The Greatest Fight Of The Enlightenment

Religion vs. Science: The Greatest Fight of the Enlightenment Is the existence of God subjective? Is the occurrence of bias enough to discredit an argument, or is it a necessary factor in keeping arguments ongoing? The Enlightenment era centered around questioning institutions that people were expected to blindly follow. The philosophers and scientists of this era wished to improve society and uncover truths about the world. During the Enlightenment era, the Christian church held a large amount of power over society which philosophers opposed. Because of this, criticism of religion became a main topic of philosophic works. The Enlightenment focused on intellectual ideas and “overcoming the social and cultural notions that had been pushed by
Despite criticizing religion, many Enlightenment philosophers were not atheist. However, they wished to correct the hypocrisy of their own beliefs and the hypocrisy of those in their community (“The Enlightenment”). At the time, the belief that science was the end of religion was gaining popularity, but “a good many Christian intellectuals actually embraced the new knowledge and sought to celebrate science as proof of the truth of Christianity” ("Christianity, Science, and the Enlightenment"). The growth in scientific works gave these people the courage to pursue scientific knowledge as means to reevaluate religion. Each philosopher worked to find what they believed was the most logical way to explain their existence on the planet and the planet’s existence itself. Proving God was a widely controversial topic during the Enlightenment, and it remains one to this
Some writers “insisted that the symmetry and the efficiency of Nature could not be coincidental; these things must be the designs of a divine hand” ("Christianity, Science, and the Enlightenment"). They believed that all of creation that is visible to the human eye could only have been created by a perfect and all powerful God. Gottfried Leibniz supported this by arguing that “There is, therefore, or there can be conceived, a subject of all perfections, or most perfect Being. Whence it follows also that He exists, for existence is among the number of his perfections” (Leibniz). To him, the qualification for a perfect God was a God that existed. René Descartes, an influential Enlightenment thinker, reasoned that the idea of a perfect God was in itself, proof to His existence. “For how would it be possible that I should know that I doubt and desire” Descartes argues, “That is to say, that something is lacking to me, and that I am not quite perfect, unless I had within me some idea of a Being more perfect than myself, in comparison with which I should recognise the deficiencies of my nature?” (Descartes). Descartes concludes that we cannot envision the concept of imperfection if we do not have its inverse, perfection, to compare it to. Furthermore, the notion of perfection can only appear in an imperfect mind if a perfect being places it there. Similarly, Descartes deduced that it could only be