What was the Enlightenment or so called Age of Reason?

Answer 1

The Age of Enlightenment, sometimes called the Age of Reason, refers to the time of the guiding intellectual movement, called The Enlightenment. It covers about a century and a half in Europe, beginning with the publication of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) and ending with Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781). From the perspective of socio-political phenomena, the period is considered to have begun with the close of the Thirty Years' War (1648) and ended with the French Revolution (1789).
The Enlightenment advocated reason as a means to establishing an authoritative system of aesthetics, ethics, government, and even religion, which would allowhuman beings to obtain objective truth about the whole of reality. Emboldened by the revolution in physics commenced by Newtonian kinematics, Enlightenment thinkers argued that reason could free humankind from superstition and religious authoritarianism that had brought suffering and death to millions in religious wars. Also, the wide availability of knowledge was made possible through the production of encyclopedias, serving the Enlightenment cause of educating the human race.
The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment regarded themselves as a courageous elite who would lead the world into progress from a long period of doubtful tradition and ecclesiastical tyranny, which had resulted in the bloody Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and the English Civil War (1642-1651). This dogmatism took three forms:

1. Protestant scholasticism by Lutheran and Calvinist divines,[1]
2. "Jesuit scholasticism" (sometimes called the "second scholasticism") by the Counter-Reformation, and
3. the theory of the divine right of kings in the Church of England.

(A later, religious reaction against the church's dogmatic outlook was the Pietist movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.)
Enlightenment thinkers reduced religion to those essentials which could only be "rationally" defended, i.e., certain basic moral principles and a few universally held beliefs about God. Aside from these universal principles and beliefs, religions in their particularity were largely banished from the public square. Taken to its logical extreme, the Enlightenment resulted in Atheism.