For Ron Hallman’s ClassMarch 5, 2012

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Man – an emancipated being with autonomous reason

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An intellectual movement which began in England in the seventeenth century, but then spread to have eventual influence over all sections of the world. The term "Enlightenment," rooted in an intellectual skepticism to traditional beliefs and dogmas, denotes an "illumined" contrast to the supposed dark and superstitious character of the Middle Ages. From its inception, the Enlightenment focused on the power and goodness of human rationality. Some of the more characterisitic doctrines of the Enlightenment are: 1) Reason is the most significant and positive capacity of the human; 2) reason enables one to break free from primitive, dogmatic, and superstitious beliefs holding one in the bonds of irrationality and ignorance; 3) in realizing the liberating potential of reason, one not only learns to think correctly, but to act correctly as well; 4) through philosophical and scientific progress, reason can lead humanity as a whole to a state of earthly perfection; 5) reason makes all humans equal and, therefore, deserving of equal liberty and treatment before the law; 6) beliefs of any sort should be accepted only on the basis of reason, and not on traditional or priestly authority

Reason is the most significant and positive capacity of a human.Reason enables mankind to break freefrom primitive, dogmatic, superstitious beliefs holding one in ignorance.Reasonable thinking will lead to rightliving.Reason and scientific progress will lead toearthly perfection.Reason makes all humans equal deserving liberty.All beliefs are subject to reason not tradition or priestlyauthority.

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“Our story has its being in the beginning of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, a time of our intellectual awakening. The Enlightenment began when the Dark Ages ended, a time when the minds of men were cowed by the great mystery of the universe and their minds, through ignorance, were ruled by fears. The Enlightenment was a time when man, stepping out of his shackles, began to use his rational facilities and pulled himself out of the medieval pits of mysticism and in the process shoved aside the state and church authorities of the day. It was a spontaneous and defused movement which fed upon itself and led to the great scientific discoveries from which we all benefit today. Beliefs in natural law and universal order sprung up, which not only promoted scientific findings and advancements of a material nature, but which also gave a scientific approach to political and social issues.”

(A bit of exaggerated rhetoric)

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The Rise Of Modern Science & Modern Philosophy

Early modern science: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Isaac Newton; science seems to displace religion

Early modern Philosophy: Descartes, Locke, et. al. - philosophyemphasizes reason and the scientific method as sufficient.

The Age of Reason, the Enlightenment and Christianity: DeismAnd early modern approaches to biblical criticism, especially coming out of the Enlightenment (Aufklaerung) in Germany.

Where are we going??

(A few seminal thinkers in Early Modern history who influenced Enlightenment thought)

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-Reformation thinking was Ptolmaic, but this changed with Copernicus,

"Of all discoveries and opinions, none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus. The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind - for by this admission so many things vanished in mist and smoke! What became of our Eden, our world of innocence, piety and poetry; the testimony of the senses; the conviction of a poetic - religious faith? No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed not even dreamed of." [Goethe]

Nicolas Copernicus

1473-1543

The Founder of Modern Astronomy

Pre-Enlightenment Thought

Claudius Ptolemy, ca. 150 AD, was an Egyptian in Alexandria who taught that the earth was a fixed, immovable mass located at the centre of the universe and all celestial bodies including the sun and the fixed stars revolved around it.

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Ptolemaic View of the Universe

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Ptolemy thought that all celestial objects — including the planets, Sun, Moon, and stars — orbited Earth. Earth, in the center of the universe, did not move at all. NOTE: The outer planets, like Uranus and Neptune, are missing from both charts because they had not been discovered at the time. The planets are lined up to make the charts easy to read; they never line up this way in nature.

Geocentric universe

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Copernicus thought that the planets orbited the Sun, and that the Moon orbited Earth. The Sun, in the center of the universe, did not move, nor did the stars.Copernicus was correct about some things, but wrong about others. The Sun is not in the center of the universe, and it does move, as do the stars. Also, both Copernicus and Ptolemy thought the orbits of the planets were circular, but we now know they are elliptical.

Heliocentric universe

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Copernicus:

Born in Poland, educated in Cracow University, Bologna. Then a high church position in Frauenburg, Poland, where he spent the rest of his life. He had time to investigate astronomy and without any aids and with the naked eye came to the conclusion that the earth is not fixed, that it revolves on its axis every day and revolves around the sun each year. This was astounding thinking at the time. It exploded Ptolmaic thought. But he was a perfectionist and did not publish for thirty years then reluctantly. He died (1543) before he realized the stir his ideas caused. His book, De Revolutionibus was placed on the Index in 1516, not removed until 1835.

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Copernicus’Observatory

Copernicus’ statue

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Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician and astronomer who discovered that the Earth and planets travel about the sun in elliptical orbits. This corrected errors of Copernicus and made accurate astronomical observations possible.

Throughout his life, Kepler was a profoundly religious man. All his writings contain numerous references to God, and he saw his work as a fulfilment of his Christian duty to understand the works of God. Man being, as Kepler believed, made in the image of God, was clearly capable of understanding the Universe that He had created. Moreover, Kepler was convinced that God had made the Universe according to a mathematical plan (a belief found in the works of Plato and associated with Pythagoras). Since it was generally accepted at the time that mathematics provided a secure method of arriving at truths about the world, we have here a strategy for understanding the Universe.

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1564-1642

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Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564. He was the first of 7 children. Although his father was a musician and wool trader, he wanted his clearly talented son to study medicine as there was more money in medicine. So, at age eleven, Galileo was sent off to study in a Jesuit monastery.

After four years, Galileo had decided on his life's work: he announced to his father that he wanted to be a monk. This was not exactly what father had in mind for his gifted son, so Galileo was hastily withdrawn from the monastery. In 1581, at the age of 17, he entered the University of Pisa to study medicine, as his father wished.

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Shortly thereafter, at age 20, Galileo noticed a lamp swinging overhead while he was in a cathedral. Curious to find out how long it took the lamp to swing back and forth, he used his pulse to time large and small swings. Galileo discovered something that no one else had ever realized: the period of each swing was exactly the same. The law of the pendulum, which would eventually be used to regulate clocks, made Galileo instantly famous.

In the end, Galileo left the University of Pisa without a degree--a college dropout. But he had some inventing successes, and within the year, Galileo had received a three-year appointment to the University of Pisa, the same university that never granted him a degree!

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Galileo was determined to attempt to construct his own spyglass. After a frantic 24 hours of experimentation, working only on instinct and bits of rumors, never having actually seen the Dutch spyglass, he built a 3-power telescope. After some refinement, he brought a 10-power telescope to Venice and demonstrated it to a highly impressed Senate. His salary was promptly raised, and he was honoured with proclamations.

In Venice on a holiday in 1609, Galileo Galilei heard rumors that a Dutch spectacle-maker had invented a device that made distant objects seem near at hand (at first called the spyglass and later renamed the telescope).

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Months passed, and his telescopes improved. On January 7, 1610, he turned his 30 power telescope towards Jupiter, and found three small, bright stars near the planet. One was off to the west, the other two were to the east, all three in a straight line. The following evening, Galileo once again took a look at Jupiter, and found that all three of the "stars" were now west of the planet, still in a straight line! Observations over the following weeks lead Galileo to the inescapable conclusion that these small "stars" were actually small satellites that were rotating about Jupiter. If there were satellites that didn't move around the Earth, wasn't it possible that the Earth was not the center of the universe? Couldn't the Copernican idea of the Sun at the center of the solar system be correct?

And there were more discoveries via the new telescope: the appearance of bumps next to the planet Saturn (Galileo thought they were companion stars; the "stars" were actually the edges of Saturn's rings), spots on the Sun's surface, and seeing Venus change from a full disk to a sliver of light.

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As another amusement, Galileo started writing about ocean tides. Instead of writing his arguments as a scientific paper, he found that it was much more interesting to have an imaginary conversation, or dialogue, between three fictional characters. One character, who would support Galileo's side of the argument, was brilliant. Another character would be open to either side of the argument. The final character, named Simplicio, was dogmatic and foolish, representing all of Galileo's enemies who ignored any evidence that Galileo was right. Soon, he wrote up a similar dialogue called "Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World." This book talked about the Copernican system. "Dialogue" was an immediate hit with the public, but not, of course, with the Church. The pope suspected that he was the model for Simplicio. He ordered the book banned, and also ordered the scientist to appear before the Inquisition in Rome for the crime of teaching the Copernican theory after being ordered not to do so.

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Galileo Galilei was 68 years old and sick. Threatened with torture, he publicly confessed that he had been wrong to have said that the Earth moves around the Sun. Legend then has it that after his confession, Galileo quietly whispered "And yet, it moves." Unlike many less famous prisoners, he was allowed to live under house arrest in his house outside of Florence. He was near one of his daughters, a nun. Until his death in 1642, he continued to investigate other areas of science. Amazingly, he even published a book on force and motion although he had been blinded by an eye infection.

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-Newton's theory of gravitation and his contribution to astronomy mark the final stage of the transformation of the Aristotelian world-picture begun by Copernicus. For a vision of spheres, operated by a first mover or by angels on God's order, Newton had effectively substituted that of a mechanism operating according to a simple natural law, requiring no continuous application of force, and only needing divine intervention to create it and set it in motion. He demonstrated mathematically that heavenly bodies moved by laws and gravity.

Newton's accomplishments in life were many. Generally, he devoted much of his energy towards alchemy, theology, and history. In 1668, Newton built the first reflecting telescope. During his lifetime he was involved in the development of calculus. It was Newton who struck upon the Laws of Motion and the Law of Gravitation. He sat in parliament, 1689-90. In 1696, he was appointed warden of the Mint; and then, in 1699, he was appointed the master of the Mint, a position which he held until his death. He sat again in parliament in 1701 for his university. In 1703, Newton was to become the president of the Royal Society, another post that he held at his death. In 1705, Newton was knighted by Queen Anne.

1642-1727

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Newton has been regarded for almost 300 years as the founding exemplar of modern physical science, his achievements in experimental investigation being as innovative as those in mathematical research. With equal, if not greater, energy and originality he also plunged into chemistry, the early history of Western civilization, and theology; among his special studies was an investigation of the form and dimensions, as described in the Bible, of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.

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In 1687, Newton devised his law of universal gravitation, which introduced gravitation as the force that both kept the Earth and planets moving through the heavens and also kept all things from flying into space, allowing scientists to quickly construct a plausible heliocentric model for the solar system. In his Principia, Newton explained his system of how gravity, previously considered to be an occult force, conducted the movements of celestial bodies, and kept our solar system in its working order. His descriptions of centripetal force were a breakthrough in scientific thought, and finally replaced the previous schools of scientific thought, i.e. those of Aristotle and Ptolemy. However, the process was gradual.

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René DescartesPhilosopher

1596 -1650   If you would be a real seeker after truth,

it is necessary that at least once in your life   you doubt, as far as possible, all things.                                                                  —Descartes

The Father of Modern Philosophy

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René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596 in La Haye, France. Descartes became one of the most influential thinkers in human history, and is sometimes called the founder of modern philosophy.

Descartes' parents were Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard. His mother died the year following his birth. His father was a lawyer and magistrate, which left little time for raising a family. René and his brother and sister, Pierre and Jeanne, were raised by their grandmother.

From 1606 until 1614, Descartes attended La Fleche, a Jesuit college in Anjou. He spent the following two years in Paris studying mathematics, and being introduced to fashionable French society. In 1616, he began the study of law at University of Poitiers, but in 1617, set out for the Netherlands where he volunteered in the Dutch army. Over the following eleven years Descartes travelled throughout Europe, settling in the Netherlands in 1628. He completed two additional years of education in the Dutch cities of Franeker and Leyden. Descartes later claimed that his formal education provided little of substance, and that only mathematics, any real knowledge.Descartes published his major philosophical work, Meditations, in 1641, the year before Galileo died and Isaac Newton was born. Because he lived at a time when traditional ideas were being questioned, he sought to devise a method for reaching the truth. This concern and his method of systematic doubt had an enormous impact on the subsequent development of philosophy. Descartes introduced the now famous Latin phrase "cogito ergo sum," or in English "I think, therefore I am."

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In Descartes' view, the universe was created by God on whose power everything depends. He thought of God as resembling the human mind in that both the mind and God think, but have no physical being. But he believed that God is unlike the human mind in that God is infinite and does not depend on a creator for His existence.

In addition to his accomplishments as a philosopher Descartes was an outstanding mathematician, inventing analytic geometry and attempting to devise the simple universal laws that governed all physical change.

In 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden persuaded Descartes to come to Stockholm. On February 11, 1650, after only a few months in that cold climate, he died of pneumonia.

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John Locke (1632-1704):"The Philosopher of Freedom."

"Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided." (Locke.)

 

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Briefly, the core of Locke's beliefs are to be found in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). It is with this book that there was established the principles of modern Empiricism (the human mind begins as a tabula rasa, and we learn through experience). It is in this book, Human Understanding, that we see Locke attacking the rationalist doctrine of innate ideas. His other work naturally follows: Two Treatises of Government (1690). Locke's Treatises were written in defense of the Glorious Revolution: that government rests on popular consent and rebellion is permissible when government subverts the ends - the protection of life, liberty, and property - for which it is established.

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If a government subverts the ends for which it was created then it might be deposed; indeed, Locke asserts, revolution in some circumstances is not only a right but an obligation. Thus, Locke came to the conclusion that the "ruling body if it offends against natural law must be deposed." This was the philosophical stuff which sanctioned the rebellions of both the American colonialists in 1775, and the French in 1789.

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He accepted the existence of God, but he did not consider man to be a divine creature fixed with ideas on coming into this world. Locke was an empiricist, viz., all knowledge comes to us through experience. "No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." There are no innate ideas; there are no moral precepts; we are born with an empty mind, with a soft tablet (tabula rasa) ready to be writ upon by experimental impressions. Beginning blank, the human mind acquires knowledge through the use of the five senses and a process of reflection. Not only has Locke's empiricism been a dominant tradition in British philosophy, but it has been a doctrine which with its method, experimental science, has brought on scientific discoveries ever since, scientific discoveries on which our modern world now depends.

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VoltaireAuthor and Philosopher

1694 - 1778

“Those who can make you believe absurditiescan make you commit atrocities.”

Francois Marie Arouet

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Deism is the belief that by rational methods alone mencan know all the true propositions of theology whichit is possible, necessary, or desirable for men to know.Deists have generally subscribed to most of the follow-ing propositions, and have ranged widely from Chris-tian rationalists or fideists to atheists:

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•1. One and only one God exists.

•2. God has moral and intellectual virtues in perfection.

•3. God's active powers are displayed in the world, created, sustained, and ordered by means of divinely sanctioned natural laws, both moral and physical.

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•4. The ordering of events constitutes a general providence.

•5. There is no special providence; no miracles or other divine interventions violate the lawful natural order.

•6. Men have been endowed with a rational nature which alone allows them to know truth and their duty when they think and choose in conformity with this nature.

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•7. The natural law requires the leading of a moral life, rendering to God, one's neighbor, and one's self what is due to each.

•8. The purest form of worship and the chief religious obligation is to lead a moral life.

•9. God had endowed men with immortal souls.

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•10. After death retributive justice is meted out to each man according to his acts. Those who fulfill the moral law and live according to nature are “saved” to enjoy rewards; others are punished.

•11. All other religious beliefs or practices conflicting with these tenets are to be regarded critically, as at best indifferent political institutions and beliefs, or as errors to be condemned and eradicated if it should be prudent to do so.

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In America: Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, most of the “founding Fathers” were deists.

“These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.” Tom Paine

The political writer Thomas Paine (1737–1809) also brought Enlightenment ideas to bear on the American Revolution. An

Englishman who immigrated to America, Paine was inspired by America and wrote the political pamphlet Common Sense

(1776), which encouraged the secession of the colonies from England. Later in his life, Paine’s religious views and caustic

demeanor alienated him from much of the public, and he died in somewhat ill repute.

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". . . [We] have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months."

Tom Paine, “Common Sense”

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In many ways, the new United States was the Enlightenment, for its leaders could actually implement many of the ideas that European philosophers could only talk idly about. Americans were exposed to, and contributed to, the leading works of science, law, politics, and social order, yet lacked the traditions and conservatism that impeded the European countries from truly changing their ways. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence borrows heavily from Enlightenment themes—even taking passages from Locke and Rousseau—and the U.S. Constitution implements almost verbatim Locke and Montesquieu’s ideas of separation of power. America was founded as a deist country, giving credit to some manner of natural God yet allowing diverse religious expression, and also continued in the social and industrial veins that were begun in Europe.

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Christian Wolff, (1679-1754), mathematician, philosopher, truthcan only be deduced by rational thought. Ideas areinnate; world a huge machine driven by natural laws.God and his attributes can be deduced rationally. Miraclespossible but not probable. Positive view of humannature. Man and society progressing toward completeness;no supernatural revelation or rescue from sin needed. He taught at Halle, was opposed by Pietists, driven away, thenreinstated. This ended Pietism’s influence at Halle.

‘Aufklaerung’

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Reimarus (1694-1768) – A true deist, the worlditself is the only true miracle and revelation. Sub-jected life of Christ to literary criticism, rejectingsupernatural. Bible writers frauds.

Lessing (1729-1781) ‘The Education of the HumanRace’ – childhood (OT), youth (NT), maturity needs reason alone to guide us. Historic Christianitybelongs to the past.Rational religion continues into 19th C. Jesus the great moral teacher.

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