The Enlightenment primarily took the place during the 18th century. Although it ultimately affected the whole world at a large scale. The ideas that triggered the Enlightenment came from the Europe continent. The Scientific Revolution was a period of time when thinkers and scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton set a way of thinking where solely rationality and reasoning was trusted.
It was during the Scientific Revolution that the strong omnipotent, religious beliefs were temporarily put aside to be able to focus on the universe, the world, and reality itself. The Enlightenment really was an era when society took the beliefs and ideologies of the Scientific Revolution and tried to see if there was a way they could discover the natural laws that govern universe, as well as human society itself.
It was thanks to the Scientific Revolution that the society of the Enlightenment were finally able to question monarchies, absolutism, religion, among other things. The aim of the Enlightenment was to completely depend up on human reason; the capacity of the brain to be able to think, solve problems, raise suspicion, and come to an understanding. This aim was in place in an attempt to better primarily Europe, but the overall world, where human suffering was minimized as much as possible.
The most significant issues that the Enlightenment addressed were the issues of political representation, the ideals of the natural rights of man, the ideal of how to find a ruler and what limits on those rulers should be, the ideals of what religion is, as well as what should be tolerated in terms of religion, and last but not least, the ideals of how to create a society that would be beneficial for everybody and what that meant in terms of who to follow. As can be seen, the Enlightenment was a period of time that revered the generation and implementation of critical ideas.
According to the speaker within the video, Sargent, the Enlightenment actively addressed important political issues. Questions were raised about why the monarchy had absolute rule over people, questions were raised about the lack of justice. For example, thanks to the Enlightenment, the British were able to be ruled more by the Parliament, and less by the royal family. Also, the speaker makes an excellent connection between these ideas and the creation of the United States.
The colonial people were fed up with their mistreatment by the English, and it was thanks to this era as well as a great understanding of the Enlightenment ideas that United States was able to generate the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitution. It’s fascinating to discover that United States was mainly the result of the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Other than politics, religion was another topic that raised a lot of questions within the Enlightenment. Some of these questions focused on the dilemma of only priests allowing people into heaven, or staying in heaven, as well as the dilemma of having to pay the church money in order to get into heaven. When reason, rationality, and thought was put into these dilemmas, it was discovered that none of it truly had made sense. Thus, the stronghold religion had within society was forever shaken.
People were enlightened due to their absorbance of knowledge in high amounts, which lead them to see things in a new light which they hadn’t experienced before. Sargent describes the role of religion in regard to the ideas of Sir Isaac Newton. The very foundation of the Enlightenment arises from Isaac Newton who provided a mathematical proof of the universe that depicts its perfect operation. Newton’s view of the omnipotent God was merely a clockmaker
who set things in motion and was a much better clockmaker than the one that always has to play with the clock and fix it and make little adjustments here and there.
