Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Nature and reason are thus the two gods of modern man, and sometimes
the two are one.
—Reinhold Niebuhr
Bacon's religious conceptualization of the scientific role will surprise readers
not directly acquainted with his writing. Perhaps more surprising is my own
claim that his efforts to visualize a scientific civilization are the antecedents
to evolutionism. How could a radically materialistic ideology rooted in evo-
lutionary science descend from one rooted in Protestant Christianity? My
belief that this is indeed the case stands upon the recognition that cultures
unfold in accordance with something like the gradualism and uniformitari-
anism that account for the evolution of biological organisms. To understand
how we get from the Christianized proto-scientism of Bacon to the genuine
evolutionism of the present, we need to recognize that large cultural changes
occur by increments and in accordance with abiding (uniform) principles of
language use. Turning now to an Enlightenment text that appears to be
intermediary between Bacon's vision of the scientific identity and the one
we now see in evolutionism, my chief purpose will be to elucidate the pat-
tern that accounts for this cultural change.
If Baconian proto-scientism is the trunk from which evolutionism arose,
one of its main branches must certainly be the ideology of progress that
began to emerge a century later in the French Enlightenment. To suppose
so, one would have to account for the fact that the rhetoric of progress that
took form in the eighteenth century stood in militant opposition to the very
religiosity that was its antecedent. How could an ideology of progress grow
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