How Enlightened Was the Enlightenment?
I’ve been with the students from the School of the Word in Cardiff today. We’ve been looking at worldviews that have contributed to the shaping of our societies. Last time I was with them it was the Pre-Modern, religious worldviews. Today it was the Modern worldviews that emerged from the Enlightenment in the 18th Century and that still dominate a lot of people’s thinking. Part of this involves a rejection of God’s revelation of truth and a placing of human reason as the means by which we find out what is true. It places the human self at the centre and pushes God out to the periphery. Enlightenment thinkers put their confidence in reason, science and technology to create a better world; but after two world wars, various holocausts, continuing global poverty and the nuclear threat etc. this myth of progress has to be challenged! Without God at the centre, humanity spins out of control in all its attempts to create a better world. Tomorrow, we will be considering Postmodernism. No doubt the sharp minds of those great students will keep me on my toes again!
February 24th, 2006 @ 4:47 pm
Trevor, thanks for a great day’s teaching, sorry to have missed you today. Reason and unfounded human optimism will indeed lead to nowhere - but with wisdom from above we shall see it. In Huddersfield & the nations ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in!
February 25th, 2006 @ 12:59 am
I’m gald to hear that you are teaching such material at the School. It is so important that we understand some of the background and philosophies that still seem to shape the world in which we live. Have you seen Bonhoeffer’s book “Christ at the Center”?
February 25th, 2006 @ 7:17 pm
Hey Trevor, I hope everything is going well with you and you’re having a great time both with the students down here in Cardiff and back in Huddersfield!Great blog by the way! As I was just reading this entery my memory was ushered to something that Francis Schafer wrote in his book ‘Escape From Reason’. Truley great stuff! It’s quite long, but I hope you enjoy it anyway:
“The early scientists believed in the uniformity of natural causes. What they did not believe in was the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. That little phrase makes all the difference…between natural science and a science that is rooted in naturalistic philosophy… Under the influence of the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, the machine does not merely embrace the sphere of physics, it now encompasses everything. Earlier thinkers would have rejected this totally. Leonardo Da Vinci…understood that if you begin rationalistically with mathematics, all you have is particulars and therefore you are left with mechanics. Having understood this he hung on to his pursuit of the universal… but now the autonomous lower storey has eaten up the upstairs completely. The modern ‘modern’ scientists insist on a total unity of the downstairs and the upstairs and the upstairs disappears. Neither God nor freedom are there any more – everything is in the machine…whenever you make up one autonomous section below, the result is that the lower eats up the upper…
When nature is made autonomous it soon ends up by devouring God, grace, freedom and eventually man”
February 27th, 2006 @ 9:00 am
But there will always be spirits in the machine![Ecclesiastes 3:11]
March 8th, 2006 @ 2:58 pm
Do you consider the enlightenment to have bequeated to us anything of positive value? I’m wondering especially about democratic principles?
As you know, I love the blog and the ‘food for thought’ it provides for us readers out in cyberspace. Thank you for your hard work.