The philosophes made knowledge a program against priestcraft while physico-theologians mined the same discoveries for design; deism flourished and thinned; chemistry and natural history professionalized.
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The eighteenth century organized knowledge as a campaign. Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772) rearranged the sciences to marginalize theology in the order of knowing itself, and its editors understood the gesture. Yet the Enlightenment was not one party: alongside Voltaire’s campaign against the Church stood the physico-theologians, who read design from every adaptation; the German Pietists who staffed new universities; and the Scottish moderates who made moral philosophy a science of man within a Presbyterian establishment.
Lavoisier refounded chemistry on the balance and the element list, executing — in 1794 — a tax farmer whom the Revolution had abolished before it abolished his chemistry. Linnaeus classified creation as an act of devotion and produced the binomial system every biologist still uses. Natural history, geology, and the age of the earth became the era’s pressure points: Buffon’s cooling-earth calculations stretched time to 75,000 years and beyond, and the Sorbonne’s censure of his propositions taught naturalists the uses of discretion.
Deism — a creator inferred from nature, a religion reduced to morality — was the era’s characteristic export to theology, and its characteristic failure: within two generations its adherents’ grandchildren divided between orthodox revivals and frank materialism. The era’s deeper legacy is institutional: the academy, the museum, the public lecture, and the idea that knowledge advances by criticism in the open.
The Worldview Stakes
The Enlightenment’s contested inheritance is the claim that reason is one, public, and self-correcting — a claim its heirs in every tradition now use, including against the Enlightenment’s own anti-clerical certainties. ‘Science’ and ‘religion’ as the names of two separate territories are themselves Enlightenment-and-after constructions, as Harrison’s history of the terms shows; projecting them onto earlier eras is the root error this section is built to avoid.
Elsewhere on This Site
References
- Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (2015)
- Thomas L. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (1985)
Related Across the Site
- Greco-Roman Science Era — Greek natural philosophy separated explanation by nature from explanation by myth, while Roman engineering turned knowledge into aqueducts, roads, and concrete — and physicians and astronomers worked for patrons of every cult.
- Islamic Golden Age Science Era — Under the Abbasid caliphs, Baghdad’s translation movement turned Greek, Persian, and Indian learning into an Arabic science that advanced astronomy, optics, algebra, and medicine — and argued about philosophy’s place beside revelation.
- Medieval European Science Era — Latin Christendom built the university, recovered Aristotle through Arabic and Greek, and debated the eternity of the world, the plurality of worlds, and the freedom of God — inside theology faculties, not against them.
- Nineteenth Century Science Era — Professional science, deep time, and Darwin; the warfare story was written in this century by Draper and White, while many of the era’s leading scientists — and many churchmen — saw no war to fight.
- Patristic Science Era — The Church Fathers received Greek learning as a handmaid: useful for reading Scripture and ordering life, subordinate to revelation, and preserved — selectively — through the collapse of Roman institutions.
- Renaissance and Reformation Science Era — Print, recovered Greek texts, and confessional rivalry reshaped European knowledge: Copernicus the canon published a heliocentric cosmos, Vesalius remade anatomy, and Jesuit colleges became engines of mathematical science.
- Scientific Revolution Science Era — Kepler’s ellipses, Galileo’s telescope and trial, Boyle’s Christian experimentalism, and Newton’s designed cosmos: the century that invented modern science also shows why the simple war story fails — most of its soldiers were believers arguing with believers.
- Twentieth Century Science Era — Relativity, quantum theory, and a priest’s Big Bang; war made science a state enterprise and the scientist’s conscience a public problem; creation-evolution litigation defined the American quarrel while genetics under Lysenko showed the cost of policing conclusions.