Addressing those questions will involve a brief foray into the history of ideas. Let's study the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was primarily a celebration of humans' ability to understand and improve the natural world through reason. The Enlightenment had a number of antecedents, including the European Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. But what made it special was that some of its more radical proponents, like Immanuel Kant, for instance, went so far as to argue that human reason rendered a belief in God unnecessary, and by extension, proclaimed that any belief in divine intervention or a divine plan for humanity was just superstition. Given that this was coming out of an overwhelmingly Christian Europe, this was a pretty controversial suggestion, and not all Enlightenment thinkers would go that far. And more moderate Enlightenment thinkers were also more willing to countenance hierarchical social and political structures.