This article is a nitpicker's dream! First up, is that etymology of the phrase "Middle Ages" reliable - or is "Middle Ages" merely a convenient term for the period between the Dark Ages (which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, according to what I remember of my high school history) and the Tudors and the Elizabethan era in England and the Renaissance jhust about everywhere else in Europe (broad brush strokes, but I'm sure you get the picture).

While we're on the subject of the Middle Ages, theology isn't the only subject that's needed for an understanding of that era that isn't - as far as I know - on offer in our universities. How many Australian Law graduates know about scutage, the murdrum fine and the difference between high justice and low justice? The proper rate of compensation to a feudal proprietor for killing one of his Irish? Where are the heraldry courses - how nay Arts graduates would know what a "lion rampant, gules on a field argent" is? What about crop management under the three field system and other aspects of medieval agronomy?

What God?

Peter, an interesting article and conversation with BBoy, (with less interesting obligatory contributions by those who need this forum as a psychotherapeutic couch on which to air their anti-Christian, anti-theology, or even anti-religious, bias bordering on paranoia, as irrelevant as it is to the topic of the article).

Nevertheless, in retrospect, whatever Enlightenment was, I think rather than seeing it in opposition to Christianity, contemporary Christians should regard it as an inevitable and challenging outgrowth of Christianity (its "illegitimate child"), a correction to the Medieval interpretation of Christ's message. Arguably, no other civilisation was capable of this self-correction.

In particular, Enlightenment gave rise to science which can provide the background of a modern "God of the philosophers and scientists", a model which complements, rather than stands in opposition to, the Christian model of God seen through scripture, tradition and liturgy.

Referring to John Locke you say "Knowledge of the essence of things (what Immanuel Kant called "das Ding an sich") could never be certain because we could only have sensible knowledge of them. However formal propositions like two plus two equals four were certain."

This reminds me of Einstein's "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality" which I once paraphrased as "As far as religious symbols (and norms) refer to observable reality (and rules that can be enforced) they are not certain; as far as they are certain they do not refer to observable reality (and rules that can be enforced)."

Ponder, him, up there, yeah that’s right, look up – the geezer with the long white beard hanging out with gorgeous angels fluttering about on pillow soft clouds - as against him down there with the pitch fork and red body suite and horns. Don't you know anything!! LOL

Kenny,

The senses provide us with raw data about the world around us. That data is incomplete, often inaccurate, fragmented and in itself meaningless. Only by application of memory and the imagination, individual and shared, do we begin to form meaningful connections between these fragments of sensory data. The imagination links the data into narratives which add direction and meaning to the 'picture' of the world provided by the senses.
Knowledge, wisdom, virtue, meaning and purpose derive from whatever story we have constructed over the sensate data of sounds, images, textures and so on that bombard us through our waking day.
Scientific knowledge, or the story that science tells, is strictly limited by a set of rules which prohibit notions of purpose and meaning, right and wrong. Science can never tell the whole story.
Likewise humanism is nothing other than a particular set of stories that lack any sense of the sacred.
History and literature (including all forms of story-telling) provide the narratives which justify our political systems, our sense of justice and our idea of community. History, for example, tells us what a dubious creature the church is.
At the same time the story of the humiliation and torture of the god-man suggests a life full of purpose and dignity that goes beyond the physicality of flesh and blood and is not lost in death. It is universal in its orientation to death and life.
It is not necessary to 'believe in' things supernatural to hear the story of Jesus or even the story of God. Western society is deeply imbued with the Jesus story, to the point that it is quite incomprehensible without it.
If the enlightenment is anything it begins with some serious attempts to reinterpet life without reference to the supernatural. Here is the flaw in the 'enlightenment enterprise'. It is not necessary to dispense with the supernatural any more than it is necessary to believe in it.

Sells, I will try to confine my comments to a few specific areas, your article is far too discursive to grapple with in 350 words.

I think you're seriously misrepresenting Aristotle. Surely Aristotle's empiricism is the foundation of the scientific method? Aristotle's method involved consulting all the experts and written texts and cataloguing their ideas, he would next observe as much phenomena related to the inquiry that he could and then derive laws from his observations. Post-Renaissance science gradually rejected much of Aristotle's science, but not his empirical methods.

You conclude by saying "It is my contention that we need deconstruction of the Enlightenment narrative to reveal what it is: a consistent polemic against the Church that has robbed us of the key narrative that formed us. It is only in the absence of that narrative that the bloody 20th century could have happened." Fell free to contend this Peter, but it seems to me a rather long bow to draw. My own view is that the horrors of the last century had more to do with the mechanisation of warfare than with the abandonment of Christian doctrine. Even if we blame all the ills of the 20th Century on Enlightenment values, we must set 20th Century scientific and medical advances on the credit side of the ledger.

Peter, I would be interested to see you develop your deconstruction of the Enlightenment. Most specifically, how would your deconstruction differ from that of the post-modernists?