The turn of the 18th century is marked by a generation in which a radical revolution takes place in the Western European’s mind as to how truth is to be sought and found. The achievements of Newton convincingly demonstrated that not only could the New Philosophy, as advocated by Bacon, Descartes, etc., know things which the Old Scholastic Philosophy had not, but more importantly that the authority which had been received from the past had been wrong. Thus we can see that not only did the New Philosophy emerge as a viable contender to Scholasticism, but that Scholasticism itself had suffered a serious blow to its integrity, whether the New Philosophy was ultimately “better” than it or not. Following Galileo and Newton, the educated population began to turn more and more to the book of nature and less and less to the book of scripture in search of truth. The seemingly inevitable movement which would result from such an environment was Deism. (more…)
