At one point in our history, all of the scholars, philosophers and general thinkers of any era devoted a large percentage of their research/pondering/life to attaining religious and/or spiritual enlightenment.
That hasn’t been the case for some time, I don’t think, but I cannot pinpoint when this happened or why.
The “why” should be obvious: because attaining religious enlightenment is worth fuck-all to the goal of understanding anything outside that particular set of obsolete myths.
If you want to understand reality or the nature of the universe, you become a scientist, not a priest.
How long is “for some time”?
What leads you to think great thinkers aren’t searching for enlightenment anymore?
BTW, I loved reading Richard Feynman’s personal writing about his search. He experimented with various new age things, sensory deprivation, music, drugs, etc. describing his results in his books.
He was never searching for religious enlightenment though, just cool new experiences.
It’s difficult to argue for or against a generalization like this, but if you’re thinking of Western European philosophy and attitudes, then the “Age of Enlightenment” is probably a good beginning for any philosophical trend. And this development only arose after the Thirty Years War and other religious wars and conflicts on the continent.
Did it?
Yes. Religion is an intellectual backwater. Science is the forefront of human knowledge; religion is the dead past. A zombie past that won’t stop trying to eat people’s brains, but still dead.
I miss Bishop Fulton Sheen. He was brilliant and just happened to be religious.
I think Enlightenment/Humanism is the time in history when great thinkers realized that understanding God was a separate task from figuring out how nature works or what sort of laws should be in place. Not everyone got the memo.
When I’m at a used book sale, I usually grab anything I can find by him… and he was a great popular communicator who could actually bring in ratings! Imagine someone like him being given a prime-time slot on network TV today.
EWTN and the occasional charismatic Christian cable station still carry him. I once mentioned him to a friend at work and my friend said “You mean the guy in the black outfit & the violet cape. He looks like a superhero!”
My friend ran a comic book store for a while.
I’m not sure how religious Norman Borlaug was. He was the grandson of a Lutheran pastor, quoted the Bible several times in his Nobel Prize address, and served on the board of the Christian organization Bread for the World. I would say he did a much better service to God & humanity using his brain-power towards food production than musing about the ultimate nature of existence. One may be highly intelligent & highly religious/spiritual and focus more on practical work than metaphsical speculations. Moses, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Buddha, Confuscius, Mohammed et al already did all that heavy lifting- the Scriptures & Commentaries they left tell us what to do, now let’s get to work.
Yeah, I’d have a problem calling the work any of those men did heavy lifting.
Religion produces nothing of value. Science feeds the world. There are certainly brilliant men involved in Religion at every level. But they are ultimately wasting their time and their gifts.
Norman Borlaug was very vague about his religious beliefs. That Nobel Prize address was one of the few times he mentioned the Bible at all. He was a member of the Christian group Bread for the World but that may have been more because of its cause rather than its religious affiliation. I suspect that if he were serious about his religion he would have mentioned it more but it’s really inconclusive. Here’s hoping he was an atheist! Religious or not, he was seriously one awesome motherfucker. He certainly earned that Nobel.
Great thinkers were once religious because most people were religious. Now fewer regular people are religious and few great thinkers are religious. Religion is simply less popular now.
Religious adherants still vastly outnumber those who claim no religious or spiritual inclinations. I don’t see the brilliant minds of our times religious with the same ratios - not even close.
One important historical landmark was the discover of evolution. Before evolution, the complexity of living things was the great trump card of religion; even thinkers who realized that religion was absurd had no good explanation for where that complexity came from. Then evolution is discovered, and there’s a perfectly good, factually verifiable explanation for the complexity of life that doesn’t involve religion.
Moses didn’t even exist.
To answer the OP, I don’t think there’s a clear turning point, but the process definiely really got going in the 17th century. Some of the really early scientists started in the 16th century but things took off in the 17th. Science didn’t really exist as we currently understand the discipline to exist until the 17th century; in fact, the term “science” didn’t become popular until the 19th century. Sir Isaac Newton would have been referred to as a “natural philosopher.” As science grew, religion as an intellectual pursuit lost proportionately.
Evolution, as Der Trihs pointed out, is a blow to religion. But so were Newton’s laws of motion, the heliocentric model of the solar system, atomic theory and a dozen other major breakthroughs; each has chipped away at mysticism.
I am rather shocked that it took until post #16 for someone to say this. Sure, a few people were starting to turn away from religion before this, and there were other factors, such as Enlightenment skeptical empiricism and its more militant descendant, Positivism, and the “higher” Biblical criticism which began to reveal that the Bible is a textual hodge-poge from many diverse and disparate sources, but the real watershed moment (for the reasons Der Trihs says) can be dated quite precisely: 24 November 1859.
It removed the last really solid-seeming reason for thinking that there must be a God.
In a way that is true, but “chipped away” is about right. In fact religion had very little stake in any of those issues (despite what happened to Galileo, which was not really religiously motivated). All the advocates of heliocentrism were convinced Christians.
Many nails in that coffin, but one that hasn’t been mentioned is the realization that there are billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars.
The notion that we are unique in the vastness of such a cosmos became less and less tenable.
Uhh… so?
I think the OP is being really badly misunderstood here. The question here is not whether people are turning into atheists. The question posed by the OP concerns the fact that fewer great minds are concerning themselves with matters of theology than used to be the case. It doesn’t even matter if the great minds belong to devout Christians.
Norman Borlaug may have been a great mind who was also a Christian, but he wasn’t a theologian, he was a biologist. Albert Einstein was not a theologian, nor were almost any great mind of the 19th and 20th century. But if you start going back into history, the further back you go, the more likely it is that the great minds spend a lot of their time on matters pertaining to God. That’s what the OP is asking about.