Age of reason
From these ideas came the Enlightenment, which reached its height in the 18th century and emphasised a scientific approach to the world over superstition and religion. Philosophers like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza were rationalists: they argued that reason was the way to truth. Meanwhile, John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume were empiricists: they argued that all knowledge is derived from the experience of the senses.
The soul was in retreat and was being replaced by the mind or self. Descartes used a 'method of doubt' where everything was questioned, even his own senses. One thing could, however, be certain, he said: ' Cogito ergo sum.' I think, therefore I am.
Charles Darwin's book challenged the biblical creation story
Perhaps the most important example of science challenging religion was Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species which concluded that living things must have evolved over millions of years, not in the seven days in which, according to the Bible, God created the world.
Revolutionary ideas
As science, education and literacy have progressed, miracles, mysticism and superstition have come to seem less and less believable to more and more people. Attacks on religion were accompanied by the development of radical social ideas. If the established religions could be questioned then so could the social structure, monarchies, colonies, rich and poor. The French and American revolutions at the end of the 18th century threw off the accepted orders to create new constitutions that separated religion from the politics of the state and dispensed with hereditary monarchies based on the mystical beliefs of earlier eras.
In the 19th century various movements such as humanism and Marxism attempted to reach a scientific, non-religious basis for an ethical stance, working out how political, economic and social systems could be controlled by human beings to ensure the dignity of the individual in a fair and equitable society. The Russian revolution early in the 20th century was one of a number of attempts to turn that into reality.
