The Enlightenment Myth, Busted (Part I)

How the 19th century produced a myth to propagate an ideology

When people today think of the Enlightenment, what usually comes to mind is something that sounds much more like a foundation myth than anything resembling history: a sort of Star Wars saga complete with Evil Empire (religion, the church), shining heroes (heretical scientists), and transformation (humanistic values, technology).

The problem is: most of it not only sounds like a myth, it literally is a myth.

In what follows I won’t talk much about the history of the complex Enlightenment movement in the 17th and 18th centuries, which in many ways wasn’t a movement at all but a certain trajectory of thought and politics that can only be discerned after the fact. I’m more interested in the rationalist ideology that associates itself with the Enlightenment, and that is behind the creation of the modern myth that once upon a time, science and reason triumphed over superstition and led humanity towards the golden dawn of eternal progress.

The very word “enlightenment” is kind of ironic, implying as it does a sort of spiritual-religious awakening. Its history is also quite telling: the term was really invented in the late 19th century.¹ In fact, the whole Enlightenment Myth seems to be largely a child of the (later) 19th century, where Western civilization became increasingly hostage to a fanatic mechanistic and scientistic ideology.²

Note that the older German word for Enlightenment, Aufklärung, has a completely different ring to it. Coined by Immanuel Kant, it has a strong connotation of “schoolmaster explaining stupid children how the world really works” and, amusingly, today is used mostly in the sense of “sex education” (Sexualaufklärung, or Aufklärung for short). In German, when we ask, “Is your son aufgeklärt?” this means “does he know about sex?” So there.

Aufklärung, even to German ears, sounds a lot less glorious and lofty than “Enlightenment” which, as is a theme with the rationalist dogma, with its grandiose ring and mythological undertones, sneaks in a sort of surrogate religion while vehemently denying having anything to do with what it regards as childish superstition.

It should also be noted that Kant, in his famous essay What is Enlightenment? does not criticize religion as such (haha), but encourages people to think for themselves so that thought, including religious thought, may become more mature instead of just reflecting the dogma of the authorities. Big difference!

(I highly encourage you to read Kant’s original essay and mentally substitute the word “religion” by “science,” and the word “religious” by “scientific.” Very enlightening.)

So, here are some elements of the Enlightenment Myth, specifically as it relates to the Star Wars-like saga of reason triumphing over religion, and why they are (for the most part) completely wrong. Except for the last section, I draw mostly from appendix 8 of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things.³

No, Science Isn’t in Conflict with Religion

It is a fact that an untold number of scientists are, and were, deeply religious. And they didn’t compartmentalize their religion—live a double-life of sorts as some people have it—but actually thought of science as an expression of it. Max Planck, who wrote the following, is a good example:

Visible, perishable matter—that is not what constitutes the real, true and actual, it is the invisible, immortal spirit that is the truth.

And:

We must assume behind this force [that holds together matter] the existence of a conscious and intelligent Spirit. This Spirit is the matrix of all matter.

The great Werner Heisenberg saw it, too:

At the end of the day, the central Order, or the “One” as we used to say, with which we commune in the language of religion, must prevail.

Even Einstein, who is often seen as an example of a scientist who had his issues with religion, had this to say:

[I]n view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.

John von Neumann, besides ridiculing Darwinism,⁴ said this, which would make today’s atheists run and scream God of the gaps:

There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.

These are just a few relatively recent examples. They are instructive though, because if you read the non-technical works of these great men, you realize the sheer depth of their thought—a very far cry indeed from the Enlightenment ideologues. To repeat the often quoted insight by Francis Bacon: “It is true, that a little Philosophy inclineth Man’s Mind to Atheism; But depth in Philosophy, bringeth Men’s Minds about to Religion.”

Obviously, there are a many more examples. Great science in the West has historically almost exclusively been carried out by religious people, many of them among the clergy—with the full support of the church. In fact, the church used to pay the bills for a very long time.

But it’s not just long ago that this was the case. According to one comprehensive study McGilchrist cites, 95 % of Nobel laureates in physics are/were consistent believers in God. Of all Nobel prize winners, only 10.5 % self-identified as atheist, agnostic, or “freethinkers.”⁵ Physics had the lowest number of them all.

The Enlightenment narrative that science and reason defeated religion is simply ludicrous in light of all this.

No, People Didn’t Believe The Earth Was Flat

It’s perhaps the most famous Enlightenment punchline: before the victory of science and reason over religion, people believed the earth was flat! The church didn’t allow dissent and cracked down on scientists! Again, this is simply not true and, like so much else that plagues us today, an invention of 19th century anti-religious radicals.

The ancient Greeks knew the earth was a sphere, as did most of the early Christians, as did most medieval folks, as did the church. McGilchrist points out: “An important tract of the 13th century, Sacrobosco’s Sphaera Mundi, widely read across Europe, contains a clear description of the Earth (not just the wider cosmos) as a sphere, in accord with established opinion in Europe at the time.”

So why do people still believe otherwise? In short: 19th century propaganda. Here’s a quote by historian Burton Russell, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California (as quoted by McGilchrist):

[W]ith extraordinarily few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilisation from the 3rd century BC onward believed that the earth was flat … the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans. Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few—at least two and at most five—early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of the earth … On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.

And about the origin of the myth that people in the Middle Ages believed the earth was flat, and the whole Columbus shtick:

[T]he falsehood about the spherical earth became a clourful and unforgettable part of the larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopaedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day.

No, Copernicus’ Heliocentrism Was Neither New Nor A Problem

Another trope is that the evil, backwards religious authorities thought the earth is at the center of the universe, and along came Copernicus to show them otherwise. Enemies of science and reason that they were, the religious obviously persecuted and cracked down on this brave heretic.

Fact check: false.

First, the idea that Christian theology depended on the earth being literally the center of creation doesn’t hold true. (Who would think something like that!?) In fact, it is an ancient and powerful idea that the opposite is the case: the higher spheres are closer to God the further removed they are from earth. This apparently was a view widely held among “medieval Arabic, Jewish, and Christian writers but also many prominent voices that we usually associate with Renaissance humanism, both before and after the time of Copernicus.”⁶ McGilchrist:

“As a matter of fact,” writes Claudio Ronchi, “helioentric doctrines … already circulated in classical antiquity as well as in Muslim and Christian Middle Ages.”

As for Copernicus, as McGilchrist points out, he “was a canon of Frauenburg Cathedral. Nor was his theory rejected, but on the contrary enthusiastically welcomed by a number of cardinals, as well as by Pope Clement VII himself, who invited him to lecture to an assembly of bishops and cardinals in the Vatican, and extravagantly rewarded the scholar Johann Widmanstetter, the Papal secretary who brought Copernicus to his notice.”

It was only a century later that the church banned Copernicus’s teaching, which, as McGilchrist argues, it did “under pressure from the literalistic, left hemisphere-dominated mentality of Reformed theologians.” In other words, if true, it was the so-called “good guys” who introduced this literalist lunacy.

So what about Giordano Bruno? Wasn’t he persecuted by the church for his heliocentric views? Not at all: his dispute with the church was entirely a theological one.⁷ The guy had nothing to do with science and didn’t even know Copernicus’s theory. While some people might agree with his views more than with the church’s views at the time, it would certainly not be the Rationalists: if they knew what Bruno really thought, they would be even more outraged by those views than by church doctrine; in fact, they would probably join the church in denouncing him as a heretic, if for different reasons.

No, Religion Is Not The Result of Brainwashing

Still another Enlightenment myth is that you need to brainwash people to make them believe in religion. Ever since Marx and Freud, this is a hugely popular view which is at the root of the smug air of superiority that emanates from atheists and the Enlightened. It is, of course, completely delusional.

The exact opposite is, in fact, the case. So strong is the religious intuition, including the intuition of intelligent design, in children and those unaffected by materialist and “enlightened” ideology, that you need to brainwash them very hard indeed for them to give up those natural beliefs.

It seems to me that this is the kernel of truth behind the idea that we should “listen to the children” and that “children are wiser than adults.” Naturally, while children are great and can teach us a good deal, they certainly aren’t very wise (like we would think of a true sage as wise), and adults shouldn’t take their advice on serious matters. However, if the adults have been brainwashed to believe in nonsense, while the childrens’ intuitions are still more intact, the kids suddenly seem very learned and wise indeed.

If we need any further confirmation beyond eyes to see and half a brain cell for the fact that religious intuition is universal (we don’t and we shouldn’t), McGilchrist cites study after study and sums them up as follows:

Religious experience exists across the life-span, from childhood onwards. The literature attests to the existence of profound religious experiences in children. Children’s “intuitive theism” appears to be independent of culture and environment, including parents’ beliefs (whether atheistic or theistic), the sotrybooks that have been read to them or the content of family conversations. Young children whose parents are atheists may have religious experience, and their religiosity may persist without any specific cultural reinforcement.

Bonus: The Church Helped Create Materialism

The very word “science” is—drumroll—another creation of the 19th century. Before then, what we now call science was referred to as “natural philosophy,” but it was basically the same thing. Common sense tells us that it is ludicrous to think that science didn’t exist before: people have always been curious, and always loved to tinker and find things out. That’s basically what science is. No pompous theories about the “scientific method” needed. Except, of course, to counter the often ignorant proclamations of science about the big questions, pretending that it has some special, secret knowledge that allows scientists to solve philosophical problems in a way nobody else can, without ever mentioning the evil word “philosophy.”

As many have pointed out, the problem is that the Enlightened Rationalists do have very strong philosophical beliefs—but they mostly don’t even notice them, even while they claim they have nothing to do with philosophy whatsoever. Their apriori assumption is the reductionist, materialist, mechanistic dogma, which they mistakingly believe to be a result of scientific inquiry.

Now, lest you think I am a catholic apologist, here’s an interesting idea.

According to David Ray Griffin,⁸ not only did “science” emerge from the Christian tradition, as is often conceded even by the Enlightened, but authoritarian church doctrine in a sense created the materialist worldview for its own selfish reasons in the first place. In other words, the Rationalists have to thank church politics for their belief system.

How so? In the early 17th century, there was a conflict between the official church and the Hermetic tradition, which believed in some forms of magic (or PSI as we might say today) and therefore saw miracles as something natural, part of nature. The church didn’t like that: if miracles, including Jesus’ miracals, are something natural, this would threaten its authority and exclusive access to miracles, which it saw as originating from a God who resides outside of nature. It would threaten the very view of God as a supernatural being who can suspend the natural order at will, as in Jesus’ miracles.

Mechanistic philosophy to the rescue: it puts an end to all this heresy. Because in the mechanistic picture, the universe is just a machine, a clockwork. God is completely external to it and merely created it, and intervenes sometimes if he feels so inclined.

This is how David Ray Griffin describes the dynamic:⁹

Foundational for the use of the mechanical philosophy to protect the supernatural nature of Jesus’ miracles was Fr. Marin Mersenne. Along with Pierre Gassendi, Mersenne preceded Descartes in introducing the mechanical philosophy into France (just as Robert Boyle preceeded Isaac Newton’s development of the mechanistic worldview in England).

In 1623, Mersenne publiched a criticism of the Hermetic philosophy, dealing especially with Giordano Bruno (“one of the wickedest men whom the earth has ever supported … who seems to have invented a new manner of philosophizing only in order to make underhand attacks on the Christian religion”) and Thomas Fludd (“Bruno’s vile successor and principal enemy of Christian religion”).

When Fludd replied, Mersenne, realizing that he needed an alternative system to defeat Fludd’s Hermetic philosophy, appealed for help to Pierre Gassendi. Mersenne learned from Gassendi about the Democritean, mechanistic philosophy, which had recently been revived in Italy by Galileo. Mersenne thereby became a major figure in the ascendancy of the mechanistic philosophy of nature, as indicated by the title of Robert Lenoble’s book, Mersenne ou la naissance du méchanisme (“Mersenne or the Birth of Mechanism”).

… Accordingly, far from being used to undermine the belief in miracles, as older studies suggested, the mechanistic philosophy was used to support it.

In other words: if this is true, the Enlightened Rationalists have to thank authoritarian supernaturalists for their mechanistic worldview. A worldview which, ironically, had been pushed to justify the dreaded miracles, precisely the thing that the Enlightened believe we have overcome because of the mechanistic worldview.

Of course, these church people still believed in a supernatural God. But by adopting a mechanistic view of the universe plus Creator, all that the later materialists and anti-religious Enlightened had to do was eliminate the Creator, which leaves us with today’s dead, pointless cosmos: a falsehood based on another falsehood propagated for political purposes.

What a tangled web we weave…

~

In part II, we will explore how Enlightenment ideas ultimately collapse into technocratic utopianism, and ask whether it had kept its promise of progress via knowledge and technology.

1. See Wikipedia, Age of Enlightenment, under Definition

2. It is fascinating that in the mid-19th century, the Spiritist movement took shape as well, which somewhat preceded the dominance of the mechanistic view—yes, there were con-artists among them and some of it was just fashionable nonsense, but a lot of it also was fascinating and sophisticated, and represented a move away both from literalist and fundamentalist religion and from materialist-mechanistic ideology. It could have heralded a new age of a prosperous marriage between science and religion. Alas, the materialist blockheads won, and ushered in the age of Darwinism, scientism, Marxism, Freudianism, logical positivism, analytic philosophy, utilitarianism, etc.

3. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, Perspectiva Press, 2021, p. 1361 ff.

If you want to look up McGilchrist’s sources, please buy his book. Heck, you should buy his book anyway.

4. As related by Niels Bohr and documented in Werner Heisenberg’s autobiography, Der Teil und das Ganze.

5. Baruch A. Shalev, 100 Years of Nobel Prizes

6. Dennis Danielson, as cited by McGilchrist

7. You can read the Catholic version of these events following this link. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything the Catholics say here, the fact remains: the claim that Giordano Bruno was persecuted by the church for his “science” is simply made up.

8. See David Ray Griffin, God Exists But Gawd Does Not: From Evil to New Atheism to Fine-Tuning, Process Century Press, 2016

9. op. cit., p. 51-52