The Enlightenment concept posits science as progress and clergy as its obstacle

Evidence

The concept became, however, embedded in a philosophy of history once the philosophes began to argue that the kind of intellectual innovation made respectable by Newton was the motor of general social progress - a belief which requires conceiving the unfolding of time as recording not the decay of a fallen world or the eternal cyclical repetition of the same or even the operations of the divine will but rather the steady improvement of the human condition thanks to the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge. The notion of enlightenment did not simply provide this philosophy of history with a name: it offered both an explanation and a measure of the extent of human progress, while its absence accounted for the obstacles to change, particularly in the shape of the clergy, the social agency by which the masses are held in the night of superstition. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 150

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Scientific progress required expelling religious and classical textual authority — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1621