Intro to Humanism, Part 5: Enlightenment Precursors to Secular Humanism
to debunk superstitious thought, even religion itself and to systemize the various intellectual disciplines. They believed that deliberate progress of the human race would be possible through: the betterment of the human condition via knowledge of the natural world and technology; overcoming superstition and religiously based ignorance; and use of the social sciences, social and government improvements to overcome violence and religious intolerance.
Denis Diderot was also a prominent Philosophe. Many of the French philosophes were Deists such as Rousseau and Voltaire (mentioned later in this article with the Democrats), Pantheists such as Diderot or Skeptics such as Hume, while Germany's most prominent Philosophe, Gotthold Lessing, was an atheist.
The Philosophe movement that started in France eventually spread to other places, albeit slowly in places like Germany that suffered a high degree of religious censorship. Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781) in Nathan the Wise, argued for religious tolerance of the Jews and that human excellence had nothing to do with religious affiliation. His later work, On the Education of the Human Race, was a history of human progress in which he argued that all religions are steps in the progress of humanity toward the ultimate goal of the rejection of religion in favor of reason.
The most prominent skeptic of this time period was David Hume (1711-1776). He questioned the idea of a permanent "self", whether we are able to demonstrate the truth about the external world, the veracity of miraculous claims, and many commonly held religious beliefs such as the existence of God or souls. Hume criticized standard proofs of God, and founded utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is secular moral theory based on the consequences, or the utility, of our actions. He wrote Treatise of Human Nature and Essays, Moral and Political, and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In 1744-1745 Hume was a candidate for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Town Council, responsible for electing a replacement Chair, voted against him because of complaints about Hume's anti-religious writings.
In his original Five Dissertations Hume wrote two essays defending the moral right to suicide and criticizing the idea of an afterlife. After Hume's publisher was threatened with prosecution, the essays were replaced with a new essay and the book was renamed Four Dissertations. His most substantial works on religion were The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which was published posthumously and attacked by critics as dangerous to religion, and The
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