What was so enlightened about the enlightenment? Where is the evidence of how it enlightened anybody?
             The enlightenment was a period where previous notions of our world were disregarded and new views adopted in their place. Authority no longer came from divine scripture, ancient philosophers, or the wisdom of cultural tradition but instead Europe adopted the modern scientific outlook using detailed systematic examinations of our environment to reveal its causes and effects.
             The origins of the enlightenment can be found in classic Greek culture, notably the Socratic school including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Aristotle and his colleagues at the time used a dialectic empirical process for understanding a wide range of different subjects ranging from biology to mathematics, politics, geology and astronomy. One of his major contributions to the Enlightenment was his idea of causality where each thing or event has more than one reason to explain what, why, and where it is. Often these theories incorporated religious beliefs of the time, the origins of the universe and man finding their explanation as a divine process. Man was viewed as the center of meaning on Earth and Earth as the center of meaning in the universe. Although, many reasonable ideas in chemistry, geology, and other science developed during the Hellenistic and surrounding Greek ages, the period was relatively short and much of what was discovered became dogma for later ages.
             Scholasticism was the predominant school of thought during the middle ages both hindering and supporting the Enlightenment. Much of Greek and Roman thought was lost for centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. Scholasticism rediscovered those texts and reexamined them allowing Europeans to use more complex explanations for the different phenomenon of the world; planets, politics, etc.. Scholasticism's fault lies in its dogmatic approach to the classica...