Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (1870; reprint, New York: Garrett, 1968),
3:264.
12
Bacon,
Work s
, 3:264.
13
Bacon,
Work s
, 3:264-65.
14
Bacon,
Work s
, 3:265. Eccl 3:11 (emphasis in original).
15
Bacon,
Work s
, 3:265. Eccl 3:11; Prov 20:27 (emphasis in original).l
16
The popularity of this trope among Renaissance scientists is explored by Ben-
jamin Nelson, “The Quest for Certitude and the Books of Scripture, Nature,
and Conscience,” in
The Nature of Scientific Discovery: A Symposium Commemo-
rating the 500th Anniversary of the Birth of Nicolas Copernicus
, ed. Owen Ging-
erich (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1975), 355-72. It was first
used to justify the separation of science from theology in the twelfth century
by Adelard of Bath. See A. C. Crombie,
Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of
Experimental Science: 1100-1700
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 11-12.
17
This is a commonplace probably going back to Tertullian. “We postulate that
God ought first to be known by nature, and afterward further known by doc-
trine—by nature through His works, by doctrine through official teaching.”
Quintus Tertullian,
Against Macion
, trans. and ed. Ernest Evans (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1972), 1:18. The metaphor also harkens back to St. Paul's well-
known declaration in the Letter to the Romans (1:20) that “Ever since the
creation of the world [God's] invisible nature, namely his eternal power and
deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”
18
Bacon,
Work s
, 3:221 (emphasis in original).
19
Bacon,
Work s
, 3:266.
20
Bacon,
Work s
, 3:268.
21
Bacon,
Work s
, 3:267-68.
22
When Bacon does use the “handmaid” image in his
Novum Organum
(4:89),
he also mixes this metaphor with language that is more suggestive of partner-
ship than clear-cut subordination. Bacon asserts that when Jesus reprimands
the Sadducees as men who “know not the Scriptures and the power of God,”
he was “thus coupling and blending in an indissoluble bond information con-
cerning his will and meditation concerning his power.”
23
Maurice A. Finocchiaro, ed. and trans.,
The Galileo Affair: A Documentary His-
tory
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
24
William E. Carroll, “Galileo and the Interpretation of the Bible,”
Science and
Education
8 (1999): 151-87.
25
Richard J. Blackwell,
Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible
(Notre Dame, Ind.: Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 67-68.
26
Bacon,
Work s,
3:287.
