Enlightenment Thinkers Were Optimistic About The Potential For Human Development

The Enlightenment Period evolved during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a period of scientific revolution in which reason, the scientific method and progress were superimposed on the intellectual and cultural movement. According to Enlightenment thinkers, people, and nature should be subjected to reason. Application of the scientific method was one way to determine which traditions needed to be discarded to ensure that human societies and nature progressed. The purpose of this paper is to discuss why Enlightenment thinkers were optimistic about the potential for human development by examining the concepts of reason, progress through education, and the natural human spirit.
Ability of future generations to reason in every
Distinguishing the two often blurred the lines between reason and faith, which was a balance enlightenment thinkers sought to achieve. Diderot felt that religious faith often overstepped its boundaries into the reason arena, which caused the great thinkers of their time, to retract statements and/or theories to satisfy the religious institutions view during a given time period. Galileo was tried and convicted of heresy for his Copernican views of the world, and recanted only after being imprisoned and tortured. If the boundaries between religion and faith aren’t firmly established according to Diderot, “… This opening would mean the way to the most incensed fanaticism, and the most foolish superstitions! With such a principle, there would be nothing so absurd that it could not be believed.” The Declaration of Independence and Declaration of the Rights of Man gave scholars of that period more freedom to publish their work, and hope for a day where they would be free of all impediments. A good government which by extension would have virtuous people would not fear public criticism or the advancement of science even when it clashed with
Deism simply put is the belief in God it doesn’t pretend to answer questions it has no answers too. Nor restrict the common man with false doctrine presented in the form of text in some sacred hall. Thomas Paine explains the belief, “There is a happiness in Deism, when rightly understood, that is not to be found in any other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them.” Deism relies on reason, teaches tolerance, and preaches the search for truth, rejecting all supernatural phenomenon. The belief would unshackle the minds of Christians and allow them to pluck from the tree of