Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
As we press on, we will see that Bacon's effort to depict scientific work as
redemptive action manifests the fundamental mechanism of cultural con-
servation that, as it continued to be plied, was destined to ensure that this
Baconian theme would be imitated by the figures who gave us evolutionism.
His new ideas could only take hold by being tied to existing ones, and this
limitation would also hold for those who would carry these ideas forward in
later generations. Thus, even though the story's imaginative aspect strives to
bring about a novel turn in Christian thinking by introducing science into
the trajectory of history, its traditional form—the story of sin and redemp-
tion which was already a reworking of the Bible's most ancient themes of
chaos and creation—anchored it to mainstream religious ideas and ensured
that these would continue to abide. This could hardly have been otherwise.
Had Bacon been the purely modern thinker he is now often mistaken for,
he could not have hoped to win over an audience that by all appearances
remained firmly committed to the traditional premises of religion. The con-
servation of form is the price by which public acceptance of his scientific
vision was purchased, and since this constraint has operated upon similar
efforts of scientific advocacy in every subsequent moment of the scientific
culture's development, we have every reason to expect that something akin
to this earlier theme would persist. Thus when Carl Sagan declared several
centuries later that the rejection of science was a “turning away from the
Cosmos,” he was invoking a secularized redaction of Bacon's theological
drama.
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Certainly the Cornell astronomer did not see his message in this
way, since he clearly regarded theistic beliefs of this kind as fundamentally
anti-scientific, but this was only because he could not see the longer reach of
the rhetorical pattern that had descended upon his mind. Like other voices
of evolutionism, Sagan was reworking a thematic pattern that an unbroken
chain of public advocates going all the way back to the seventeenth century
had imitated.
s
ePaRation
anD
e
lection
If human beings are alienated from God by sin, the elect can return to God
only by separating themselves from a fallen world—from the cultural matrix
that perpetuates evil. In every biblical narrative that expresses this, separa-
tion is enacted through some act of obedience to God's revelation, and the
natural consequences of this obedience, such as the physical redemption
that occurs in the Noah and Jonah stories, are reminders of the fact that
nature has analogous revelatory significance. To obey God is to honor his
