How did the Enlightenment change basic Western attitudes toward reform, faith, and reason? What were the major formative influences on the philosophes? How important was Voltaire in the success of the Enlightenment?.
The Enlightenment altered the basic attitudes of the Western culture towards reform, faith, and reason. The focus of thought for most philosophers during the Enlightenment focused on humanity and change: both the ability to change as well as the need for people to do so. "The goal of discovering social laws was to remove the inhumanity that existed through ignorance of them." (734) People understood the need for reform in society. Education was to be reformed: society needed to lead the children down the right path rather than scaring them in that direction. The judicial system and prison system also needed to be reformed. The philosophers taught people that criminals must be rehabilitated and pay their debt to society. Punishment should not be handed out just to create pain, it should be to protect society. Human cruelty was to be overcome by the use of social improvements and government structures.
Western attitudes began to change towards faith as philosophes analyzed the church and discovered its flaws. When the bible was looked at critically, philosophes uncovered contradictions of itself within its writings. "For the philosophes the concept of predestination suggested that the fate of the human soul after death bore little or no relationship to virtuous living" (734). The philosophe Voltaire desired a belief in God, but a lack in the church. The philosophes of the Enlightenment infiltrated society with the ideas of atheism and deism. Atheism was an idea that God is nature and people must worship civil society. An atheist during the Enlightenment must focus on the here and now, which reflects back to the concept of constant change and improvement of daily life. Deism, another form of Enlightenment religion is based on two main ideas: religion should be reasonable, and the knowledge of the natural and human world has nothing to do with religion.