"Age of Endarkenment" is a colloquial play on words on the name of the Age of Enlightenment. It has been used to refer to the Enlightenment itself, in order to denote a philosophical disagreement with the implication of the name given to the age, that humanity was benefited by a new philosophical and metaphysical approach to describing reality. The Enlightenment saw a withdrawal of support for Aristotelian theology and its system of causality, which includes material causes, formal causes, efficient causes and final causes.
The term has also been applied in the opposite fashion, including to refer to the period of the Galileo affair and the adverseness of the Catholic Church to scientific advancement, and to describe the rise since the early 1980s of anti-scientific and unscientific beliefs, such as creationism and alternative medicine.
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