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 PrintableVersion Faith in the Age of ReasonVain philosophy?FAITH IN THE AGE OF REASON Jonathan Hill’s contribution to the ‘Lion Histories’ series is beguiling. The format is delightful. It appears at first sight to be just a little pocket-book with many captivating pictures, delightful ‘inserts’ which provide potted biographies or summaries of the main philosophies of the age, and frequent pivotal quotations in the margins, including a specially delicious one from Jonathan Swift satirising the scientists of the day. But once you get stuck in, and I’ve now read it twice, you’ll find that it is a succinct summary and analysis of the major thinking of the period misleadingly called ‘The Age of Reason’ or ‘The Enlightenment’. At times when reading of the scientific discoveries that accompanied and sometimes influenced the age, the book reads a bit like a Christian version of Bill Bryson’s A History of Nearly Everything! Philosophy was part of my degree course, and I understood virtually none of it, but at least I recognised the philosophers were all on the wrong track. I’m still convinced that the whole lot — Descartes, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume — were all misguided, basing their ‘philosophy’ on the false premise that by searching they could find out truth/ God/meaning to life. Jonathan Hill’s book helped me to understand them a little better. Although they were all wrong, because they have been so influential and their ideas continue to be in circulation, we cannot dismiss them. We must engage with them, and this book helps us to do just that. Perhaps Erasmus should have been brought into the equation. His The Freedom of the Will has much to answer for. Jonathan Fletcher,
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