Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
This is a classic expression of the more general
nomos
-
cosmos
pattern dis-
cussed already, but it is one expressed in terms that distinctively reflect a mil-
lenarian legacy. We should teach evolution, these writers surmise, because it
enables students to integrate their lives into the modern age. Their
nomos
,
the rapidly changing society in which they live, finds its ordering principle
in a volatile
cosmos
that only evolutionary constructs can account for. By
supposing that evolutionary science has so redefined history as to mark our
time as such a new beginning, the committee of scientists and educators
who authored this guidebook have set the present apart from the past as a
new epoch which is also the vantage point by which all of history is defined.
Science is the key to this new age, and only the new revelations of evolution-
ary science can understand it. This also explains why the effort to combat
creationism is such an important purpose of the NAS topic. The stability
of life forms that is traditionally associated with the assumption of biologi-
cal design is not just wrong; it is also a sin against the order of history. To
oppose science's evolutionary revelations is to be out of tune with progress.
Bacon's attraction to an analogous argument reflects the fact that the
Reformation with which he wanted to identify science was in some sense
modern already. To shake up Christianity while also remaining true to its
essentials required a powerful but also malleable historical rationale, and
millenarian reasoning provided this. The historical “periodization” that we
find in the Christian concept of the millennium, as R. G. Collingwood
names the concept behind such new beginnings, supposed a final stage of
history that balanced the movement's conservative and radical tendencies.
32
It was conservative in that the very idea of Christianity is founded on the
notion of a new beginning, since time had begun anew with Christ's com-
ing, but it was open to novelty for the same reason. Just as the incarna-
tion had dramatically altered traditional Jewish conceptions of prophecy's
meaning, subsequent revelations (which for Bacon now included scientific
revelations of God's works) could likewise rewrite the meaning of the past
and future.
If the revelations of science were to be regarded as capable of founding a
new age, it would be necessary to show that they were compatible with tradi-
tional understandings of revelation, and Bacon demonstrates this by appro-
priating the seasonal metaphors that biblical authors had used to depict
pivotal epochal changes. Just as Christ's coming had been associated with
the cycle of seasons, he depicts science in his
Val er iu s Ter minu s
as a latent
development whose fruition was “appointed to this autumn of the world.”
33
Like the seemingly dead branch of Jesse that had borne Christ as its fruit,
