(July 20, 2022 at 3:03 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: Maybe Darwin was a trigger for broader atheism, but Christianity was falling centuries before him. One of the main triggers was Martin Luther who broke up Catholic Church and thus created places for freethinkers to exist and their ideas to spread. So you had thinkers like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes.
What they did was to topple the Aristotelian Great Chain of Being which was an authoritative order of classes of people which is something that the Church imposed in everyday life with God on top and pope below him and then bishops, etc. Which was nonsense and was finally seen as such.
Especially after Newton made his discoveries, a lot of people started looking at God as a passive observer who is behind the "mechanism of the universe" and does not get involved in it anymore. They created deism which then led to atheism.
Martin Luther recognized that mainstream christianity is not tenable, he wanted to solve this problem by challenging the commonly held beliefs, but since christianity is corrupt to the core, this lead to its downfall, like you said.
There is no reliable reference in christianity since its corruption started very early. Islam clearly has the advantage here since the Qur'an is universally considered to have been preserved.
