Because this view of God contradicted the tenets of the established Roman Catholic Church, the philosophes were considered very dangerous. Deists believe in the existence of a creative but uninvolved God, and they believed in the basic goodness, rather than sinfulness, of humankind. At the center of the Enlightenment were the philosophes, a group of intellectual deists who lived in Paris. The freethinking writers of the period sought to evaluate and understand life by way of scientific observation and critical reasoning rather than through uncritically accepting religion, tradition, and social conventions. The term 'Enlightenment' refers to the belief by the movement's contributors that they were leaving behind the dark ignorance and blind belief that characterized the past. During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment emerged as a social, philosophical, political, and literary movement that espoused rational thought and methodical observation of the world.
