Biology Reference
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fulfillment anticipated by this ancient undertaking, it was also its antitype
and therefore, like the Reformation itself, one of the final truths of revela-
tion history.
What is of interest to us now is the cultural evolutionary course on
which Bacon was putting science through this undertaking. If his efforts
to situate the scientific ethos within Christian history set in motion a
pattern that now finds expression in evolutionism's similar efforts to situ-
ate this ethos in natural history, we might also expect to find that the
particular creative choices that shaped this effort will have left their mark
upon evolutionism. My argument goes like this: just as Baconian science
was linked to the Protestant ethos through the two topics doctrine, and
through this to subsequent forms of empiricism that now sustain science's
priestly ethos, so did his alignment of science with this Protestant recon-
figuration of sacred history put it on the path that now aligns it with
progress.
To understand why the mimetic habits that drive cultural evolution
would have forged such a connection, we will first need to understand what
Bacon achieved for the scientific ethos by depicting natural philosophy as a
sign of the millennium. The Bible is filled with new beginnings, but the mil-
lennium, since it is history's final epoch, provides unique rhetorical pull. As
a new and definitive beginning that had not yet manifested, it made avail-
able to Bacon the kind of creative freedom that could anticipate a future
dominated by science—even though the Christian past seemed not to be.
Millenarianism's futuristic orientation in this regard is both iconoclastic
and conservative, and this is why, as Charles Webster has noted, millenar-
ian thinking has usually become pronounced in periods of religious crisis.
In particular, during the period of the Puritan Revolution when Baconian-
ism was also in ascendancy, it “emancipated reformers from any obligation
of respect for the long-established institutions or of operation within the
boundaries imposed by current intellectual values.” 5 It was able to do this,
just as the modernist doctrine of progress continues to do, by treating the
future rather than the past as the historical standpoint from which to judge
the present. In modernism the push of the past is always weaker than the
pull of the future. To common sense reasoning this might seem absurd,
since knowledge of the past is always more certain, but common sense
was superseded by prophetic authority. Millenarian conceptions of history
may be iconoclastic, but they still bear the authority of revelation, and this
enables their prophets to engage in free speculation even while professing
exegetical moderation.
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