After the Reformation which began to be launched in the sixteenth century there was an explosion of independent thinking. The Reformation shattered the chains of Romanism and for a couple hundred years man began to think creatively. He invented the printing press; he began to pass out material. People could see, study, analyze, criticize, evaluate. Life took on a different tone. You had the Age of Enlightenment. Man began to look at his own mind and see how bright he was. You had the birth of the Industrial Revolution as his brilliance began to show up in the things that he could make and create and invent. And what was the child of that? The child of that was rationalism. And what was rationalism? The worship of the human intellect; all of a sudden he found out he had all kinds of ideas, all kinds of creative genius, all kinds of capability to develop all kinds of wonderful things in his world. And it didn't take him long then to say that the mind is God. And Thomas Paine pulled it all together in the most famous book of that time called, The Age of Reason. And in The Age of Reason, it's a two-part book, half of the book debunks the Bible and the other half exalts the human mind as the ultimate deity.
And out of rationalism came liberal theology. What did they do? They went back to the Bible and said, "That's not rational, we'll throw that out."And man began to worship his mind. Whenever there is a time period of great achievement, man turns from the supernatural to the natural and begins to see the tremendous capabilities of his own mind. And he falls down and worships. We're in the same time right now. If you think they had the tremendous advances in the Age of Enlightenment, imagine compared to today what they would look like. We live in a very sophisticated, a very, very complex, advanced, amazingly advanced culture. We have accomplished unbelievable things in this culture, amazing things. And the legacy of that is thatman begins to be literally narcissistic in terms of worshiping and loving his own intellect. He is so resourceful, he is so imaginative, he is so capable, he has come up with so many things that he believes he has all the answers to all the questions. And so the achievements of an amazingly advanced culturelead man to believe that his ability is greater than it is. And as a result of that, man begins to look to himself for all of his answers and to the systems that he can devise.