith came to be seen as pertaining to different realms, with Christian philosophers and scientists, and the larger educated Christian public, perceiving no sure integration amongst the scientific reality and the religious reality. As scientific knowledge in Europe continued to increase exponentially, the gap between faith and reason continued to widen.Faith had grown detached from reason in ever more literal interpretations of the Bible and the sola fide, or faith alone, dogma of Protestantism, whereas reason increasingly freed itself from reference to faith and instead found its bide in the empirical sciences and natural theology, an approach to religion based on reason and experience rather than speculation and appeal to revelation, of Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes. Traditional Christianity, with its miracles and saints, came increasingly to be viewed as outdated and superstitious. This was especially rightful(a) in the light of Newtonian physics.A mechanistic universe which operated cons istently according to a standard set of laws did not allow for alleged miracles and faith healings, self-proclaimed religious revelations and spiritual ecstasies, prophecies, symbolic interpretations of natural phenomena, encounters with God or the razz and so on and so these ideas increasingly came to be viewed as the make of madness, charlatanry, or both. consort to Jacques Barzun, religion as such was not attacked it was redefined into simplicity. In the light of this new scientific knowledge and the new views of religion it engendered, a new religious straw man was strikeed.The new religious movement that emerged from this station was deism. Deism allowed that one may well be overawed by the Great Archetict and His handiwork13 after all, Newtons cosmic architecture demanded a cosmic architect. 14 However, the attributes of such a God could be right derived only from the empirical examination of his installation, not from the extravagant pronouncements of revelation. T he deists excessively positively charged that religion include a lot emphasis on good morals, as they, like the belief in a creator, are universal as well.This rather tenuous set of beliefs, however, could not hold for long. Samuel Clarke, an early English Enlightenment philosopher, noted in a letter to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that The notion of the worlds macrocosm a great machine, going on without the interposition of God as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker, is the notion of materialism and fate and tends (under pretense of making God a supramundane intelligence) to exclude frugality and Gods government in reality out of the world.And by the comparable reason that a philosopher can represent all things going on from the branch of the creation without any government or interposition of providence, a skeptic will easily argue still further backward and contemplate that things have from eternity gone on (as they now do) without any original creation or original author at all but only what such arguers call all-wise and eternal nature. As more thinkers began to assure this, the rationalist God soon began to lose philosophical support. Disbelief was no longer secure the doubt and postulate for proofs that had been present in Medieval thought. It was no longer theoretical and it was no longer subservient to the needs of religious thinkers in their attempts to strengthen the case for faith. Disbelief had become a new and distinct religious category in its own right. Later generations of Western thinkers (drawing on the thought of the Enlightenment in religious matters just as they did in political and economic matters) carried on the Enlightenments new movement of disbelief.According to Richard Tarnas, It would be the ordinal century that would bring the Enlightenments secular progression to its logical conclusion as Comte, Mill, Feuerbach, Marx, Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley, and, in a somewhat different spirit, Nietzsche all sounded the death knell of traditional religion. The Judaeo-Christian God was mans own creation, and the need for that creation had necessarily dwindled with mans modern maturation. Most Western philosophy after the Enlightenment, in point, no longer felt the need to level off argue for or against the existence of God.Rather, philosophers like those named by Tarnas as well as many others simply assumed the nonexistence of God as a fact and formulated their philosophy without regard to the existence of a deity. Ludwig Feuerbach, one of these nineteenth century philosophers who built on the work of the Enlightenment philosophers, stated explicitly that The question as to the existence or non-existence of God, the opposition between theism and atheism, belongs to the one-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but not to the nineteenth.I pass up God. But that mans for me that I deny the negation of man. In place of the illusory, fantastic, heavenly position of man which in actual life necessarily leads to the degradation of man, I substitute the tangible, actual and accordingly also the political and social position of mankind. The question concerning the existence or non-existence of God is not important but the question concerning the existence or non-existence of man is.For the philosophers of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and even the Enlightenment, the question concerning the existence or non-existence of God had, of course, been seen as being of the utmost following the importance of the Enlightenment. Only a philosopher who lived in the wake of the Enlightenment and accepted its presuppositions in materialism and determinism would have been able to make such a statement as Feuerbachs his run-in are demonstrative of how influential the atheism of the Enlightenment had become. Though his lecture bout himself can only fairly be applied specifically to Feuerbach and do play an important role in his unique philosophy, much the same sentiments can with c onfidence be assigned to the vast absolute majority of other great philosophers who The disbelief of the Enlightenment has also had a major effect on popular philosophy and religion, especially in Europe. According to the 2005 Eurobarometer Poll, approximately 18% of the citizens of countries in the European Union report that they dont believe there is any kind of spirit, God or life force. 29 This is a significant change, of course, from the situation in Europe during the Middle Ages, when Anselm, Aquinas, and others like them directed their arguments for the existence of God against vague, theoretical, and unnamed skeptics and heretics. The new prominence and popularity of disbelief also had a major effect within Christianity for much the same reason. Unbelievers were now real and unbelief itself now a viable alternative to religious faith as a result, many believers felt a need to go on the defensive.Doubt, and even any application of reason to Christianity and to issues of fai th, came to be viewed as insidious enemies, not as the means to the strengthening and further understanding of faith as in previous generations. 30 In removing a rational element from faith, faith came to be ever more irrational and, occasionally in later Western history, even anti-rational, as is evidenced by the growth and influence of Christian and semi-Christian sects cogitate on otherworldly mysticism, ecstatic experience, and emotionalism to the exclusion of logical thought and scientific knowledge in America and Europe during and following the Enlightenment.Christian apologetic also took on a more forceful character, as Christian apologists found it necessary to concede as little as doable to the unbelievers, such as defending extremely literal interpretations of the six-day creation and worldwide flood described in the biblical book of Genesis, whereas earlier generations of Christians had in the main interpreted these events in allegorical and mystical terms. 31 Christ ian apologists also found it necessary to attack their unbelieving opponents with a new zeal, labeling them as missionaries of evil and focusing the bulk of their apologetic efforts on disbelief ather than on other religions or Christian heresies. 32 The attempts to reconcile faith and reason and the use of doubt as a faith-building tool had become things of the past. Doubt has been implicit within and an aspect of religious belief for as long as religious ideas have existed. This is especially true of the Christian religious tradition, whose most intellectual adherents found reasonable arguments for the existence of God to be necessary in the course of their attempts to reconcile the inheritances they had received from both ancient Judaism and ancient Athens.The eventual reconciliation of faith with reason, though accomplished during the Middle Ages, fell apart as the Middle Ages ended, largely under the influence of William of Occam. With the dawn of the Enlightenment in Europe an d especially the new scientific knowledge which it brought with it, the separation that had been wrought between faith and reason widened continually and ever more deeply.Deism originally rose from the reason side of this illogical as a supposedly reasonable alternative to religious fanaticism it attempted to formulate a set of religious beliefs that was pared down to the fundamental principle of the existence of a creator God and a moral constitution he had ordained alongside the laws of the universe. As the universe and human beings themselves came to be viewed increasingly as natural machines, however, there was less and less need for the existence of a God or the plausibility of holding to a moral system based on one.With dHolbach, atheismefound its first outspoken spokesman, extolling a worldview in which there was no God and everything that existed was part of the material world. As with much Enlightenment philosophy, this view subsequently gained such popularity and influ ence among philosophers that it became the assumed standpoint of later generations of philosophers. As with any great new idea, the set up became tremendous once atheism reached the ears of the people at large, reshaping the nature of both religious belief and disbelief throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and inveterate through to today.