"The Great Awakening, however, coincided with the Enlightenment, the foundational movement toward secularistic apostasy throughout Christendom.
John Wesley and Voltaire were contemporaries.
The Enlightenment simply meant the Reformation stripped of it's
religious premises,
subject matter,
and motivation.
Because of the variety of religious opinions which resulted fro the Protestant ideal of lay Bible study, "enlightened" Deists concluded that the Bible was too specific in contents and too peculiar in its impact on diverse readers to inspire religious consensus. Ignoring the evangelical answer, they rejected peculiar Bible doctrine in favor of the general truths of natural revelation.
Trends in science followed suit.
Secularists now began to conceive of science, not as knowledge, but as an endless quest for knowledge, that is, a set of learned rituals for confirming agnosticism."
Origin of the Nations p.255 John Pilkey
...always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.
