Enlightenment on Christianity and on

¶ … Enlightenment on Christianity and on Islam religions Religion and the Enlightenment The Enlightenment refers to the zeitgeist of the 17th and 18th centuries that originated in Europe and spread to the Americas. The principle values of the Enlightenment advocated logic and reasoning over faith and subservience, and emphasized man and his individual achievement as opposed to supernatural beliefs.

Traditional conceptions of divinity and religion, in particular, were challenged by man's intellectual capacity for accomplishment in diverse areas such as philosophy, mathematics and science, and blatantly contested man's unquestioningly subordinate status to God and realms traditionally associated with the divine such as nature, circumstance, and fate.

Several religious pretexts were developed during this epoch (such as Deism, which held that God created the universe and everything in it then had no other bearing on its events) that adhered to these principles, which, on the surface, seemed to directly undermine the beliefs of Christianity and Islam, which had previously held unchecked sway over the masses. Within the realm of Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church's response to the Enlightenment dealt with its specific proponents and the individuals who proposed them.

The church initially supported some scientific investigations that championed the prowess of man, such as the Scientific Revolutions tenets of the 16th century -- in which farmers began to study the conditions of their environments in order to produce better crops -- because it considered such secular examination merely as admiration of God's creation. But when astronomers such as Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and their followers began to contend with traditional church views of the universe and man's place in it, Roman Catholic reaction was more duplicitous.

It initially tried to buttress such scientific findings with Bible scripture to support its non-secular viewpoint. When that failed, attempts were made to outright suppress, discredit and persecute such thinkers of the Enlightenment. Protestant reaction to the Enlightenment was more inclusive, as Protestantism actually incorporated several concepts of this progressive era to further its ideas of religious tolerance and the increasing necessity of the separation of church and state. Muslim reaction to the Enlightenment was less harsh than that of the Catholic Church, yet less adoptive than that of Protestantism.

One such reaction, posited by S.H. Nasr, holds that the Enlightenment was not as widely embraced in traditional Muslim countries because there is no inherent separation of reason and religion within this faith, and that Islamic science has always included divine revelation. Another Islamic viewpoint of the Enlightenment, most convincingly stated by Ziauddin Sardar, contends that many principles of philosophy, math, and science, including the very University concept known in Arabic as the adab system, actually come from Islamic countries and indicates their significant contribution to the movement.

But if the Muslim world contributed a majority of the intellectual concepts which gained popularity during the Enlightenment, the Christian world can be thought to have taken some necessary logistical measures to implement them.