ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 looks at Issac Newton whose Principia Mathematica and John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, both published in the 1660s, provided the scientific, mathematical, and philosophical parameters of the Enlightenment. Both men were devout Christians who engaged in a debate over the role Christianity played in the natural and social world.
Although recent scholarship has called attention to the fact that the Enlightenment was not as anti-religious as had been previously thought, the thinkers who opened the debate between those who adhered to a theistic worldview and those who advocated a naturalistic/materialistic one are discussed. The debate over the role of Christianity is analyzed in the thought of such Philosophes in Scotland as David Hume and Adam Ferguson, and Jacques Rousseau, Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Baron D’Holbach in France, to mention those most responsible for the origins of “the science of man.”
