Galanis on Religion and Nature in the Enlightenment

Panagiotis Galanis, National Kapodistrian University of Athens, has published Religion and Nature in the Enlightenment. Here is the abstract.

The Enlightenment transformed the relationship between religion, nature and law. Nature ceased to function solely as an object of theological explanation and increasingly became a normative vocabulary through which political authority, rights and religious belief could be assessed. The appeal to nature took several distinct forms. Natural law provided a standard superior to positive command; natural rights located fundamental entitlements in the person prior to the state; natural religion sought religious truth accessible to reason independently of ecclesiastical revelation; and the scientific image of an ordered universe encouraged the idea that public reason could distinguish civil interests from theological claims. This study examines the legal significance of that transformation. It argues that the Enlightenment did not simply replace religion with secularism. Rather, it reorganised the relation among religion, nature and political authority. Locke used natural rights and limited government to restrict the magistrate's religious competence. Spinoza naturalised biblical interpretation and defended the freedom to philosophise. Voltaire connected natural reason with toleration and criticism of confessional persecution. Rousseau converted religion into a constitutional problem through the category of civil religion. Hume destabilised rational proofs of natural theology and thereby weakened claims to public coercion based upon metaphysical certainty. Kant relocated religion within the limits of reason and moral autonomy. These intellectual movements contributed to a legal transition from confessional government to constitutional freedom of conscience. The study further considers the constitutional crystallisation of this transition in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, with its reference to the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, and in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, which proclaims natural and inalienable rights while expressly protecting religious opinions. It concludes by analysing the continuing relevance of the Enlightenment synthesis for contemporary freedom of thought, conscience and religion under international and European human-rights law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.