Given all the evil things I've said about the Enlightenment, the title might be a bit baffling. A UPenn student was so plastered with references to it, he referred to it as the "Endarkenment". So what useful purpose is served in trying to find good things about the rejection of God and the rise of atheism?

Well first of all, all of history is in the hands of almighty God. So if He brought the Enlightenment to Christianized Europe, there must have been a good reason. If we can find the good in it, perhaps we can also begin to understand the evil in it as well, and properly sift the treasure from the trash. This piece is the result of a lively discussion with my 18-yr old, while driving the 850 miles from her grandparents house.

At the intersection of several sidewalks in the center of the UPenn campus is a mosaic of compass directions. Rumor has it that stepping on the compass will ensure failure on your next test, so that students meticulously avoid its evil eye. Cameron, a feisty Orthodox boy, calls it all wicked superstition, and takes pains to plant a foot firmly on it at every occasion. It seems obvious to him that this is that sort of thing, but what is his criteria?

Suppose for a moment that it isn't all superstition, but an evil graduate student has buried a Cobalt-60 source there that will irradiate your foot, and give you radiation sickness in 24 hours that looks a lot like a bad cold, and of course, interferes with your test-taking. Then there might actually be a scientific reason for this rumor. How can one tell the difference between superstition and experimental science?

At the end of the high middle ages there were a lot of rumors and superstitions as well as new science, and Europeans had to find a path through the weeds to establish the new field of science. Perhaps then, the Enlightenment was the result of extending the Reformation method of distinguishing the good theology from the bad theology, but now applied to nature. In that case, it was not so much an Endarkenment of the spiritual revolution begun by the Reformation that made it atheistic, but a failure of the Enlightenment to understand its derivative roots, its parasitical dependence on Reformation metaphysics. In that case, it was the arrogance of material success that was the Enlightenment's spiritual undoing. If so, then we don't have to discard the progress of the Enlightenment in order to correct it, rather we have to counter-act the overconfidence that led us into two centuries of atheism. History, then, is not what Franky Schaeffer presented in "How then shall we live?" movie as a series of reversals, but rather a helical spiral that may go over the same ground but at ever increasing altitude.

Therefore let us consider what was truly remarkable about the Enlightenment dismissal of superstition as a method of explanation, before we circle back and discuss what was lost.

The main point is that superstition kills science. The late Stanley Jaki wrote extensively on what made the Europeans discover Science, and not the Caliphate, the Greeks, the Babylonians and the Chinese before them. Why is it that the Chinese invented gunpowder and compasses but didn't invent muskets and global navigation? Why is it that the Babylonians could predict eclipses and divide the heavens by degree, but never started mathematics? Or why did the Greeks know the earth was round and had a circumference of 25000 miles, but never discovered America? Or why did the Muslims invent distillation and use kerosene to defend against seige towers, but never founded chemistry? 

Jaki gives the answer. They didn't have the metaphysics for science. One needed an assurance that laws were unchanging, and that laws were discoverable. In religious terms, a law is a permanent aspect of God, what Reformed theologians call a covenant. (See Poythress' book "Redeeming Science".) On the other hand, one must also think that God's attributes are comprehensible. God must be transcendently unchanging, yet immanently understandable. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner referred to it as the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences."  Babylon had a polytheism that made the laws accessible, but also variable, personal, and arbitrary. Islam had a monotheism that made the laws unchanging, but also distant, transcendent, and unknowable. Only Christianity had the right mix of the transcendent God who became Emmanuel, God with us.

But Christianity didn't appear in a vacuum. Metaphysics didn't come on two tablets of stone. Rather, centuries of Christian teaching slowly changed the way in which men viewed the world until finally all the ingredients were present for the birth of science. The Reformation in the 16th century, and the Enlightenment in the 17th mark a one-two punch that provided the knockout blow to a superstitious, anti-scientific world view.  What was the hurdle that stopped Medievals from developing science? Broadly speaking, superstition.

The attitude that both monotheists and polytheists share is an arbitrary view of law. For the monotheist, God can do whatever he wants, he has no limits, and therefore there can be no explaining his actions in a coherent way. For the polytheist, there is a rational aspect to the god's actions, but they are always struggling with each other for primacy, so that one never knows which law will be applicable in this instance. The irrationality of the gods is ever-present, masking their rationality. The net result is that neither the rigid monotheist nor the flexible polytheist has any incentive to uncover unchanging laws of nature. Worse than that, they had a very attractive substitute, an enticing counterfeit: superstition.

       Incommensurate cause and effect
As I said to my 18yr old on that trip, let's ask why Cameron knew that the rumor of the compass was superstition rather than science. The first thing I noticed was the lack of equality between cause and effect. If I step on something nasty, I expect to hurt my foot, make me limp, or slip and hit my head. I don't expect that in the next 24 hours my mental abilities will be degraded unwittingly on a test. Now drinking something nasty might do that to my thinking abilities, but in a general, unspecific fashion. Yet here we are told that something I step on was going to subtly sabotage my memory.  It doesn't seem commensurate.

Now as an alternative explanation above, I suggested a multistep process that might have this effect, but notice that it is a chain of causes. The characteristic of superstition is that it has no intermediate steps. "Step on a crack, break your mother's back!" my elementary school classmates chanted, without the slightest concern for a chain of causation. So what makes superstition attractive, is its simplicity. It doesn't require multiple steps. It doesn't insist on logical reasoning. It can appeal to small children as much as adults. But when an adult skips steps, he is being lazy, arguing in a childlike manner. The attractiveness of superstition and also its principle failure, is childishness.

But also note what this same simplicity says about God, about Nature, about other humans. It says that just as a child cannot explain adult behavior, so Nature and God have inexplicable behavior. It projects the childlike irrationality upon the Universe, which if one were still a child, would be understandable. But when an adult assumes other adults are acting in a childlike way, he is demeaning them, or possibly demeaning himself. There is a deep immaturity when we mature yet expect that God and the Universe will not.

          Blameshifting
There is another more subtle effect for much superstition: the desire to avoid blame. I spent a summer in Haiti, and discovered how this works. When a young man took a turn too fast in his car, and careened into a roadside stand striking an old woman, his defence was Voodoo--someone had put a hex on him. So also when one blames a poor test grade on the curse of the campus compass, there is a strong element of blameshifting. And the destiny of blameshifting can be worse than the character in CS Lewis' "The Great Divorce" who preferred the selfishness of his hell to the responsibility of heaven, for it is possible to achieve hell on earth with an ultimate abdication of all blame and all personality. Superstition makes an idol in the hope that it will excuse, but in the end it will only consume.

            Idolatry
That idols eat us up is the stuff of all tragedies. The very thing we avoid is that which destroys us. When we insulate ourselves with money, be it luxuries, IRAs, or medical insurance, it is that same money that destroys our families, our retirements, and our health. "Health insurance" my wife always reminds me, "is not health."  So it is whenever we make idols of what should remain means. And superstition is the first step of idolatry, an irrational belief in the efficaciousness of some action.

For superstition is not just unwarranted belief in causation--that thunder causes milk to curdle--it is an implied command that if we do not want our milk to curdle we must shelter it from thunder. That is, superstition requires some personal action on our part. It is a personalization of the Universe, that our actions are part of the laws of nature. If stepping on a crack will break my mother's back, then cautiously avoiding all cracks will force the Universe to respect my personal attention.

Metaphysics

We can look at these aspects of superstition and recognize that they obviously deviate from the laws of science, but it was not so obvious 400 years ago. For every other religion in the world holds to one of these views. Islam's fierce monotheism makes God the transcendent parent to our immanent child, so that childishness in Science is praised, rather than condemned. Likewise, blameshifting is the essential nature of polytheism, while the personalization of Nature is inseparable from pantheism.

Thus the Reformation insistence on abandoning tradition for the revealed word was the necessary precursor to the Enlightenment insistence on abandoning superstition for the scientific law. Such was the poison of counterfeit science that all traces of it had to be expunged before real progress could be made. This then was the benefit of the 17th century, and led directly to the rise of the West.

The Endarkenment came in the next century, paradoxically the most Christian 19th century as some of the weeds of the Reformation bore fruit.