I believe in the Enlightenment. It is the highest accomplishment of Western thought. Here is Hume's wonderful statement from Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."
This is an extreme statement of course: It leaves out many fine things: beauty, art, fine stories, spirituality, etc. But to me it is clear that what all these fine things cannot give us are systems of knowledge. That is the cultural advantage of the West, the ability to change the material world through science. Like it or not, this powerful tool for knowledge was what gave the West its dominance.
Earlier systems of wisdom and knowledge are pre-science. These are often brilliant and even beautiful structures, but they have no explanatory value, and they can't make things. Castles in the air are fine, but you can't live in them. Such systems offer people a good deal of consolation and even some excellent guides for self management but they are not the truth in the strict sense that enlightenment values demand. Such is the neediness of us humans that a mythology has, unfortunately, grown up even around science telling us that we can go where no one has gone before. This is an illusion. The pathetic Heaven's Gate people believed they would be resurrected on the far side of the moon, but they just died, that's all. They really had pre-scientific minds, infantile.
Genuine science does what it does. It proceeds cautiously and empirically. It organizes empirical data into theory. It creates theory and searches for empirical proof. Science lacks charisma, because it is not all inclusive and it seldom tells us what we want to hear. We don't want to hear that we are born, live, and die. We want to hear that we are transcendent beings who will live forever. We are infantile if we believe such things, and as Kant said,most people are infantile. People who are !00% dependent on science and technology ignore the material underpinnings of their lives, or take them for granted, imagining themselves to be natural beings uncontaminated by mere things.
Even after centuries of scientific inquiry, this is still so. We don't want the truth, if it is hard. We would rather be ignorant if knowledge means discomfort or change.
Real science is such a powerful thing. And enough for me as a guiding force in life, or at any rate what I regard as at least the best chance of reaching for the truth. What are minds for, if not to know? If I find myself liking ideas and feeling nice about them, I know I am in the realm of falsehood. If ideas disturb me, I pursue them, because that is the way to truth.