Biology Reference
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religious questions, it is difficult to imagine how the kind of undisguised
technological imperialism described in the above excerpt could have won
much sympathy for science. Auditors belonging to a culture that regarded
the sovereignty of God and the governance of providence as unassailable
premises could not have supposed that human beings had any unilateral
right to master nature. We might suppose, as the Encyclopedists certainly
would in the next century, that Bacon's religious arguments were insincere,
that they merely masked a worldview that was in its essence much more
similar to their own secular one. To the extent that it is audiences as much
as authors who ultimately determine the success and meaning of messages,
however, such speculations lose much of their plausibility. In the generation
immediately following Bacon's death, it was clearly those who took the reli-
gious themes of his rhetoric most seriously who also resonated to its scien-
tific advocacy. A prophetic vision that did not relate science to faith simply
could not have sustained the English scientific revolution.
My point here is not merely revisionist. It is an expression of the work-
ing assumption of this topic that the
mimesis
that drives cultural evolution
involves
descent
as well as
modification
. Whiggish readers who treat Bacon's
religious arguments as mere filigree may be able to recognize the modifica-
tions he foreshadows but not the religious patterns that persist in evolution-
ism—its own notions of redemption, election, and millenarian expectation.
In chapter 1, I explored the sociological insight that messages constitut-
ing social identities are characteristically infused with religious meaning. If
this is also true of messages constituting science's social identity (as clearly
was the case for Bacon), this would imply that subsequent generations
would find it difficult to separate science from the sacred, even if they were
intent on undermining established religious authority. The religious ideas
that sanctioned seventeenth-century social reality were more likely to be
integrated into secular ideas than to be blotted out once their theologi-
cal content was called into question, and this makes secularization more
evolutionary than revolutionary. If the original morphology of these reli-
gious ideas is not understood, we cannot easily follow their transformation
though subsequent cultural mimesis.
The pattern that most clearly signals such continuity is the manifest sim-
ilarity that the religious concept of
providence
articulated by Bacon bears to
the seemingly secular notion of
progress
championed in the Enlightenment.
Historians who turn Bacon into a mere modernist, of course, bear witness
to this connection, since they recognize that elements of his rhetoric denote
something similar to progress. Were there not some conceptual similarity
