The Enlightenment is a movement of squatters. And the efforts of the squatters to dig a new foundation are irrelevant, at the end of the day, because on so many of the important topics people care about (natural law, scientific discovery, individual freedom and dignity) they were still trying to reproduce Christendom’s house. They wanted all the benefits of the Judeo-Christian legacy without all the “revelation” stuff.

I’ve been known to ascribe the supremacy of the Western world in just about every disciplinary metric to the Judeo-Christian worldview, or “Christendom,” for short. Whether it is law and justice, human dignity and value, science and technology, I maintain that the astonishing success of the Western experiment is due to distinctively Christian values.

I do not intend to prove this assertion in a blog post. Volumes would be required and, thankfully, volumes have been written. Well, that’s a link to at least one, anyway. There are many others.

But I do want to address a common objection to this point of view. Any time I’ve written an article along these lines, I hear this objection. I notice that Carl Trueman met this objection in a recent debate with an atheist.

It is this: Isn’t the success of Western values, science, and technology due to the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment, rather than Christendom?

It is a powerful objection on the surface. I don’t think there is any real question that, for example, the Founding Fathers of the United States were to a significant degree influenced by the Enlightenment. It is John Locke, after all, to whom we owe our allegiance to the specific language of “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” The rise of rationalism and empiricism would seem on its face a serious “fly in the ointment” to my point of view.

So what about that? Is Western supremacy due to Enlightenment rationalism?

Only if you’re content to read things off the surface and assume the conventional myth of the so-called “Dark Ages” instead of digging deeper. The “rather than” assumes a radical ideological disjunction between Christendom and the Enlightenment, the former representing darkness, the latter representing light. I do, actually, think there is an antithesis between the two; but there are some important commonalities often overlooked. Here are some questions leading to my answer.

Why is it that when I read Rene Descartes, the father of Enlightenment philosophy, his first item of business after establishing his methodological skepticism is to prove rationally the existence of God? Why did he think that was important?

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