One of the distinctive characteristics of the school where I teach is that it offers instruction in "character education." What is character education? According to the U.S. Department of Education, character education is "a learning process that enables students and adults in a school community to understand, care about and act on core ethical values such as respect, justice. civic virtue and citizenship, and responsibility for self and others" (see here). In other words--it seems to me--character education is an effort to inculcate certain moral values in students without any specific religious or philosophical context.
A few days ago, during a character education class at my school, some seventh graders were shown a short film entitled "30,000 Days" (the estimated number of days in a person's life), which provides an introduction to the concept of character education. A good part of the film consists of a historical overview of how ideas about the meaning and purpose of life have developed over the centuries. About midway through the film (starting around the 5:22 mark) viewers are told:
And then, another great shift happened...the Enlightenment. Huge discoveries across scientific disciplines from astronomy to math to medicine, gave order to what was once unruly and unexplainable.
What was problematic for me about these two statements was that it was obvious that the scriptwriter(s) had conflated the Scientific Revolution with the Enlightenment. "Huge discoveries across scientific disciplines from astronomy to math to medicine" seems clearly to be a description of the Scientific Revolution, which, according to many scholars, began during the 15th century and continued into the 17th century or early 18th century. The Scientific Revolution, as the name indicates, involved developments in the physical sciences. In contrast, the Enlightenment, which began in the late 17th century and continued through the early 19th century, was concerned with philosophy, religion, and the social sciences.
Now, to be fair, there was a connection between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers (like Voltaire) were very impressed with the discovery of scientific laws explaining all sorts of physical phenomena. Consequently, "since physical science discovers laws that are general and uniform, it was assumed that the human sciences must likewise discover general laws" (Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy, pp. 93-94). Moreover, since the physical sciences emphasize the use of reason and logic to discover truth, it was thought that reason and logic should likewise be the only sources of truth in the "human sciences," rather than tradition (like religious traditions).
In other words, it could be said that the Scientific Revolution inspired the Enlightenment--even though it can also be argued that the Enlightenment's project of applying the scientific paradigm to non-scientific fields was, in reality, illegitimate. The problem with the film--it seems to me--is that it implies that scientific discoveries led directly to changes in beliefs about non-scientific matters--namely, philosophical/religious beliefs--which is a gross oversimplification.
I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on the author(s) of the film script. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if one is purporting to present an accurate account of the history of ideas, it is essential to avoid the temptation to oversimplify.
Image of Voltaire, a major figure of the Enlightenment, from Wikimedia Commons