The Dark Ages of course never existed. Except in the fetid minds of Christian-haters and those opposed to the Church. Voltaire, Gibbon et al never created, built, or manufactured a single item. Yet they are declared by their cult members as the intelligent Uber mensch, bringing classical thought and light, back to a world rotted with the sick decayed corpus of a corrupt Church....the opposite is true of course.
Fat men in periwigs, strutting around in their diffident ignorance offered very little of value to the world, even in their domain of metaphysics.
Science did not suddenly 'evolve' by magic random chance in the 17th century. Newton and other Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, did not spring out of the dirty, muddy ground and pronounce rootless, detached theorems ad novo. 2000 or more years of patient discovery, including the foundations of modern math and science long pre-date Newton, the Galileo myth, or the Atheist legends that only the godless discover 'truth'. The cult of the Vaccine, Corona, Globaloneywarming and the fraud of Evolution are the results of ‘Scientism’ or the worship of ‘Science’, not premised on reality, common-sense, or proof, but on philosophy, models and anti-humanism.
The Enlightenment, an English perversion of a word which once had meaning, was an endless Protestant attack on the Church. It was not elevated, scientific or rational in many ways. This era resurrected abiogenesis, witch burnings, and historical revisionism. Men who wore eyeglasses, which was a 13thc. innovation, could find no value in what preceded them. Blindness finds many forms. In the name of the 'Enlightenment' thousands of properties across Europe were torn down, treasures looted, stolen and defaced; priceless artifacts cut down; thousands killed and in the name of politics and hunger for money, sundry wars created.
The unenlightened Enlightenment gave us the following:
1-The free-will denying theologies of Luther and Calvin. No free will, no freedom, no markets, no civilization.
2-The promotion of predestination, meaning that nothing you do in this life matters. This moral rot has seeped deep into the foundations of civilization.
3-Rousseau, counter-rationalism, naturalism and the myth of the noble savage. This pagan theology that 'nature' in and of itself is superior, and that man is not the master but the slave of nature, is such childish nonsense and philosophical poison.
4-Anti-science theologies ranging from the Cult of Corona to Evolution and abiogenesis, to 'long ages of the earth', extra-terrestrial life forms and a resurgence in astrology and magic.
5-Phlogiston was declared to be the base element of the cell. It was disproven in 1774 by Lavoisier, but zealously promoted by 'scientists' during the 18th century.
6-In the 19th century, Darwin, who never performed a single experiment to support algae to human evolution; accepted, along with most 'scientists'; that the single cell was a simple globule akin to jelly.
7-The Enlightenment tore apart Europe and granted us the French Revolution and Napoleon, one of the greatest butchers and worst autocrats in history, whose bloody career killed millions, destroyed wealth and property and held back European development by at least 2 generations. The state was uber alles. The wise dictator an Enlightenment hero. See Fredrick the 'Great'.
8-Marxism, Darwinism, Socialism, Communism, Nazism, and theological philosophies supporting the same including Hitler, Lenin, Heidigger and the Frankfurt post-modern schools of the 1930s and 40s [cultural Marxism which is so rampant today]. All of these 'dialectical' theologies are irrational and immoral but were sold based on their 'science'.
9-Atheism, a theology of the unscientific and immoral which in the guise of Nazism and Communism murdered 150 million people. Atheism is the defining religion of the Rona cult, and modern Statism.
10-Flat earth societies which never existed in the Middle Ages [no one from the time of Christ thought that the earth was flat]; appear in the 19th century all over the developing world. 'Science' was used to prove [via sight lines usually along 'flat' bodies of water]; that the earth's curvature was a fiction.
11-Historical rewriting and ignorance. Voltaire and friends could not explain the engineering masterpieces named 'Gothic Cathedrals' for example, nor did they know much if anything about what predated them.
Of course, in today's perverted, distorted world if you criticize the Un-Enlightenment era, you are 'anti-rational'. As usual with these people the opposite of what they state is the truth. Yes, one can highlight achievements – sundry and many – during the era 1650 to 1850. But they have precious little to do with 'Enlightenment thought', and more to do with individuals creating, innovating and getting on with life. One can say with historical veracity, that the achievements from 1650 to 1850 were smaller in comparison to what preceded that era; and were accomplished in spite of notable declines in culture and reason, through wide areas of society including medicine, science and philosophy.