Many educated people living in the colonies had studied the ideas of the Enlightenment which was an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th centuries which challenged many beliefs existing in Europe at that time. Enlightened thinkers believed in questioning everything in existence and then using logic, reason, and rational thought to discover the natural laws which would provide the true answers to all their questions. part of he Enlightenment was a revolution in science where men like Newton and Galileo came up with new theories to explain the physical world and tested them using them the scientific theories.