our purposes, the Enlightenment matters because it was the decisive break with the Christian legacy of the West. God, if He was mentioned at all, was not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but the nondescript divinity of the Deists. Deism, a rationalistic school of thought that emerged in the Enlightenment, holds that God is a cosmic architect who created the universe but does not interact with it. Deism rejects biblical religion and the supernatural and bases its principles on what can be known about God—the “Supreme Being”—through reason alone.
