In Why the Enlightenment Matters, Adam Wakeling sets himself the ambitious task of defining the shift in thinking known as the Enlightenment that occurred in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and explaining how it made much of the modern world what it is.

Prosperous nations now enjoy benefits unimaginable throughout most of history, such as advanced health care, respect for human rights, free speech, tolerance, democracy, material comfort, scientific knowledge, education, and a reduction in wars and barbaric punishments. The author’s central thesis is that this is due to the Enlightenment. Of course, things are far from perfect – famine, disease, poverty, and dictatorship are still widespread, and the Enlightenment has an ambivalent record when it comes to racism and slavery. But today’s world would have been unrecognisable to the people of sixteenth-century Europe, when the book’s story starts.

Wakeling begins his narrative in 1553, with the burning alive of the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus in Calvinist Geneva. Servetus had denied the Trinity, proclaiming to the very end that Jesus was ‘the Son of eternal God’ and not the ‘eternal Son of God’. John Calvin, who had once been Servetus’ friend, approved of the heretic’s execution. This was the pre-Enlightenment world. In the fourteen chapters that follow, the author takes us through the unfolding story of the extraordinary changes that took place in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and gives us his explanation of why and how they happened.

His account is admirably comprehensive in scope, rich in historical detail, and highly readable. This reviewer is not an historian, and other curious non-historians will learn much about the manifestations and effects of Enlightenment thinking. Their common themes are principally the challenges to spiritual and political authority, and the rise of science and innovation. They include the effect of the Protestant Reformation on the breakdown of centralised authority in northern and western Europe and its role in promoting literacy. From these came the growth of toleration in the Netherlands, despite the efforts of the Dutch Reformed Church. In seventeenth-century England there was the end of rule by ‘divine right’ of English monarchs after the Civil War, and the subsequent  growth of alternative justifications for government found in the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and especially John Locke. Scholastic natural law theory was modified to include rights to property and political rebellion. Developments in just war theory, especially by Hugo Grotius, had already been made urgent by the excesses of religious wars. The eighteenth century saw Adam Smith’s attempt to provide a ‘science of man’ and his role in the decline of mercantilism and the burgeoning of free trade.

Also discussed in learned detail is the history of the Enlightenment in France, where it arrived later than in the Netherlands, England and Scotland. We read of the eventual success of the Encyclopédie despite attempts to suppress or censor it, and the influence of Enlightenment ideas about the ‘Rights of Man’ on the French Revolution. Of course, the Revolution’s bloodthirsty descent into Terror, largely engineered by the fanatical Maximilien Robespierre, caused many to doubt the whole Enlightenment project.

Running parallel to these rich narratives of political changes and their attendant wars is an account of how the scientific method became established. Aristotle had already made patchy attempts at empirical enquiry into nature but had been hamstrung by his teleological theory. His ideas had become embedded in the Catholic Church’s teaching as doctrines, despite their originally provisional nature, and it was only when the Church’s authority began to fracture that Aristotelian science could be questioned. Francis Bacon exposed some ‘idols of the mind’: errors or cognitive biases such as the ‘gambler’s fallacy’, excessive reliance on personal experience, the miscommunication of correct ideas and the spread of false ideas through existing systems of philosophy. Such issues still make it hard to discern truth from prejudice in science. Yet it was only after the patient observations and hypotheses of Galileo, Kepler and Newton, in part while trying to explain the anomalous behaviour of planets, that the geocentric view of the universe was dislodged, and otherwise inexplicable celestial movements could eventually be explained in terms of a universal theory of gravitation.

Wakeling shows how religious authorities tried to obstruct scientific thinking, not only in Europe but further afield. In fifteenth century Samarkand, for instance, the Islamic authorities destroyed an observatory, and in sixteenth century Constantinople, a similarly impressive observatory was closed by the Sultan amid concerns that its founder, Taqi ad-Din, would be prosecuted for heresy. But for some reason, the Enlightenment prevailed in northern and western Europe, whereas the pockets of Enlightenment thinking that had sprung up in other places, such as the Ottoman Empire and India, never took off. Moreover, in the eighteenth century, the nations where the Enlightenment occurred began to overtake the rest of the world in technological knowledge and economic power, and in the nineteenth century brought massive improvements to the living standards of ordinary people.

The final chapter of the book is especially interesting and potentially controversial, as it explores why the Enlightenment was successful in Europe and north America but not elsewhere. It brings us back to the author’s account, given near the start of the book, of what the shift in thinking that defined the Enlightenment really amounted to. In his view, it consisted of five simple elements: recognition of the limits of reason, empirical thinking, toleration of dissent, universality, and progress. Of course, in a broad sense the Enlightenment was a rational project, in that its thinkers used reason to question authority and dogma. But they rejected the notion that pure reason could reach truths that, as it happened, only empirical methods could reveal. Once dogmas were questioned, dissent was inevitable, and the issue of toleration became unavoidable. Wakeling argues that it was precisely this shift in thinking that explains the success of the countries where the Enlightenment took root.

This is controversial, not only because fashionable post-colonial theory is suspicious of the Enlightenment, but also because some writers think the flourishing of Western civilisation is traceable to Greco-Roman times and Christianity.

Wakeling’s rebuttal of the latter notion is, in essence, that the Enlightenment’s empirical style of thinking and its toleration of dissent amounted to a radical break with the past. There was much that was bad about the Greco-Roman world, and much of the history of Christianity is one of intolerance.

In reply, one might say that it was the best features of the classical world, such as Greek democracy and philosophy that inspired Western civilisation, and that it was not so much Christianity as its connection to state power from the fourth century onward that explains why the Enlightenment took so long to occur. As Wakeling concedes, Jesus reportedly said that his Kingdom was not of this world, and Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire until 313 AD. These questions are of course complex, but whether or not Christianity ultimately contributed to the Enlightenment, Wakeling is persuasive in arguing that the latter was almost certainly a major factor in Western success, due to its distinctive style of thought.

I highly recommend this book both for scholars and the general reader. It is a rare combination of erudition and lucidity; it makes its thesis plain from the outset and it sets out its evidence clearly and thoroughly. Since it is primarily an historical analysis, it does not respond to contemporary philosophical critiques of the Enlightenment, such as that of Alasdair MacIntyre. Some thinkers might regard the Enlightenment view of human nature as naïve and lacking in spiritual insights into our darkest flaws: a world of rights and prosperity may be lacking in love and humility. But for all that, the Enlightenment provided fertile soil for the better as well as the worse aspects of humanity, and readers will find this stimulating book an invaluable resource.

Adam Wakeling, Why the Enlightenment Matters: The shift in our thinking that made the modern world, is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing, May 2023.

See also Wakeling’s article for the Freethinker, Do we need God to defend civilisation?

The post The Enlightenment and the making of modernity appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me’ wrote C. S. Lewis of his conversion to Christianity in Surprised By Joy. ‘In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.’ Like most new Christians, Lewis converted because he had become convinced of the truth of the Scriptures and felt a connection with the God of the Bible. He went on to become the most famous Christian apologist of the twentieth century, always arguing in support of a literal, real and personal God.

In the twenty-first century, the God of the Christian Bible has found new defenders. Unlike Lewis, they do not argue that he is real. Rather, they argue that he is necessary. More specifically, that he provides our civilisation with its ethical foundations, and without him, we face nihilism. New Atheism ‘inherits a vague rational humanism that it has to pretend is natural, or common-sense,’ wrote Theo Hobson in Spectator. ‘It’s an important task of Christian apologetics to point this out, to insist that the moral assumptions of our culture have Christian roots.’

‘Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war’ was Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s position in her article on her conversion to Christianity, published in November 2023 in UnHerd. Referring favourably to Tom Holland’s Dominion, she wrote that ‘all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.’ Ali does not mention accepting Christianity’s metaphysical claims in the article.

Perhaps no public figure has become more associated with this argument than Jordan Peterson. Peterson does not appear to believe in a literal supernatural being, but believes that the secular ethics of the modern west are based in Judeo-Christian values and it would be better if we acted as though the Christian God did exist. ‘What else do you have?’ he demanded of sceptical young men in his 2022 message to Christian churches. And, to those who might respond by saying that they do not believe in the doctrines of the Church, ‘who cares what you believe?’

This argument is made by conservatives and directed at a specific audience: non-religious people sceptical of modern progressivism. Christianity, they argue, provides a bulwark against geopolitical threats like Islamic fundamentalism and China, and against the extremes of ‘woke’ culture. I have not heard left-wing Christians argue that only Christian ethics provides a basis for demanding that the rich give away their wealth and care for the poor, although such an argument would be similar.

There are a few problems with this claim. Proving that Christianity is influential would not prove that its supernatural claims are true, and visa-versa. For this reason, atheists of different political opinions do not find the argument satisfactory. Secular humanist Matt Dillahunty had a lengthy debate with Peterson which left him, as he later told Douglas Murray, ‘confused and more than a little irritated.’

‘I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible,’ Dillahunty said, explaining that things were true or not based on whether they comported with reality. The usefulness of God is irrelevant to his existence.

It is also unsatisfactory to the conventionally religious, for similar reasons. ‘Contra Peterson, the story of Scripture was not written in philosophical abstracted metaphor, but in real time, space and blood,’ wrote Dani Trewek for Gospel Coalition, a gospel advocacy group based in Australia, in 2022. ‘It is not ultimately concerned with the earthly “optimisation” of created man, but the eternal glorification of the Son of Man.’ Again, God’s usefulness is irrelevant to his existence.

Even if the argument were sound, it is not clear what we would do about it. Christianity might, as Ed West put it in Spectator, ‘meme itself back into existence’ if we all go through the motions, but it is hard to see people being persuaded into accepting the supernatural for political reasons.

I want, though, to focus on a particular problem with the argument: that it overstates the continuity of Judeo-Christian ethics. According to Genesis, God created man in his image – yet the morality of the Bible is not humanist. The Ten Commandments condemn disbelief and sabbath-breaking before murder; Leviticus and Deuteronomy are filled with condemnations of ritual offences, but permit slavery and treat women as property.

Let us look at one specific case. Writing on heresy in Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas accepts that heretics should be put to death. He favourably quotes Saint Jerome verbatim on the way heretics should be treated: ‘cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, lest the whole house, the whole paste, the whole body, the whole flock, burn, perish, rot, die.’ Aquinas’ position is consistent with Scripture. The God of the Bible collectively punishes societies for tolerating sin, floods the earth, rains down fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, and allows the Babylonians to march the Israelites into captivity when they fail to self-police their morality. Aquinas’ position was uncontroversial in the medieval and early modern church.

Today, however, this position is repugnant to us, including among the devoutly religious. Morally, killing someone for their religious beliefs strikes us as murder. And practically, if we had kept the death penalty for heresy, we could never have achieved what we have in philosophy, science, literature and art. A society that burns heretics is doomed to stagnation. The idea of killing an individual to protect the morals of society as a whole is fundamentally incompatible with liberalism.  

In many ways, traditional Judeo-Christian ethics are as different from modern secular ethics as Sharia law is. This is not to condemn them for being unusually bad: most pre-modern ethical codes are based in similar principles. But it does ignore the massive break with the past represented by the Enlightenment, which saw the concomitant rise of liberalism and the creation of the modern concept of human rights. In practice, the advocates of the ‘necessary’ Christian God are dining at an ethical buffet, picking and choosing from the Scriptures and the writings of theologians according to taste.  

Ultimately, there is a false dichotomy between faith, or at least the appearance of faith, and nihilism. We can – and should – consider ideas on their own merits. Those for whom faith is real and personal will believe. But those who are not persuaded by metaphysical arguments will not be persuaded by political ones, and nor should they be. Voltaire was alleged to have quipped that he did not believe in God but hoped his servant did so she did not steal his silver; the modern argument for the ‘necessity’ of Christianity, when it is boiled down, looks similar. By comparison, I actually prefer C. S. Lewis’ straightforward and direct approach.

Anyone who appreciates the benefits of living in a modern Western country can look to the tested and proven principles of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, constitutional government and human rights. If someone wants to believe in the Christian God and in the values of the Bible, that is fine – but it is not necessary.

See also: What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

The post Do we need God to defend civilisation? appeared first on The Freethinker.