Enlightenment Essay The enlightenment of Europe was a time of great thinking. People started to question the church and make new discoveries that proved the church wrong. Monarchs were overthrown and taken out of power and replaced with a new type of government. Economy changed over time. This time is when the people started think for themselves. A big change in Europe was the power of the church and the pope. The people started questioning the church when the bible was written in the vernacular. They were able to see what the bible had said for themselves. Then these people started to revolt and split off of the Catholic Church because the church was lying to them. The church had lied to them so that they could have power over the people. They tried to answer scientific questions with religious explanation. People started to believe in rationalism and natural law. Rationalism is the idea of using reason and logic instead of religion to answer all of your questions of the world. Natural law were laws that applied to everything in the universe. Galileo questioned the church that the earth was not the center of the solar system. The church had said that God was so proud of us that he put us in the middle of the universe. They were wrong and Galileo was correct. Martin Luther said that there was nothing in the bible that said you had to buy indulgences and it was just a way to get extra money. He was right. Eventually they had the protestant reformation which had many people splitting off from the Catholic Church and making their own church. So the church started to slowly lose power until they changed so the people liked them. And that was the end of the Catholic Church rule. Another change that the Enlightenment made was the government. Before the enlightenment there was absolutism. Absolutism was where the king had absolute power over the people and the law. The monarchs supposedly had this divine right from God. This meant that the monarchs could do whatever they want and couldn’t get in trouble. Then the enlightenment brought new ideas for government. First people thought of enlightened despotism in which the monarch would combine absolutism and the ideas of the enlightenment but it never worked. Thinkers called Philosophes started to say that the people should have natural rights. John Locke